Bloody Brilliant Women. Cathy Newman

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СКАЧАТЬ women’s inability to forge the necessary old-school-tie connections made the job doubly hard. As Charlotte O’Connor Eccles wrote in 1893, in an anonymous article for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine:

      One is horribly handicapped in being a woman. A man meets other men at his club; he can be out and about at all hours; he can insist without being thought bold and forward; he is not presumed to be capable of undertaking only a limited class of subjects, but is set to anything … Where a man finds one obstacle, we find a dozen.45

      When women were employed at a senior level, it was often as a gimmick. In November 1903, the newspaper proprietor Alfred Harmsworth – later Lord Northcliffe – decided to launch a paper ‘for gentlewomen by gentlewomen’. Called the Daily Mirror, it would, Harmsworth announced in its inaugural editorial, arrange its stories so that ‘the transition from the shaping of a flounce to the forthcoming changes in imperial defence, from the arrangement of flowers on the dinner-table to the disposition of forces in the Far East, shall be made without mental paroxysm or dislocation of interest.’46 So far, so enlightened: in fact, it sounds rather like the UK edition of Marie Claire in its 1990s pomp.

      To edit the Daily Mirror Harmsworth chose Mary Howarth, who had previously edited the women’s pages of his incredibly successful Daily Mail, launched in 1896 and a classic example of the so-called ‘ha’penny press’ which catered to the newly literate beneficiaries of the 1870 Education Act. All Howarth’s staff were women, and for a short time it looked as if Harmsworth’s gamble had paid off: the first issue sold a healthy 276,000 copies. Within weeks, however, circulation had plummeted to 25,000. Howarth and her team were sacked and the Mirror transformed into a picture-driven (and male-edited) paper which went on to be almost as successful as the Mail.

      Harmsworth called the first incarnation of the Daily Mirror ‘the only journalistic failure with which I have been associated’: ‘Some people say that a woman never really knows what she wants. It is certain she knew what she didn’t want. She didn’t want the Daily Mirror.’47 Bafflingly, the conclusion Harmsworth drew from this catastrophe was not that he had misjudged women’s interests and catered to them poorly, but that ‘women can’t write and don’t want to read.’48 Oh dear.

      Female journalists were consistently sidelined and belittled – a hazard of the job familiar to some in Fleet Street today. Emilie Peacocke, born in 1882, was the daughter of the editor of the Northern Echo, but even having journalism in the blood was of little help when she became the first full-time woman reporter on the Daily Express: she still wasn’t allowed to use the paper’s staff room.

      Rachel Beer’s installation as editor of both the Sunday Times and the Observer in the 1890s owed more than a little to the fact that her family owned them: her husband Frederick Beer had inherited the Observer from his father. She was a socialite, the great-granddaughter of the Sassoon family patriarch Sheikh Sason ben Saleh, an Iraqi Jew born in Baghdad in 1750 – the poet Siegfried Sassoon was her nephew – and arguably the papers were her playthings. Beer worked from home, a telephone line connecting her west London villa to the Sunday Times’ office in Fleet Street.

      Beer wrote copiously and was surprisingly hands-on as an editor. She had a weakness for puffery – she once altered George Bernard Shaw’s copy to insert some society gossip, to his noisy displeasure – and was denied the confidence even of politicians she counted as friends, such as Gladstone. But on the whole she used her powers thoughtfully and responsibly, supporting women’s causes whenever she could, although she thought equal pay and respect in the workplace more pressing issues for women than the vote.

      Under her editorship the Observer achieved one of its biggest scoops: the admission by Count Esterhazy that he forged letters that had resulted in the false conviction of the Jewish artillery officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus for feeding military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. But Beer’s final years were not happy ones. She had contracted syphilis from Frederick and, after he died from the disease in 1903, her grief escalated into a full-scale mental breakdown. She was declared insane by the controversial psychiatrist George Savage, who counted Virginia Woolf among his patients, and the papers were sold off.

      Instead of being forced into an asylum, Rachel was installed in a mansion in Tunbridge Wells and looked after by three nurses. Her nephew Siegfried visited her and wrote, in a passage he later cut from the final version of his memoir The Weald of Youth, that Rachel was reduced to staring at him, ‘apathetic and unrecognising … a brooding sallow stranger, cut off from the rest of the world.’49 She died on 29 April 1927.

      A similar fate befell another talented woman journalist of the period, Lady Colin Campbell, aka Gertrude Elizabeth Blood, the youngest daughter of Anglo-Irish landowners from County Clare, Ireland. She contracted an unspecified venereal disease – probably gonorrhea – from her philandering Liberal MP husband. After a humiliating show trial in 1886 that left her a pariah, Gertrude was not allowed to divorce him. The illness robbed her of her vitality and striking looks and led eventually to her death in 1911, by which time she was more famous for having once worn a live snake around her neck than for her books and witty contributions to the Pall Mall Gazette.

      Gertrude Elizabeth Blood’s treatment showed that the sexual double-standard was alive and well relatively late in the century. It showed how little things had changed; how far, despite everything, women still had to go in their quest for representation and equality. For like it or not, the public sphere was still overwhelmingly male. Women who wished to make inroads into it were obliged to emphasise their homely, caring virtues, as the campaigner Josephine Butler did explicitly in 1869 when she wrote:

      I believe that nothing whatever will avail but the large infusion of Home elements into workhouses, hospitals, schools, orphanages, lunatic asylums, reformatories, and even prisons, and in order to attain this there must be a setting free of feminine powers and influence from the constraint of a bad education, and narrow aims, and listless homes where they are at present a superfluity.50

      Butler had grown up in a staunchly liberal, abolitionist family where women were treated as intellectual equals. Like Mary Higgs, she married a clergyman and became interested in philanthropy, befriending an unmarried mother who had been imprisoned in Newgate after committing infanticide and finding the woman work as a servant in the Butler family home in Oxford – an early example of her ‘rescue work’.

      As with Annie Besant, personal tragedy turbo-charged her reforming zeal. In 1864 her five-year-old daughter Eva died after falling forty feet while trying to slide down a bannister. She had been rushing to greet her parents as they returned from a holiday in the Lake District. Josephine, who witnessed the event, wrote later that ‘for twenty-five years I never woke from sleep without the vision of her falling figure, and the sound of the crash on the stone floor.’51

      The Butlers moved to Liverpool in 1866 to begin a new life. Josephine remained depressed, but knew the only solution was to ‘go forth and find some pain keener than my own … I only knew that my heart ached night and day and that the only solace possible would seem to be to find other hearts which ached night and day, and with more reason than mine.’52

      At the suggestion of a local Baptist minister, she visited Liverpool’s docks where homeless women would gather to collect oakum, the untwisted fibres of old rope used to caulk ships – ‘hard and degrading work, thought fit only for paupers or convicts’.53 To their baffled amusement, Butler joined the women in their work and slowly won their trust and friendship. Many of them, she realised, were also prostitutes. They had to be, if they were to have enough money to live.

      As before, Butler opened up her house, this time to the prostitutes she felt were especially deserving. One in particular became like a surrogate daughter: twenty-four-year-old consumptive Mary Lomax, a former under-maid in a СКАЧАТЬ