Normal Women, page 48
A few middle-class women who had approached the poor as patrons gained such expertise through their voluntary work that they were offered official posts as government inspectors, visitors and wardens. As the work had grown from separate sphere philanthropy, they felt able to take professional posts without loss of gentility. By 1900, an estimated half a million women were working as unpaid volunteer campaigners or as professional and semi-professional philanthropists.29 A few were appointed to the Boards of Trade from 1909, to advise on a minimum wage in industries that were known to be ‘sweated’: chainmaking, ready made tailoring, paper box making, machine lacemaking and finishing trades – work typically done by women. One of them was Beatrice Webb (1858–1943), who wrote a minority government report against linking pay to a person’s sex: the pay should be for the job and not for the sex of the worker; but majority advice was that a fair breadwinner wage should be twice the pay needed by a single woman.30
The problem of sexually transmitted disease inspired the breakthrough campaign that brought ladies out of the separate sphere of their protected homes into partnership with the poorest of working-class women – prostitutes. It became clear that the home could not be isolated from the world, and that freedom for male sexuality came at a cost to both his wife and his prostitute. In the early nineteenth century, it had been assumed that chaste and monogamous women were safe from disease, inside the separate sphere of their exclusive home. Syphilis, the worst of the sexual diseases, was thought to generate spontaneously inside the bodies of promiscuous women and was then given to men. Doctor William Acton (1813–75) said a prostitute was ‘a mere instrument of impurity . . . a social pest, carrying contamination and foulness to every quarter to which she has access’.31
The Contagious Diseases Act passed in 1864 forced prostitutes in naval ports and garrison towns to report to police stations for regular inspection for diseases. Any woman could be arrested on suspicion of prostitution and forcibly physically examined by a (male) army surgeon. One woman described the experience of being examined by a speculum: ‘Often they use several. They seem to tear the passage open first with their hands, and examine us, and then they thrust in instruments, and they pull them out and push them in, and they turn and twist them about.’32
Arrest, examination and treatment were made deliberately painful and humiliating as a deterrent to the women. Campaigner Josephine Butler called it ‘surgical rape’. As a Kent woman accused of prostitution said: ‘It is men, only men, from the first to the last that we have to do with! To please a man I did wrong at first, then I was flung about from man to man. Men police lay hands on us. By men we are examined, handled, doctored. In the hospital it is a man again who makes prayer and reads the Bible for us. We are had up before magistrates who are men, and we never get out of the hands of men till we die.’33
If a woman was found to be infected, she was imprisoned either in a Lock hospital or in the workhouse, and sentenced to three months of treatment – later extended to a year. There was no known cure for the diseases but mercury, a poison that could cause kidney failure, was widely used as an ointment, inhaled, ingested and inoculated.
Only women suspected of selling sex found themselves arrested and treated. The man’s sexual act and his payment were not illegal. No men were forcibly treated, none were even challenged by the police and they were never named in court. But despite the harsh treatment of women it was clear, in 1875, that the diseases were not confined to prostitutes – they were spreading even beyond male clients to their wives and unborn children.34
Two women were admitted to the Central London Sick Asylum in Fitzrovia, in February that year, one a 19-year-old prostitute with ulcers developing across her body. The doctors named the patient ‘AG’ when they wrote up her notes and observed the spread of the disease for which there was no cure: syphilis. The other patient, who they named ‘AP’ in the anonymised notes, was a married lady from the middle classes, 30 years old, well educated, who had endured seven years of miscarriages, a large sore on her tongue and a constant headache. The doctors noted that she spoke as if she were ‘deranged’ and admitted her for observation. She too had contracted syphilis; but as a virgin bride and a celibate wife, she could not possibly have generated it by her sexual promiscuity.35
The only explanation – however disagreeable to elite doctors and their genteel patients – was that sexually promiscuous women were not generating syphilis in themselves. Mrs AP’s infection must have come from Mr AP. He – like thousands of other men – used poor women for sex and carried syphilis into their own homes. The disease was widespread: 30 per cent of soldiers and sailors reporting sick were found to be suffering from venereal diseases,36 and in 1916 a royal commission report estimated that more than 10 per cent of people in towns had syphilis and even more had gonorrhoea.37
The prostitute AG died a week after being admitted to the hospital. No family demanded her body for a respectable burial so the doctors were able to do a post-mortem, which found that the membrane around her brain had turned to jelly.38 The other patient, AP, admitted at the same time, lost the ability to speak and died a few weeks later.
Sheltered ladies stepped out of the protection of their homes and spoke in defence of prostitutes. Campaigner Josephine Butler said: ‘It is unjust to punish the sex who are the victims of a vice, and leave unpunished the sex who are the main cause, both of the vice and its dreaded consequences.’39 The pioneer of competent nursing, Florence Nightingale, a single gentry woman, had the courage to publish an essay opposing the police regulation of prostitutes, demonstrating with data that arrests of women had little effect in controlling disease. Nightingale’s reputation as the heroine of the Crimean War earned her a respectful hearing, but the infamous Contagious Diseases Act was extended in 1868 – from all naval ports to 138 towns and later to a 10-mile radius around each town.
Elite women were banned from the first campaign against the Contagious Diseases Act as the men-only committee felt such a taboo topic to be unsuitable for ladies. Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Wolstenholme and Josephine Butler established their own association: the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, an active campaigning committee that identified the assault on working-class women as an assault upon all women. They did not recommend that prostitutes reform but that the Contagious Diseases Act was at fault, since it was not a genuine provision for public health, but a veiled attempt to provide men with women who were free of disease. All women taking part in the campaign – both rich philanthropists and poor women – were radicalised and educated by the protest, and many of them made a connection between the abuse of women and their lack of legal rights.40
The committee listed the great names of nineteenth-century feminism. Josephine Butler toured Britain speaking of the ‘sistership’ of women. She held 99 meetings in 1870. For many it was shocking to hear a lady speaking publicly about sex and prostitution, and she was attacked by men who used prostitutes, by pimps and by brothel owners. In Pontefract in 1872, her lecture room was set on fire, as the police watched and did nothing.
A huge petition of 2.5 million signatures was presented to the Houses of Parliament and the acts were suspended and repealed in 1886 – but only in England.41 They still applied in the empire, where the laws were used to segregate Indian sex workers from their families and their communities. Indian women servicing English troops were forced to live in special housing, next to military cantonments, and have sex with white men only.42 Josephine Butler argued for sisterhood despite race as well as despite class: ‘Our poor Indian sisters claim our sympathy, even more than our own countrywomen, who were subjected to the C.D. Acts, for not only are they women oppressed by men, but they are the women of a conquered race oppressed by their conquerors. Their hope of deliverance must seem to them so very far off.’43
Butler went on to campaign against child prostitution in England and the trafficking of enslaved women and children to Europe. In 1880, she identified a child sex abuse ring involving the head of the Belgian Police’s vice squad and her evidence led to the trial, conviction and imprisonment of the head of the squad, his deputy and 12 brothel owners. With Florence Soper Booth, Butler persuaded the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette to demonstrate the abuse of children by buying a 13-year-old girl from her mother for £5. After a long campaign, Parliament raised the age at which a child might consent to have sex from 12 to 13, and finally, in 1885, to 16 years old.44
Another member of the Contagious Diseases Act committee, Elizabeth Wolstenholme, established the forerunner of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) with Richard and Emmeline Pankhurst in 1889. She would live long enough to see women get the vote, dying aged 84 in March 1918. Her colleague Millicent Fawcett, another Contagious Diseases campaigner, organised the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), founded Newnham College, Cambridge, and other women’s campaigns.
As Christabel Pankhurst said: ‘The cause of sexual disease is the subjection of women. Therefore to destroy the one we must destroy the other.’45 Pankhurst linked the liberation of women gaining the right to vote to freeing women from male sexual demands with her slogan: ‘Votes for Women! Chastity for Men!’46
(Amazingly, it didn’t catch on.)
Women Against the Vote
Not all women made the connection that in order to change the laws on women, they must become lawmakers themselves: MPs and voters. Caroline Norton, the bereaved mother whose children were taken by their father and who almost single-handedly won changes to the law with the Custody of Infants Act of 1839, never supported women’s suffrage: ‘The natural position of a woman is inferiority to man. Amen! That is a thing of God’s appointing, not of man’s devising. I believe it sincerely, as part of my religion. I never pretended to the wild and ridiculous doctrine of equality.’47
Many other women wanted to be part of public life but stay out of political life. Campaigners like Etta Lemon, whose extraordinary crusade won conservation controls on the trade in wild bird pelts and feathers, also founded the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League – a campaign against women having a vote in national elections. An 1896 pamphlet linked the two causes: ‘If women are so empty-headed and stupid that they cannot be made to understand the cruelty of which they are guilty in that matter, they certainly prove themselves to be unfit to be voters.’
The National Anti-Suffrage League began in 1908 with a roster of great women, including Lady Jersey, Mrs Humphrey Ward the novelist, Gertrude Bell the explorer, social reformers Sophia Lonsdale and Violet Markham, and Beatrice Chamberlain the educationalist daughter of Joseph Chamberlain. It was hugely successful at first, presenting a petition of 337,018 signatures and recruiting a fee-paying membership of 9,000 in 1909 – far greater than any pro-suffrage campaign. By 1913, it boasted 270 branches with more than 33,000 members, when the suffragettes’ Women’s Social and Political Union had 2,000.48
The Anti-Suffragists argued that women were not competent to run a large and complex empire. Women were ‘debarred by nature and circumstance from the average political knowledge and experience open to men’. The league argued that since reforms for women had been successfully brought by women from outside Parliament, it proved that women had influence beyond partisan politics. They believed that women should be consulted by the government on women’s questions, and proposed a Women’s National Council or Advisory Committee to advise and influence the all-male Parliament.49 They were happy that women vote in local elections, and even serve in local government offices, as parish and county was an extension of a woman’s ‘home’, where she ought to have moral authority. But national commerce, finance, war and diplomacy remained the business of men, and it should be men who elected male MPs. To allow women a vote in national, parliamentary elections would put the great powers of the state in the hands of an inexperienced and ignorant electorate: bad for the empire, and bad for women.
Eliza Lynn Linton compared suffragists to prostitutes: ‘The fast young lady and the strong-minded woman are twins, born on the same day and nourished with the same food; but one chose scarlet and the other hodden grey, one took to woman’s right to be dissipated and vulgar, the other to her right to be unwomanly and emancipated.’50
The real, unstated fear was that if everyone, men and women, had the vote at 21, there would be a female majority. Women, including all those surplus spinsters, would outnumber men. This was the greatest obstacle to giving women the vote . . . and it was barely mentioned.
Inevitably, an association founded to prevent women from attaining political power attracted women recruits who demonstrated incompetence. ‘It was our fate, as Antis, to attract all the ultra-feminine, and the ladylike incompetents,’ said one anti-suffrage woman organiser – sadly lacking any sense of sisterhood.51
Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer, held the presidency of the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage in 1908. When the men merged with the ladies’ association, he naturally assumed control of the new co-ed National Anti-Suffrage League, making it clear why women should not have the vote: ‘Extreme sentimentality . . . vague and undisciplined sympathies, hasty generalisations based on inexperience, and inaccurate information: qualities which are, broadly speaking, characteristic of the majority of the female sex.’52
The lady members agreed they were incapable. As Caroline Norton wrote to William Gladstone in 1850, ‘I have not ventured upon proposing improvements in the law. I am too sensible of the ridicule my attempting to adjust a framework of legal possibilities even if I believed myself capable of a task, which is utterly beyond woman’s province.’53
The gentlemen supporters intended to dominate the merged association. They wanted women members to help them, but not to make policy: ‘I am physically incapable of doing eternal battle to all these rampaging women,’ wrote one. ‘With her ideas of the way to treat the male sex, Miss Lewis ought really to be a Suffragist; it is a mere accident that she has drifted into our camp.’54
Queen Victoria, one of the most powerful people in the world as the Empress of India, remained passionately opposed to women getting the vote. In an 1870 letter, Theodore Martin, trusted friend of the queen, wrote: ‘The queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of “Women’s Rights,” with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety . . . Woman would become the most hateful, heartless, and disgusting of beings were she allowed to unsex herself.’55
Women for the Vote
The voting system in England was hopelessly corrupt, and a wealthy woman could select the MP for her area by simply bribing the electorate. Open voting, without a secret ballot, meant that any elite woman with tenants or employees could simply order them to vote for the man of her choice. Mrs E.H. Bruton wrote to all her tenants before the 1868 election: ‘SIR – I request you will vote for my father, J.W.S. Erle-Drax, Esq., on receipt of this.’56
Even when the vote was expanded to middle-class men in 1884, the word ‘men’ in this instance meant only ‘men’. Women were still excluded. Helen Taylor, the daughter of suffragist Harriet Taylor and the stepdaughter of John Stuart Mill the philosopher, stood for election as an Independent Radical Democrat in Camberwell in 1885, while the Women’s Suffrage Bill was actually going through the Houses of Parliament.57 Some people feared her candidacy would threaten the progress of the bill, while her opponents called her ‘an unsexed woman agitator’.58
On nomination day, the presiding officer at Camberwell refused to accept her papers and she stepped down. The Standard mocked her, writing that she had ‘shown a lack of knowledge of the elementary rule of grammar in the differentiation between masculine and feminine genders’.59 The Women’s Suffrage Bill failed and other women who had also registered to vote were refused in a series of court cases.
In 1894, the Local Government Act expanded the right to vote in local elections to all women who owned property in their own name. This was a compromise – it avoided swamping the male vote with women, kept the vote among the property-owning classes, and divided women by class: property-owning women got the vote, poor women and married women whose houses were in their husbands’ names did not. At a stroke the ‘votes for women’ became ‘votes for single ladies’, no longer a feminist campaign for the benefit of all women.
Some working-class women campaigned for themselves. In Lancashire, where women held the majority in the textile mills, the so-called ‘mill girls’ retained a keen political awareness. They understood that only a Parliament that responded to women voters, and staffed with women MPs, would end the exploitation of working women. The Lancashire women actively campaigned for votes for working-class women,60 and in 1902 women textile workers from all over northern England presented a petition to Parliament with 37,000 signatures demanding votes for women.61
They were the exception to the general rule of snobbery. Other suffrage campaigns, run by elite women, called only for the vote in all elections to be extended to propertied women: they were upper- and middle-class women campaigning for themselves. Millicent Fawcett (pictured in the plate section), the daughter of a liberal middle-class family, united 17 suffrage societies to found the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, campaigning for votes for middle-class, property-owning women using peaceful protest. Campaigning peacefully, holding meetings and proposing reform through Parliament, the NUWSS was the biggest organisation to campaign for votes for women: more than 3,000 women marched in support in February 1907 – on ‘the mud march’! They were far more numerous and influential than Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union founded in 1903. But the Pankhurst group would take the headlines and dominate the historical record because of their campaign of civil disobedience, terror attacks and suffering. Even the WSPU demanded the vote only for wealthy women.
