way the families spent money they couldn’t afford on burial insurance to avoid the embarrassment of a pauper’s funeral for their children, few of whom lived to adulthood. The middle-class theory that the poor were ‘bad managers’ who squandered their money on drink was mostly not true. On the contrary, they did their best, living on bread with a scraping of dripping and sometimes potatoes. Once weaned, none of the children ever tasted milk again.
It is shocking that the families featured were by no means the worst off. A pound a week was a low wage, but not disastrously so.
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Keeping body and soul together was only half the battle. There was also the life of the mind to consider.
Thanks to the 1870 Education Act, 92 per cent of the population of England and Wales were literate by 1910. But women were still not thought worth properly educating. The assumption was that they would – and would want to – stay at home raising children rather than go out to work.
Helena Swanwick, an early feminist and suffrage campaigner, wrote of her childhood in the 1880s that she ‘could not help contrasting my condition with that of my three elder brothers, all at school and able to walk about freely in the daytime, while I was not allowed out alone and had to be content with some very poor piano lessons and a few desultory German lessons with two other girls who were quite beginners.’66
Slowly, this changed. The Girls’ Public Day School Trust was founded in 1872. It was inspired by North London Collegiate, the first independent school for girls, which had been opened in 1850 by Frances Mary Buss with the goal of enabling girls to study subjects usually thought of as ‘male’, such as science and mathematics.
Buss and her friend and associate Dorothea Beale, redoubtable members of the so-called Langham Place feminists, were the target of classic Victorian everyday sexism: ‘Miss Buss and Miss Beale/Cupid’s darts do not feel./How different from us,/Miss Beale and Miss Buss’, went one rhyme. Undeterred, they pressed on, and as schools opened, so did women’s colleges like Girton, founded in Hitchin in 1869 but relocated to Cambridge in 1873. By 1879 Oxford also had three women’s colleges: Lady Margaret Hall, Somerville and St Anne’s.
Helena Swanwick was in raptures remembering her time at Girton: ‘I had a study as well as a bedroom to myself … my own fire, my own desk, my own easy-chair and reading lamp … even my own kettle – I was speechless with delight … To have a study of my own and to be told that if I chose to put “Engaged” on the door, no one would so much as knock was itself so great a privilege as to render me from sleep.’67
But Girton was expensive, costing £35 per term for board and tuition, and, even once they’d been accepted, women were at a disadvantage. Philippa Fawcett, daughter of the suffragist campaigner Millicent Garrett Fawcett (of whom more later), attended Newnham College in 1890 and came top in the Cambridge Maths Tripos exams. But she couldn’t be named ‘senior wrangler’, the term for the university’s top maths undergraduate, because women were not listed and would in any case not become full university members until 1948. Only then did they receive proper degrees rather than patronising ‘certificates of achievement’.
Still, Fawcett had an easier time of it than her aunt Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, whose vocation to train as a doctor proved farcically hard to fulfil. Medical schools were rather conservative, and distinctly queasy about women attending classes in anatomy and physiology, as if the sight of a dead man’s penis might be too much for the poor delicate creatures.
Elizabeth’s father Newson Garrett, a successful but uneducated businessman, intended great things for his daughters – all that he had not had himself. After failing to get on with their governess, Elizabeth and her sister Louisa were packed off to the Academy for the Daughters of Gentlemen in Blackheath, where they were known as the ‘bathing Garretts’ because their father had instructed that they be given a hot bath once a week – an eccentric request in 1849. Elizabeth in particular hated its finishing-school atmosphere and the fact that she was not taught maths or science there.
At twenty-one, after a grand tour of the continent, Elizabeth found herself back at the family home in Aldeburgh, tutoring her numerous siblings; comfortable, but frustrated and intellectually restless. She became interested in the burgeoning women’s movement and read about Elizabeth Blackwell, the first American (though British-born) female physician, in the Englishwoman’s Journal. Anderson heard that Blackwell was visiting Britain and contacted Emily Davies, the educational reformer who co-founded Girton College, to arrange a meeting, after which she was more certain than ever that she wanted to train to be a doctor. With Davies’ and Blackwell’s encouragement, Anderson set about filling in the gaps in her education and talking her father round. Newson Garrett initially thought the idea ‘disgusting’ but changed his mind, writing to her:
I have resolved in my own mind after deep and painful consideration not to oppose your wishes and as far as expense is concerned I will do all I can in justice to my other children to assist you in your study.
So Anderson enrolled as a nursing student at Middlesex Hospital, where she won round doubters with her competence, learned what she could from those doctors who were prepared to teach her and sneakily attended classes intended for male students only. To earn a medical degree, however, Anderson had to find a university that would allow her to matriculate. She applied to numerous English and Scottish medical schools, only to be refused entry on bizarre gender grounds. Her rejection letter from Aberdeen is priceless:
I must decline to give you instruction in Anatomy … I have a strong conviction that the entrance of ladies into dissecting rooms and anatomical theatres is undesirable in every respect, and highly unbecoming. It is not necessary that fair ladies should be brought into contact with such foul scenes – nor would it be for their good, any more than for that of their patients.68
Frustrated, she spotted a loophole at the Society of Apothecaries, which didn’t specifically forbid women sitting their exams. As it happened, the Society changed its rules to exclude women shortly afterwards, but the licence Anderson acquired allowed her to apply to a medical school in Paris where women were accepted. She obtained her degree in 1870, teaching herself French in order to do so, and returned to England to take up the post of chief medical officer at a children’s hospital.
The following year, Elizabeth married James G. Skelton Anderson, the managing director of the Orient Steamship Company, in an unconventional ceremony in which she refused to say that she would ‘obey’ him. With his financial help she founded the New Hospital for Women in London, which had an all-female staff, and she worked there between 1886 and 1892, remaining the dean until 1902.
Several other Victorian female doctors went on to found hospitals after jumping through numerous hoops to qualify. Sophia Jex-Blake was one. A rival of Garrett Anderson’s, she founded both a hospital and a school of medicine for women in Edinburgh. But she did so in the face of quite extraordinary discrimination.
Born in Hastings, Sophia had been working without pay at Queen’s College, London as a maths tutor because her father, a proctor at a lawyers’ society, wouldn’t allow her to accept a salary. Deciding to train as a doctor, she went first to America, where she studied briefly with Elizabeth Blackwell in New York, before returning to England when her father died in 1869. But finding a British medical school to take her was harder than she expected. The University of London, ‘of whose liberality one heard so much’, rejected her, explaining that ‘the charter had been purposely so worded as to exclude the possibility of examining women for medical degrees.’ With the help of influential friends, she lobbied to be accepted by Edinburgh, which agreed to teach her only after she had personally advertised for more women entrants to make up numbers.
Sophia and four other women started their Edinburgh course in October 1869. Several curmudgeonly tutors refused to teach them, but they quickly proved themselves as capable as their male counterparts. One of them even won a prestigious Hope Scholarship, awarded to the top four students in the year, although Sophia later complained that it had been ‘wrested from the successful candidate and given over her head to the fifth student on the list, who happened to be a man’.
The