tough life was for many women. Her mother had died from a rupture while attempting to lift her invalid father, leaving twenty-one-year-old Clementina to look after him and her seven younger siblings. That she managed to write her first novel, A Sussex Idyll, while doing this speaks volumes; though it’s for her work with the Women’s Industrial Council (WIC), which she founded in 1894, and the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) rather than her fiction that Black is remembered.
Rachel and Margaret McMillan had to overcome tragedy too. Born in New York in 1859 and 1860 respectively, they returned to their parents’ native Inverness with their mother after scarlet fever had killed their father and infant sister and left Margaret deaf. (Her hearing returned when she was fourteen.) Their conversion to Christian socialism in the late 1880s ignited an obsession with educational reform. They paid particular attention to working-class children, and their campaigning led to a change in the law to provide free school meals for children and the proper training of nursery teachers. They would go on to open school-cum-clinics like the Deptford Clinic, which acted as a medical centre for local children, and ‘night camps’ where children from deprived areas could camp outside as well as wash and obtain clean clothes.
Before activism dominated her life, home-schooled Lydia Becker had been an amateur scientist – specialist subjects: botany and astronomy – who published a book, Botany for Novices (1864), and corresponded regularly with Charles Darwin. Becker would send Darwin specimens of plants indigenous to Manchester and contributed to his work on plant dimorphism. In return, Darwin acted as her unofficial tutor and mentor and, when Becker asked if he had a spare paper she might read out at the inaugural meeting of her quietly radical Manchester Ladies’ Literary Society – ‘Of course we are not so unreasonable as to desire that you should write anything specially for us’ – he generously sent over three.9
Beatrice Webb is better-known. With her husband Sidney, she would go on to be a founding member of what is now Britain’s oldest political think tank, the Fabian Society and, in 1895, the London School of Economics. Her approach to social reform was to drip-feed socialist ideas into the minds of Britain’s ruling elite. As young, unmarried Beatrice Potter, however, she worked with the sociologist Charles Booth on his monumental study of the Victorian slums Life and Labour of the People in London, published between 1889 and 1903.
Webb didn’t call herself a socialist until February 1890, when she declared her conversion in her diary, but she wrote several years earlier of the ‘growing uneasiness, amounting to conviction’ she felt that ‘the industrial organisation, which had yielded rent, interest and profits on a stupendous scale, had failed to provide a decent livelihood and tolerable conditions for a majority of the inhabitants of Great Britain’.10
More and more women like these five were feeling that they had a role to play in improving society. They knew they could answer the question of what constituted a ‘decent livelihood’ or ‘tolerable conditions’ as capably as the men. But the late-Victorian expectation was that women would suppress their intellects, the better to boost men’s sense of their own superior brainpower.
All four parts of Coventry Patmore’s best-known poem, the sickly paean to marriage ‘The Angel in the House’, were first published together in 1863. By the 1880s this piece of sludge epitomised the Victorian ideal where women were concerned. ‘Man must be pleased,’ wrote Patmore, ‘but him to please is woman’s pleasure.’
For Patmore, women – being both altruistic and obedient by nature – were best employed in the home, making their husbands happy and looking after any children. Even if their husbands stopped loving them, they must continue to love these men out of loyalty: ‘Through passionate duty love springs higher, as grass grows taller round a stone.’
What became known as the doctrine of separate spheres – that women belonged at home while only men could cope with the demands of the workplace – found its most famous expression in an essay by the writer and art critic John Ruskin called ‘Sesame and Lilies’, published in 1865. The job of a woman, Ruskin argues, is to patrol the domestic front: her intellect, such as it is, is ‘not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision’:
By her office, and place, she is protected from all danger and temptation. The man, in his rough work in open world, must encounter all peril and trial; – to him, therefore, must be the failure, the offence, the inevitable error: often he must be wounded, or subdued; often misled; and always hardened. But he guards the woman from all this …11
Pity Ruskin’s poor wife! Indeed, his own marriage to Euphemia ‘Effie’ Gray was annulled after six years on the grounds of non-consummation. Supposedly the sight of her pubic hair and menstrual blood on their wedding night disgusted him.
If the ‘separate spheres’ doctrine sounds a bit barmy to us today, plenty of women at the time couldn’t get their heads round it either. The suffragist and campaigner for female education Emily Davies declared that ‘men have no monopoly of working, nor women of weeping’.12 She railed against a ‘double moral code, with its masculine and feminine virtues, and its separate law of duty and honour for either sex’.13
Nowhere was this moral code more obviously unfair than in the bedroom. If a man committed adultery, it was a regrettable but understandable lapse. (It was in men’s nature to have sex whenever they felt like it, so what could you do to stop them?) For a woman, however, it was catastrophic, unforgivable, life changing. The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 ruled that a woman could be divorced on the grounds of their adultery alone, whereas a man needed to be found guilty of other additional offences. He’d have to have committed incest, or not only been unfaithful but also deserted his wife.
The Act had led to an explosion in the divorce rate because middle-class couples could afford to split. Before the Act and its creation of a dedicated Court of Divorce and Matrimonial Causes, a marriage could be dissolved only by an Act of Parliament, at massive expense. In 1858, its first year in operation, there were three hundred divorce petitions compared to three the previous year.
One of these three hundred was brought by the industrialist Henry Robinson and became notorious. Despite having several mistresses and two illegitimate children, Robinson sought to divorce his wife Isabella on grounds of her infidelity, even though the only proof was a diary in which Isabella had been unwise enough to confide her erotic fantasies; a diary which shocked the nation when it was read out in court and extracts from it printed in newspapers.
Letters sent to Isabella by the object of her lust, a married homeopath called Edward Lane, proved nothing; nor did the diary prove anything save the lively sexual imagination of its author. But it was used against Isabella in court to protect Edward’s reputation. Broken and humiliated, she was obliged to defend herself by claiming that the diary was a dream-vision, a hallucination, and that a uterine disorder she suffered from had induced ‘erotomania’.14
By 1880 the idea of a woman being imprisoned by an unhappy marriage was grimly commonplace. Though of course, it was hardly a new one. The heroine of Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1797 novel The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria: A Fragment is locked up by her husband, first in their home and later in a mental institution. In the asylum Maria writes a memoir for her infant daughter who has been taken away from her: ‘But a wife being as much a man’s property as his horse, or his ass, she has nothing she can call her own!’ she protests. ‘He may use any means to get at what the law considers as his, the moment his wife is in possession of it, even to the forcing of a lock.’15
Under nineteenth-century marriage law a woman’s legal identity was absorbed into her husband’s – a principle known as ‘coverture’. Without her husband’s consent a wife was unable to make a will, sue or be sued. All her property became her husband’s, including anything she had owned before and brought to the marriage. And her husband had custody of their children.
A change came in 1870 with the Married Women’s Property Act, which permitted women to be the legal owners of any money they earned and to inherit property. And in 1884 the Matrimonial Causes Act denied a husband the right to lock up his wife if she refused to have sex with him – although it wasn’t ratified until 1891 after an incident which became known as the