Sophia described how, after a meeting with the Royal Infirmary’s management team, ‘a certain proportion of the students with whom we worked became markedly offensive and insolent, and took every opportunity of practising the petty annoyances that occur to thoroughly ill-bred lads – such as shutting doors in our faces, ostentatiously crowding into seats we usually occupied, bursting into horse-laughs and howls when we approached – as if a conspiracy had been formed to make our position as uncomfortable as it might be’.69
Sophia’s fellow Edinburgh medic Edith Pechey described the treatment she endured in a letter to the Scotsman:
If we happen to meet students on our way home in the evening … [they] find pleasure in following a woman through the streets, and take advantage of her being alone to shout after her all the foulest epithets in their voluminous vocabulary of abuse … I should be very sorry to see any poor girl under the care (!) of such men as those, for instance, who the other night followed me through the street, using medical terms to make the disgusting import of their language more intelligible to me.70
The more successful the women became in their studies, the more the violence against them escalated. Mud was thrown at them and fireworks attached to the doors of their lodgings. On 18 November 1870 the women arrived to sit an anatomy exam at Surgeon’s Hall, only to find a drunken mob blocking their entry and a live sheep wandering around the room. The none-too-subtle message was that a woman was as unwelcome there as a farmyard animal. ‘The unruffled lecturer advised his class to take no notice of the animal, saying that it had more sense than those who sent it in.’
To add insult to injury, on 8 January 1872 Edinburgh’s University Court decided the university would not, after all, be awarding the women a degree. But it was okay – they were still free to study there, ‘if we would altogether give up the question of graduation, and be content with certificates of proficiency’ (Sophia’s italics). The students tried to sue Edinburgh University for breach of implied contract. When this failed, they pursued the matter through Parliament and after three years of squabbling, during which Sophia founded the London School of Medicine for Women, achieved victory in the form of the Russell Gurney Enabling Act (1876), which obliged medical bodies to allow women to sit exams – except in surgery – and gave women the same rights as men to enter the profession.
Sophia Jex-Blake eventually sat her medical exams in 1877 at the Irish College of Physicians in Dublin. She set up her own practice in Edinburgh the following year and by the end of 1878 had treated 574 patients. From then on, women’s progress through the profession was unstoppable. In January 1882, 26 women in England were registered as having medical qualifications, rising to 477 by 1911. How absurd that it had been such a struggle.
In a sense, these clever, educated women couldn’t win. So-called New Women – with their bicycles, cheque books and eccentric desire to vote and hold down demanding jobs – were either shockingly erotic, in possession of a sex drive which was hard to control, or satirised as bluestockings: walking Punch cartoons, with their gaiters, loosely fitting skirts and, possibly, bloomers. They were in the curious position of knowing too much to be interesting to men, a position most of them enjoyed.
Elizabeth Blackwell had broken the news as early as 1881 that women had sex drives:
The radical physiological error, which underlies ordinary thought and action in relation to the evils of sex, is the very grave error that men are much more powerfully swayed by this instinct of sex than are women. From this radical error are drawn the false deductions that men are less able to resist that instinct; that they are more injured by abstinence from its satisfaction; and that they require a licence in action which forbids the laying down of the same moral law for men and women.71
This was incendiary stuff. One of the scandals of Gertrude Blood’s divorce trial in 1886 was her husband Lord Colin Campbell’s allegation that she had had four adulterous relationships, one of them with the Duke of Marlborough. Of course, only men were allowed in the public gallery to hear the details as the evidence was considered not fit for female ears. Lord Colin Campbell’s solicitor denounced her to the jury as ‘grossly sensuous, guilty of yielding to the gratification of her passions, guilty of indecency of the grossest character as to time, place and circumstances’.72
Sexually liberated women were rather more sympathetically drawn in the popular novels of the day. One of the most widely read was Anna Lombard (1901) by ‘Victoria Cross’ – a nom de plume used by Annie Sophie Cory, the Indian-born daughter of a British army colonel.
It was the Fifty Shades of Grey of its day, selling an estimated six million copies, running through more than thirty editions and remaining in print until 1930, after which it mysteriously vanished from the nation’s book shops and shelves. On publication it was denounced by critics as ‘disgusting’ (Athenaeum) and ‘thoroughly impure’ (Academy) because its eponymous New Woman heroine, while engaged to be married to an assistant commissioner in the Indian Civil Service called Gerald Ethridge, sleeps with and then marries her servant Gaida.
Gerald finds himself in a quandary. Should he abandon Anna or persist with the engagement in the hope that she will come to her senses and overcome the physical obsession for which, Gerald concedes with extraordinary post-feminist empathy, she is ‘no more to be held responsible than she would have been for any physical malady’?
Adultery, interracial sex, infanticide … Cory took every Victorian taboo she could think of and moulded a bestselling novel out of them, complete with prose which cleverly (or not so cleverly, depending on your viewpoint) displaces onto the natural world the sex it would have been illegal for her to describe: ‘The purple sky above was throbbing, beating, palpitating … What a night for the registration or the consummation of vows!’73
Just as intriguing was Cory’s switching of gender roles – so that it is Anna who is the sexual adventurer and Gerald who nurtures and abstains. One contemporary reviewer who appreciated this was the journalist W. T. Stead, friend of Annie Besant, who wrote: ‘Never before in English fiction can I remember so clearly cut a representation of an embodiment in a woman of what, alas!, is common enough in a man.’74
The cultural reign of the New Woman was long – from the early 1890s to 1911, though establishment newspapers tired of her early: ‘Shall we never have done with the New Woman?’ asked The Times, reviewing Ella Hepworth Dixon’s only novel The Story of a Modern Woman in 1894. No one embodied her freewheeling sexual confidence like Amber Reeves – Maud Pember Reeves’ daughter and the model for Ann Veronica Stanley in H. G. Wells’ 1909 novel Ann Veronica – ‘a girl of brilliant and precocious promise … [with] a sharp, bright, Levantine face under a shock of very fine abundant black hair, a slender nimble body very much alive, and a quick greedy mind’.75 Educated at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she helped to found the Cambridge Fabian Society, Reeves read Moral Sciences and gained a double first in 1908.
Her affair with Wells was one of the great scandals of the day. When it was discovered, Wells was ostracised by many friends and obliged to resign from the Savile Club. But even though the relationship produced a child – a marriage of convenience to a lawyer called Rivers Blanco White followed hastily – there was never any suggestion that she was a victim. On the contrary, in the reckless, emancipated spirit of Anna Lombard, she had wanted sex with Wells as much as he had wanted it with her.
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On 22 January 1901, Victoria died at the age of eighty-one. She had ruled over a fifth of the land area of the world, a population of four hundred million people. But imperial confidence was starting to crumble. The empire was expensive to maintain and, besides, other countries were catching up with Britain’s technological invention, expansionist ambition and naval power.
As we saw earlier, Victoria had railed against the ‘mad wicked folly’ of women’s rights. The next twenty years would show her to have been on the wrong side of history. But many women, particularly aristocratic ones, agreed with her. In 1889 a petition in the Nineteenth Century magazine signed by over a hundred mostly upper-class women rejected calls for equality because of ‘disabilities of sex’ (menstruation) and ‘strong