Category Archives: Women’s history

Books Feminism Politics Women's history

Victorian (and later) citizenship – inclusion and exclusion

December 28, 2012 – 9:59 pm

Notes from Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 by Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall (2000)

From the Introduction, pp. 1-70
Quoting Margaret Mylne, writing in the Westminster Review 1941: “In my younger days it was considered rude to talk politics to the ladies. To introduce [the topic’ at a dinner party was a hint for us to retire and leave the gentlemen to such conversation and their bottle. But the excitement that prevailed all over the country at the prospect of the Reform Bill of 1832 broke down these distinctions, while the new, and it seemed to us, splendid idea of a ‘hustings at the Cross of Edinburgh’ drove its inhabitants, both male and female, half frantic with delight.” (p. 29)

From “The citizenship of women and the Reform Act of 1867” (Rendall, pp. 119-178)

p. 121 – “The reform crisis of 1830-2 prompted some consideration of women’s claim to the franchise. The Tory landowner from Halifax, Anne Lister, regretted in her diary that women of property were unable to exercise the vote, though they might, as she herself did, strive to influence the electoral process. In August 1832 a petition to the House of Commons from Mary Smith of Stanmore asked for the vote for ‘every unmarried woman having that pecuniary qualification whereby the other sex is entitled to the said franchise’. Matthew Davenport Hill, a radical Unitarian, endorsed women’s suffrage in his election campaign in 1832 in Hull. BUt the Reform Act for the first time defined the voter as ‘male'”

“In October 1865 the death of Lord Palmerston signalled the possibility of a renewal of interest in parliamentary reform, as Lord Russell, who was strongly committed to moderate reform, formed a new ministry. In November 1865 the Kensington Ladies Debating Society put on their agenda for discussion: Is the extension of the parliamentary suffrage to women desirable, and if so under what conditions?”

“p. 158 “The Education ACt of 1870 for England and Wales provided that women who were municipal and parish voters could also vote in school board elections. Any woman, married or not, could stand as a candidate… as Elizabeth Garrett and Emily Davies in London and Lydia Becker in Manchester did successfully in 1870, setting important precedents for the holding of public office. In Wales, Rose Mary Crawshay, wife of the Merthyr ironmaster, Robert Thompson Crawshay, and an active supporter of the women’s suffrage campaign, was elected a member of the Merthyr School Board in Match 1871…. In England and Wales, single or widowed women ratepayers were qualified to vote for and to become Poor Law Guardians, though none stood for office until 1875, when Martha Merrington was elected … in Kensington… But a high property qualification meant only the affluent were able to serve.”
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Books Feminism Women's history

Meeting Dora Russell and Margaret Oliphant

December 24, 2012 – 10:38 pm

Reading Rosemary Dinnage’s Alone! Alone! Lives of Some Outsider Women, I was pleased to meet Dora Russell, one of the exes of Bertrand.

On English public schools she said: “I don’t see that you can get anywhere in creating a new society without getting rid of them. I’m not hostile to them; they do magnificent work in their field. But the you have it, in the heart of our society, a masculine hereditary tradition for generation aft generation; out of those schools come me , men who expect to take the highest posts in our society; and against that I don’t see how democracy, or women, are going to have any influence whatsoever.” (P86)

And on conservation and the natural world, for which she was a campaigner….” I wrote a review of a book recently on man’s responsibility for nature,and I said now that we’ve had a look at the cold moon, and our own earth in contrast, we realise what a precious thing we have here. We should be taking care of it, and enjoying it loving it; and to me this is worth everything else in the world that anybody could invent.” (P 283)

Also found interesting the life of Margaret Oliphant, forced by circumstance to be a journey woman writer when she might have been much more. Her second novel Margaret Maitland, “was unconventionally the story of a sturdy Scottish spinster – “we are not aware that the Maiden Aunt has ever before found so favourable representation in print” said the Athanaeum.” (P 245)

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Books History Women's history

A imaginative exploration of First Wave feminism – The Sealed Letter

November 4, 2012 – 9:57 pm

First published on Blogcritics

When we think about the first wave of feminists, we tend to be thinking not so much of the first pioneers, but of the later, radical women, the suffragettes and the truly freethinking women Sheila Rowbotham portrayed in Dreamers of the New Day. Yet in the 1860s there was an initial, cautious flowering of women saying what were then radical things, like married women should have some rights of their own – to their bodies, their property, their children – but still very cautious, and trapped within the framework of mid-Victorian thinking in which simply not being a doormat made them very nearly beyond the pale.

It’s in this milieu that Emma Donoghue has set her latest novel, which is based, very closely we learn from an informative postscript, on a famous divorce case of 1864, Codrington v Codrington, in which a pillar of the British establishment, Vice-Admiral Codrington, set out to prove his wife guilty of adultery, and thereby secure a divorce, while also showing that he hadn’t connived in her actions, or allowed them to run so that he could secure the said divorce.

This is a dense, gripping tale, by the end of which you’ll know a lot about Victorian divorce law, and a lot about the central character, not either of the main legal protagonists, but Emily Faithful, “Fido”, a leading early feminist who established a printing press, training women typesetters in the face of sometime violent industry resistance, and was at the heart of an early feminist core. She’s a fascinating character, as Donoghue presents her, and I’m pleased that she’s been rescued by this book from historical oblivion.
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History Politics Women's history

The history and position of the Corporation of the City of London

October 23, 2011 – 10:21 pm

The following is drawn from London and the Kingdom: A History Derived Mainly From the Archives at Guildhall by Reginald R Sharpe, DCL, in Three Volumes, printed by order of the Corporation of Under the Direction of the Library Commmittee, London, Longmans, 1894.

The author explains in the preface that authors have rarely touched on the City’s politics, yet “its geographical position combined with the innate courage and enterprise of its citizens served to give it no small political power and no insignificant place in the history of the Kingdom” (p. iv). He explains tha impetus as the popular tradition making this the 700th anniversary of the Mayoralty. (I suspect the existence of the Royal Commission on the Amalgamation of the City and County of London, which also reported in 1894 had something to do with it.)

Going back, right back… “the City has never been subject to any over-lord except the king. It never formed a protion of the king’s demesne (dominium), but has ever been held by its burgesses as tenants in capite by burgage (free socage) tenure. Other towns…were subject to overlords, ecclesiastical or lay, in the person of archbishop, abbot, baron or peer of the realm, who kept in their own hands many of the privileges which in the more favoured City of London were enjoyed by the municipal authorities.” (p. 3)

Athelstan ( king 924 or 925 to 939) gave encouragement to commercial enterprise “by enacting that any merchant who undertook successfully three voyages across the seas at his own cost (if not in his own vessel) should rank as a thane”. (p. 16)

William the Conqueror granted London a charter “by which he clearly declared his purpose not to reduce the citizens to a state of dependant vassalage, but to establish them in all the rights and privileges they had hitherto enjoyed. … William, King, greets William, Bishop, and Gosfregdh, Portreeve, and all the burgesses within London, French and English, friendly. And I give you to know that I will that ye be all those laws worky they ye were in King Eadward’s day. And I will that every child be his father’s heir after his father’s day and I will not suffer any man offer you any wrong. God keep you.” (p. 34)

Henry I granted a further charter “the citizens were henceforth to be allowed to hold Middlesex to farm at a rent of £300 a year, and to appoint from among themselves whom they would to be sheriff over it; they were further to be allowed to appoint their own justiciar to hold pleases of the crown, and no other justiciar should exercise authority over them; they were not to be forced to please without the city’s walls; they were to be exempt from scot and low and of all payments with respect to Danegelt and murder; they were to be allowed to purge themselves after the English fashion of making oath and not after the Norman fasion by wager of battle; their goods were to be free of all manner of customs, toll, passage and lestage; their husting court might sit once a week; and lastly, they might resort to ‘withernam’ or reprisal in cases where their goods were unlawfully seized.” (p. 41)

A lot of this was lost for a time under Stephen and Matilda, Henry II and Richard, particularly the shrievalty “when it was restored to the citizens (AD1199) by John’s second charter, the office of sheriff of London had lost much of its importance owing to the introduction of the communal system of municipal government under a mayor.” (p. 58) The origins of this are unclear, but may go back to Stephen’s reign. Certainly John and the barons after deposing Longchamp “granted to the citizens ‘their commune’, swearing to preserve untouched the dignities of the city during the king’s pleasure. (p. 63-4)

The first mention of the mayor is in 1202, “when John attempted to suppress the guild of weavers ‘at the request of our mayor and citizens of London’. A few years later when John was ready to do anything and everything to avoid signing the Great Charter which the barons were forcing on him, he made a bid for the favour of the citizens by granting them the right to elect annually a mayor, and thus their autonomy was rendered complete.” (p. 68)

The city rising of 1196: “The pressure of taxation weighed heavily on the poor, and occasioned a rising in the city under the leadership of William Fitz-Osbert. They cry was that the rich were spared whilst the poor were called upone to pay everything. [Sound familiar??!] … it is certain he had a large following. When Hubert Walter, the justiciar, sent to arrest him… he took refuge in the church of St Mary-le-Bow. Thither he was followed by the king’s officers… who with the aid of fire and faggot soon compelled him to surrender. On his way to the Tower he was struck at and wounded by one whose father (it was said) he had formerly killed; but this may or may not be the whole truth. A few days later he and a number of his associates were hanged.” (p. 71)

In 1200 first mention of alernmen… “the establishment of a court of aldermen preceded that of the common council”. (p. 72)

Edward III’s charter to the city of March 6, 1327, “which has been held to be of the force of an Act of Parliament,… appointed the mayor one of the justices of the gaol delivery of Newgate as well as the king’s escheator of felon’s goods within the city; it gave the citizens the right of devising real estate within the city; it restored to them all the privileges they had enjoyed before the memorable Iter of the last reign; and granted to them a monopoly oof markets within a ciircuit of seven miles of the city.” (p. 161)
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Books Feminism Women's history

Millicent Fawcett’s campaigning – not much has changed in far too many ways!

August 1, 2011 – 8:38 pm

Reading The Women’s Victory – and After: Personal Reminiscences, 1911-1918 by Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1920), it’s hard not to think that little has changed in the campaigning world. Fawcett was president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, and this little memoir is a pretty well blow-by-blow account of the final push from the non-militant wing of the suffragist movement. (They were, you might say, today’s Friends of the Earth and the suffragettes, with their militant tactics, the Sea Shepherd of the time.)

The parliamentary tactics, the lobbying, the enlisting of parliamentary supporters to convert waverers, the plotting to find ways to disarm the enemies of your cause, and the betrayals coming from those who’d promised support but found excuses to back down might come straight from an account of any similar efforts today.

As today, that often involved meetings with people with whom you had little sympathy – and they the same for you. Fawcett is delightful on the subject of her first meeting with the Chancellor Asquith. “We had with us Miss Emily Davies, the founder of Girton college; Lady Strachey, wife of the well-known Indian administrator; Miss Frances Sterling; Miss I.O. Ford, and other well-known suffrage leaders from our various societies. While we were still in the waiting-room, I was sent for by myself for a preliminary interview with Mr Asquith’s private secretary. If found him a rather agitated-looking young man, who said: ‘I want you, Mrs Fawcett, to give me your personal word of honour that no member of your deputation will employ physical violence.’ ‘Indeed,’ I replied, ‘you astonish me. I had no idea you were so frightened.’ He instantly repudiated being frightened… As we entered the room, where Mr Asquith was sitting with his back to the light on our right, I observed in the opposite corner on our extreme left a lady I did not know. So I said to the secretary in a clear voice, ‘I give no guarantee for that lady’ I do now know her.’ ‘Oh that,’ he rejoined, and again showed some agitation – that lady is Miss Asquith.’” (p. 17)

There’s also some of the same dilemmas as for today about how far a “non-party” campaigning group should do in backing parties that support it and working against those with which it disagrees. There’s some clear defensiveness in Fawcett’s tone as she describes the decision from 1912, after the Liberals had gone back on plans to include women’s votes in the Government Reform Bill in 1911. “It is interesting now to look back at the NUWSS report in the year 1912, and see the care with which we defined our position. No Government candidate was to be supported, because the Government, under Mr Asquith, had shown the most determined opposition to our enfranchisement. When a Conservative candidate was supported, it was because we deemed this the best way of securing the defeat of a Government candidate; when the Labour candidate was supported, it was made clear that this was done because the Labour Party was the only party which had made women’s suffrage part of its programme, and had, moreover, rendered us the signal service of calling upon its parliamentary representatives to oppose any Franchise Bill which did not include women.” (p. 34)
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Feminism Women's history

Millicent Fawcett remembered by Fawcett Society

July 3, 2011 – 11:23 am

To a brief but moving ceremony last night in Christchurch Gardens, Westminster, where the Fawcett Society, in a ceremony organised by the South London Fawcett group, held its annual commemoration of the work of Millicent Fawcett, laying a wreath at the foot of the suffrage ceremony.

(The event has traditionally been held in Westminster Abbey, but the Chapel of St George is currently closed for repairs – we’ll be back there next year.)

Angela Mason, chair of the Fawcett Society (which is the direct and continuous descendent of Millicent’s National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies), spoke of how Millicent would have been astonished at the fight women were still having to wage for economic and political equality. She said that after such a long struggle, it is clear that it is no longer enough to keep asking for equality, in parliament and in boardrooms – quotas have to be applied.

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