along her own secret supply of provisions – sugar, tea, plasmon (a form of dried milk) – and tolerated the filthy bedding, fleas and lack of washing facilities. But the behaviour of the people she encountered baffled her:
A conversation sprang up about the treatment of wives, and it was stated that a woman loved a man best if he ill-treated her … All the conversation was unspeakably foul, and was delivered with a kind of cross-shouting, each struggling to make his or her observations heard.40
In a workhouse tramp ward, naivety blinded Higgs to the ever-present sexual threat. A male ‘pauper’, charged with the responsibility for admitting women, ‘talked to me in what I suppose he thought a very agreeable manner, telling me he wished I had come alone earlier, and he would have given me a cup of tea. I thanked him, wondering if this was usual, and then he took my age, and finding I was a married woman (I must use his exact words), he said, “Just the right age for a bit of funning; come down to me later in the evening.” I was too horror-struck to reply.’41
Learning that ‘single women frequently get shaken out of a home by bereavements or other causes, and drift, unable to recover a stable position once their clothing becomes dirty or shabby’,42 Higgs comes to understand the catch-22 of poverty. This led her, once she had returned to her own world of middle-class comfort, to campaign for such things as pensions for widowed mothers and family allowances – some sort of safety net that might break the cycle of destitution.
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At Windsor Castle on the night of 14 December 1861, Prince Albert died of typhoid at the age of forty-two. Victoria was inconsolable: his loss was, she said, ‘like tearing the flesh from my bones’. As she withdrew from the world, all that interested her was memorialising her husband and the miracle of their marriage through the likes of the Royal Albert Hall (opened in 1871) and the Albert Memorial (unveiled in 1872).
But however marvellous Victoria and Albert’s often stormy relationship had been, as an institution marriage was becoming less and less popular. By 1871 there were 3.4 million unmarried women over the age of twenty, an increase from 2.8 million in 1851 – a mixture of spinsters and widows. Whatever their circumstances, these were ‘surplus women’, considered a significant social problem in late-Victorian Britain, unless they lived lives of sainted purity.
Among this number we can count the single, celibate Florence Nightingale, who referred to herself as a nun, her only ‘sons’ the soldiers she cared for. Other less fortunate surplus women lived in special lodgings on small annuities, devoting themselves to good works because to work for money was socially unacceptable. Nightingale was scornful of these ‘lady philanthropists who do the odds and ends of charity’: ‘It is a kind of conscience-quieter,’ she wrote, ‘a soothing syrup.’43
For middle-class women who chose not to marry, options were limited. They could become governesses, educating the children of their social superiors but kept at arm’s length by the host families so that they felt no more valued or involved than servants. Writing was also acceptable, but to make a success of it you needed private means. Back in the early nineteenth century, the prolific social theorist Harriet Martineu had been able to make a living entirely by the pen. But she was considered a brazen oddity, which may be why the novelist Margaret Oliphant wrote that Martineu was ‘less distinctively affected by her sex than perhaps any other, male or female, of her generation’.44
In journalism, 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