p 70 What is perhaps most remarkable in this period are the erudite Northumbrian women who emerged to take a prominent place in Enlightenment discourse. we should begin here with Mary astell (1666-1731), the daughter of a Tyneside coal merchant and possibly Britain’s earliest similar thinker. she was educated by her uncle on the Newcastle Quayside in Latin French logic and natural philosophy before Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. she been took the bold step of moving to London to try to make a living as a writer. In 1694 she wrote a book entitled A serious proposal to the Ladies arguing for greatest female agency and the right to what we might now think of as a career instead of the stultification of early marriage. This appealed to her friend, Elizabeth Elstob, another Newcastle woman who was a serious scholar of Anglo-Saxon history. … this independence of mind was emulated by yet another Tyneside woman Jane Gomeldon, nee Middleton (1720 79), who after travelling in Europe disguised as a man ( and attempting to elope with a French nun) return to Newcastle where she wrote Maxims- a sort of English haiku – and in 1766, to raise money for the city’s lying-in hospital, a book of 31 essays entitled the The Medley, which Jane assumes a male persona to discuss, inter alia, Milton and Homer, … it was a Newcastle schoolmistress, Ann Fisher ( 1719-78) whose A New Grammar: being the most easy guide to speaking and writing the English language properly and correctly of 1745 made her the earliest female author on the subject and that her book ran to 33 editions.”
p. 143 Well-heeled women felt the pressure to conform to traditional gender roles too, as in the case of Rachel Parsons, daughter of the famous Tyneside industrialist Sir Charles Parsons. she was a mechanical Sciences graduate from Cambridge and president of the women’s Engineering Society, and during the war had been a director of her father’s Tyneside engineering company, at Wars end to Charles insisted that Rachel stand down, causing a rift between them that was never healed. after female suffrage was introduced partially in 1918, been fully from 1928, we do see women’s participation in politics increase ( Rachel Parsons stood for the conservatives in Newcastle.) it is telling however that the private lives of women elected in the northeast between the wars gave them atypical levels of Independence. after the former “gAIETY gIRL” Mabel Philipson was returned for the Conservatives in 1923 at Berwick as the north east’s first female MP, there came a succession of formidable women who were all either widows and unmarried or childless. Margaret Bondfield in Wallsend ( who became in 1929 Britain’s first female cabinet minister), Dr Marianne Phillips ( Sunderland), Susan Lawrence ( Stockton), Irene Ward ( Wallsend), and ‘Red Ellen’ Wilkinson (Middlesborough and then Jarrow).
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