Bloody Brilliant Women. Cathy Newman

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      Nothing summed up the sexual double standard quite like the Contagious Diseases Act 1864, which gave the police the power to arrest prostitutes and subject them to brutal, degrading internal examinations for venereal disease, on the grounds that they – not the men who used and abused them – were to blame for spreading it. Through her Ladies’ National Association, Butler mobilised opposition to the Act and finally achieved success in 1885 when it was abolished and the age of consent for women raised from twelve to sixteen.

      What took her so long? Partly it was the inability of the political patriarchy to come to terms with any sort of female agenda. In 1896 Butler would remember a ‘fully sympathetic’ MP admitting to a female friend, ‘“Your manifesto has shaken us very badly in the House of Commons … We know how to manage any other opposition in the House or in the country, but this is very awkward for us – this revolt of the women. It is quite a new thing; what are we to do with such an opposition as this?”’54

      It was a more uncertain opposition than the MP perhaps supposed. Some middle-class women struggled to cast off their shackles and adjust to their new public prominence. Conditioned to be servile and law-abiding, they showed perverse respect for the rules that kept women in second place: educational reformer Mary Carpenter, for example, refused to chair meetings as she thought it wasn’t respectable. Women who stood up at meetings were routinely praised for their ‘heroism’ – or treated as circus freaks. Suffrage campaigner Lilias Ashworth went on a speaking tour of the West Country in 1872 and noticed that audiences ‘came expecting to see curious masculine objects walking on the platform, and when we appeared, with our quiet black dresses, the whole expression of the faces of the audience would instantly change’.55

      Many men were also uncomfortable seeing women as Poor Law guardians – a sort of early social work. The work was considered unsuitable because of the unsavoury things they would witness in workhouses and hospitals. The first female English Poor Law guardian, Martha Merrington, was elected in 1875.

      The historian Steven King recently discovered the diary of a female Poor Law guardian from Bolton in Lancashire called Mary Haslam. This entry for 27 February 1894 gives some idea of the day-to-day routine:

      Visited the Lying-in Ward again having tried to find out particulars of two of the women; one had left and the other had proved untruthful. Visited feeble-minded room. Saw lunatics in bed. Talked with Nurse Henry. Our Committee suggested to the guardians the possibility of brightening the lunatics’ surroundings by reversing a day and night room; we had some conversation as to whether occasional nurses could be provided.56

      Many women took advantage of the 1894 Local Government Act, which granted them the right to stand for election to local councils. Henrietta ‘Nettie’ Adler, daughter of the Chief Rabbi, was a school board manager until 1910 when she became a Progressive councillor for Hackney Central. Susan Lawrence – tall, haughty and monocled, with a cut-glass accent to match – began her career in 1910 as a Conservative councillor for West Marylebone but underwent an improbable conversion to socialism in 1913, eventually becoming one of the first three female Labour MPs alongside Margaret Bondfield and Dorothy Jewson.

      What unites many of the women of the era is a willingness to play the long game. The female-dominated Fabian Society, founded in 1884, wanted to effect change on a grand scale by proceeding slowly and carefully. (Hence ‘Fabian’, honouring the Roman general Fabius Maximus who favoured attrition as a strategy rather than direct conflict.) When we think of nineteenth-century sanitary reform we think of someone like Bazalgette and his sewers – large-scale infrastructure designed and built by men. But other big, though perhaps less ostentatious, projects in this field – like the provision of public baths and wash-houses, found in nearly every British town by the 1920s – were the work of women.

      Derbyshire-born Hannah Mitchell, a seamstress who went on to become a leading suffrage activist and Labour councillor, was elected as a Poor Law guardian in the market town of Ashton-under-Lyne in May 1904. Years later she became a member of the Manchester Baths Committee and wrote with pride of the ‘really up-to-date little wash house’ she had helped to get built, where ‘a family wash could be done in a couple of hours, and the home kept free of wet clothes and steam’.57

      From the 1850s onwards, a pressing social concern had been the woeful state of housing for the poor. One of Fabian-stalwart Beatrice Webb’s sisters worked as a rent collector for the housing scheme run by Octavia Hill – the woman Webb said taught her ‘the meaning of the poverty of the poor’. Webb first met Hill in 1886 at the home of their mutual friend Henrietta Barnett, the co-founder of Hampstead Garden Suburb and Toynbee Hall, the ‘settlement’ centre for the poor in London’s Tower Hamlets. ‘She is a small woman, with large head finely set on her shoulders,’ Webb wrote in her diary:

      The form of her head and features, and the expression of the eyes and mouth, show the attractiveness of mental power. We talked on Artisans’ Dwellings. I asked her whether she thought it necessary to keep accurate descriptions of the tenants. No, she did not see the use of it … She objected that there was already too much windy talk. What you wanted was action … I felt penitent for my presumption, but not convinced.58

      The regal hauteur is immediately evident. Still, more than any other woman of her era, Hill could see that grand schemes only worked if you combined clarity of ambition with an infinite supply of patience.

      Octavia Hill was born in 1838 in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire. Her father, James Hill, was a corn merchant who had fathered six children and been widowed twice by the time he married Octavia’s mother, Caroline Southwood Smith – the family governess, hired after James was impressed by her writings on education.

      In 1840 James Hill’s business collapsed and he fell into a depression. The family moved to London where Caroline found work as manager and bookkeeper of the Ladies’ Cooperative Guild. As soon as she was old enough, Octavia worked alongside her as her assistant and at fourteen began supervising the local ragged school children as they manufactured toys. But she was no callous ‘sweater’ – on the contrary, she took the children on regular trips to wide open green spaces like Hampstead Heath and noticed how much they valued and enjoyed them.

      This sowed the seeds of a scheme for improving the working classes’ quality of life by improving their environment – principally their homes, which were cramped and run-down even when ‘well kept’. She wasn’t the only one to come up with the idea. A mass of so-called ‘model dwelling’ companies emerged in London in the middle of the nineteenth century. There were thirty or more operating by the 1870s, of which the oldest, the Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes, had been around since 1841. Their goal – and Hill’s – was solidly paternalistic, and at least one of their aims was the maintenance of the status quo, by nipping discontent in the bud. As Lord Shaftesbury put it: ‘If the working man has his own house, I have no fear of revolution.’59

      In other respects, though, Hill was different. For one thing there was the unusual matter of her key investor. John Ruskin had taken an interest in her as a fifteen-year-old after seeing her sketches – she was a talented artist – and had offered his services as an art tutor. He invested money he had inherited from his father in Hill’s Charity Organisation Society for a 5 per cent dividend.

      On the whole, as we know, Ruskin preferred his women to stay home by the hearth. But exceptions were permitted: if they were carrying out ‘public work or duty which is also the expansion of that [i.e. their domestic role]’ then they had his blessing, as such work was consistent with what Sheila Rowbotham calls Ruskin’s ‘organic vision of society as an interconnected household’.60

      In 1865, Hill bought her first properties, close to Marylebone High Street in central London, but a million miles from the area as we now know it. She described her purchase СКАЧАТЬ