Bloody Brilliant Women: The Pioneers, Revolutionaries and Geniuses Your History Teacher Forgot to Mention. Cathy Newman
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If her husband take proceedings for a divorce, she is not, in the first instance, allowed to defend herself … She is not represented by attorney, nor permitted to be considered a party to the suit between him and her supposed lover, for ‘damages’.
If an English wife be guilty of infidelity, her husband can divorce her so as to marry again; but she cannot divorce the husband … however profligate he may be.
Sadly, Norton failed in her bid to secure formal access to her children. She was only allowed supervised visits after her youngest son, William, died after falling from a horse in 1842. But her campaigning blasted a path for transformative legislation like the Custody of Infants Act 1839, the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 and the Married Women’s Property Act 1870.
Before long, a new generation of bluestockings was exploiting the zest for reform. They understood only too well that far-reaching change was required and that it was as important to improve the lot of working-class women as it was to lift restrictions on middle-class women looking for work.
Education was vital because of the insight it gave women into the way men controlled the world. At the end of the day, irrespective of whatever other rights they secured, it was education that would give women the keys to the kingdom and enable them to insert themselves into history in the way they deserved.
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On the morning of 7 April 1853 Dr John Snow, renowned at the time as Britain’s most skilful anaesthetist, took a cab from his home in Sackville Street in central London to Buckingham Palace. He made contact with Sir James Clark, Queen Victoria’s Physician in Ordinary, and Dr Charles Locock, Queen Victoria’s first Physician Accoucheur – from the French, meaning ‘one who is present at the bedside’ – and the three men waited in an anteroom next to the Queen’s bedroom to be summoned. In the early stages of labour, Victoria preferred to be attended only by her beloved Prince Albert and ‘monthly nurse’ (nanny-cum-midwife) Mrs Lilly.
At around midday, the Queen asked Snow to come to her bedside. He measured out 15 minims (0.9ml) of chloroform onto a handkerchief which he folded into a cone before placing it over the royal mouth and nose. It had taken six years to persuade the Palace that chloroform was safe, but finally, on the occasion of her eighth pregnancy, the Queen had decided to give it a go. Leopold’s proved to be her easiest birth so far. As Snow noted: ‘Her Majesty expressed great relief from the application, the pains being very trifling during the uterine contractions, whilst between the periods of contractions there was complete ease.’
Victoria had always hated pregnancy and childbirth, which she nicknamed the Schattenseite or ‘shadow side’ of marriage. She called her own pregnancies ‘wretched’ and when her eldest daughter Vicky fell pregnant for the first time and wrote to her mother in anticipation of sage advice, Victoria replied: ‘What you say of the pride of giving life to an immortal soul is very fine, dear, but I own I cannot enter into that; I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments; when our poor nature becomes so very animal and unecstatic.’
‘In the Christian tradition,’ the historian of anaesthesia Stephanie Snow points out, ‘suffering during labour provided a permanent reminder of Eve’s original sin in the Garden of Eden and opponents of anaesthesia were swift to draw on the Biblical admonition that “in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children”’.12 By agreeing to use chloroform during Leopold’s birth, Victoria had done something modern, dangerous and radical, horrifying one notable contemporary obstetrician, who admonished her for ‘a too-bold step’.13 She’d taken a huge medical risk, in the process scotching the centuries-old notion that pain during labour was natural and virtuous.
If Anaesthesia a la Reine was at first an option only for wealthy, fashionable ladies, it didn’t stay that way for long, becoming part of a portfolio of new medical techniques – for example, sterilisation with phenol; wearing gloves to perform internal examinations – which made childbirth not just less onerous for women but not as frequently fatal.
The Victoria who wrote so candidly to Vicky sounds nothing like the Victoria we think we know. Ditto the Victoria who, in 1860, is considering suitors for Princess Alice when she suddenly confesses: ‘All marriage is such a lottery – the happiness is always an exchange – though it may be a very happy one – still the poor woman is bodily and morally the husband’s slave. That always sticks in my throat.’
Does this mean Queen Victoria was a feminist? It’s possible, as Simon Schama has pointed out, that Victoria was familiar with early feminist writing, particularly Barbara Leigh Smith’s exposé of the harsh realities of marriage, Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women (1854). In 1862, in an act which could be interpreted as sisterly, she appointed the women’s-rights activist Emily Faithfull as her Printer and Publisher in Ordinary – ‘not a position she would have given to someone who had incurred her disapproval’.14
But Victoria had her limits. The idea that women might want to work; might want rights; might want, through suffrage, actual involvement in the running of the country – this enraged her. ‘It is’, she wrote, ‘a subject which makes the Queen so furious she cannot contain herself.’ The whole idea was a ‘mad, wicked folly … with all its attendant horrors on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety.’
Two steps forward, three steps back.
The unnoticed contradictions here suggest a Queen and a society stumbling, blindfolded, through new territory. By the end of her reign, as we shall see, the way ahead would be rather clearer.
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One of the joys of writing this book was the numerous lively conversations with friends, family, colleagues and contacts I had along the way. So many people made inspired suggestions of women who deserved to be included. I thank them all at the back, but here at the front I want to pay tribute to two women, both dead now, who were incredibly important and inspirational to me when I was growing up. This book is their legacy.
In 1968, shortly after graduating from Oxford – the first person in her family to go to university – my mum joined the staff of the west London girls’ school Godolphin and Latymer as a chemistry teacher. Helping to run the department was a woman called Frances Eastwood. Frances was much older than my mum and only two years away from retiring, but she was helpful and welcoming and before long the pair had become firm friends. She lived with another Godolphin teacher, Dorothy Newman (no relation), who had been Head of Classics before retiring in 1961.
While I was growing up my parents’ relationship with their parents was always slightly tense and strained. As a result, Frances and Dodo (as we called Dorothy) became de facto grandparents to my sister Sarah and me; we regularly stayed at their house in Hythe where they would feed us hunks of bread they baked, topped with a thick layer of home-made cherry jam. But their gentle kindness and generosity never blinded us to the fact that they were fiercely clever, independent-minded women who had known hardship as well as opportunity.
Frances had read chemistry at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (and lived just long enough to see me win a place at the same college). Dorothy, meanwhile, had read Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge in the 1920s and remembered with fury how until 1948 – 1948! – women were not allowed to be full members of the university. Like many clever women of the period they СКАЧАТЬ