Normal Women, page 54
Despite the difficulty of getting on to long courses, women golfers learned to compete. Issette Pearson was defeated by Lady Margaret Scott in the first British Ladies Championship, in a field of 38 players. Margaret’s father, Lord Eldon, delivered her acceptance speech for her, and although she won two more championships, she retired on her marriage in 1897.203 Dorothy Campbell won both the British and American Open Championships in 1909. Charlotte Cecil Leitch won the English and French Championships before the war, and the British in 1920 and 1921. In 1921, she beat the legendary Joyce Wethered in the British and French Opens, to become the only person ever to have beaten Miss Wethered twice. Their great rivalry continued until 1929 when Joyce married Lord Heathcoat-Amory and retired from competitive golf.
Horse riding became a sport for wealthy women, with the rise of fox-hunting in the nineteenth century. Catherine ‘Skittles’ Walters204 was a highly skilled horsewoman and renowned beauty, an elite prostitute in London in the 1860s, where spectators admired her riding in ‘Rotten Row’, Hyde Park, on the finest mounts in the tight habits made specially for women.205 ‘The real objection to the hunting field for ladies and parsons was in the manners and language of some foxhunters of old,’ wrote the Ladies Field magazine. ‘Now the manners of the hunting-field and the drawing-room are the same.’206
The last Victorian courtesan, Catherine ‘Skittles’ Walters’ (1839–1920) first love was horses
Catherine ‘Skittles’ Walters on horseback by unknown photographer, c.1860 (The History Collection/Alamy)
The manual Riding for Ladies, With Hints on the Stable reversed earlier advice and said that women riders did not need to be guided through a day’s hunting by a man leading the way. Women need not move out of the separate sphere of domestic life to be a good horsewoman. Training horses and arranging their transport fell within ‘natural feminine qualities of compassion and affection’, according to Mrs Power O’Donoghue.
Women who had been riding side-saddle, wearing breeches underneath the newly designed safely skirt, took to riding astride from 1910, wearing knee-length coats for modesty, adopting the same position as girls on bicycles.207 Diarist Arthur Munby watched French women cyclists from the Paris Hippodrome in 1869 and judged there to be ‘nothing indecent in their performance, or in the girls’ behavior, if once you grant that a woman may, like a man, wear breeches and sit astride in public’.208
The popularity of the bicycle in the 1890s created a dilemma for doctors: it could improve the health and physique of women, strengthen the abdominal muscles, invigorate the respiratory system and stabilise the nerves. But they feared that women would overstrain the heart and suffer spinal deformities. Excessive pedalling would lead to uterine displacement and spinal shock and might lead to masturbation. One American doctor warned of ‘bicycle-face’, a facial disfigurement in which all of the features moved to the centre of the face.209 In 1893, at the age of 16, Tessie Reynolds set a record for cycling from Brighton to London and back in just 8 hours 30 minutes.210
In 1895, Nettie Honeyball assumed her false name and advertised for players for a British Ladies’ Football Club, supported by Lady Florence Dixie, the explorer, war correspondent, feminist and aristocrat.
Together they founded the British Ladies’ Football Club with mainly middle- and upper-class women who had the time and means to play daytime matches and travel to away matches all around England. A game played in 1895 against the Ladies Reading team drew a bigger crowd than the men’s team.
Nettie Honeyball (dates and real name unknown) founded the British Ladies Football Club in 1895 – their first match in 1895 was watched by a crowd of 12,000 spectators
Nettie Honeyball, photograph by unknown in The Sketch magazine, 6 February 1895 (Chronicle/Alamy)
Women like the Carlisle Munitionettes played football during their lunch breaks and after their war work shifts. The manager at Dick, Kerr and Co., an ammunitions factory, suggested to one of the players, Grace Sibbert, she should establish a factory team. Dick, Kerr Ladies became famous for the quality of their play and the size of the crowds they drew – far bigger than for the men’s game, even when men came back from the war. They played more matches in 1920 than any men’s team and their Boxing Day match at Goodison Park in 1920 sold out the 53,000-capacity stadium. A French team played exhibition matches against the Dick, Kerr Ladies on a tour of England and in the return tour of France, the English women remained unbeaten.
The following year the English Football Association announced the game was ‘not fitted for females’, accused women players of corruption and banned women’s teams from FA grounds. Alice Barlow of Dick, Kerr Ladies said: ‘We could only put it down to jealousy. We were more popular than the men and our bigger gates were for charity.’ Without grounds, banned by the national association, women’s football disappeared.211 While a handful of teams, such as Dick, Kerr’s, found alternative venues, the FA’s decision saw most women’s teams disband and reduced spectator numbers for the few who remained.
The most successful football team in England: Dick, Kerr & Co factory team in 1921 – the year they were banned from Football Association grounds
Dick, Kerr & Co factory team, official team photo by unknown photographer, c.1921 (Bob Thomas/Popperfoto/Getty Images)
Some women were paid for swimming and coaching. ‘Natationists’ were commercial swimmers, diving, holding their breath, performing synchronised swimming, racing and lifesaving in venues like Westminster Aquarium, where women received £2 a week in 1897 and Anne Luker, the high diver, was paid substantially more. Nellie Easton, a swimming mistress at nine metropolitan baths, staged aquatic displays with women pupils, advertising that she never wore corsets in the water. She died in 1919, leaving a fortune of £2,723 10s 9d.212
Pools segregated men and women swimmers and often offered inferior pools for women. As a woman Belle White, the first British diver to win an Olympic medal in 1912, could only get access to the high diving board at Highgate Ponds one day a week. White was also a proficient swimmer and competed at three further Games, winning gold at the Europeans in 1927 when she was 33. In 1924, Lucy Morton became the only non-American woman to win a swimming medal at the Olympics, unexpectedly taking gold in the 200 metres. Lucy trained at her local pool, where she had been given permission to swim before and after work, when the pool was usually closed.213
The ice skating world championships were considered unofficially to be men-only but when Madge Syers entered the competition in 1902, organisers could find no rule banning women and the judges had to allow her entry. She took second place and went on to beat her husband at the Nationals. She also won two of the new Women’s World Championships, and gold at the London Olympics in 1908. Syers began the trend of calf-length skating costumes to show her footwork.214
The first recorded ladies’ gymnastic event took place in 1904, at a club competition won by Lozells Athletic Club. Twenty years later, a British championships for women were held in Swindon, and in 1928 the British women’s team took bronze at the 1928 Olympics.
In 1921, on their return to England after winning the first leg of the Olympiade athletics series in Monte Carlo, the victorious women’s team decided to form the London Olympiades Athletic Club.215 The Men’s Amateur Athletics Association did not welcome women members and the Women’s Amateur Athletic Association held its first championship in 1923, at which Mary Lines won 4 of the 10 titles. By the time of the Amsterdam Olympics in 1928, the International Olympic Committee had introduced five women’s events: 100 metres, 800 metres, 4 x 100 metres relay, high jump and discus. But it was believed that the strain of running the 800 metres caused women athletes to collapse, and women would be banned from the race until 1960.216
Work
The 1851 census had defined housework as ‘work’,217 but in 1881, the census-takers decided that if housework was done by ‘ladies’, it could not be work.218 So domestic duties undertaken at home by women who were not paid was ‘not work’. This resulted in a dramatic fall in the number of women who were counted as employed – from 98 per cent in the 1871 census to 42 per cent ten years later, an apparent disappearance of 56 per cent of the female workforce.219
Ten years on, the civil servants planning the 1891 census had another change of mind. Observing the household duties of elite ladies – dusting the delicate china, maintaining social relationships, commissioning gowns, writing letters, planning parties, keeping accounts, planning menus and supervising and disciplining servants, making appointments for husbands and sometimes doing the family business accounts, investing in their business and maintaining their clients, birthing, feeding and raising children – these officials decided that the activities done by women at home were, after all, work: ‘The nature of daily occupations of such persons being thus evident, they would be properly reckoned in Domestic Service.’220
Good Lord: no! Of course, the daughters, sisters and wives of gentlemen could not be listed like maidservants in ‘Domestic Service’. A change had to be made to maintain the illusion that such women were leisured. So in 1901 the census office announced, ‘We came to the conclusion that on the whole it would be better to revert.’221 Women’s work remained, but the figures changed. By 1911, only 10 per cent of wives were recorded as working, compared to 70 per cent of single women.222
Domestic occupations may have been renamed as leisure to satisfy genteel families who wanted to claim that the ladies of the household did not work, but the re-definition affected everyone. Domestic work in their own home by women had now been defined as an economic zero – ‘not paid’ and ‘not earning’, and now not reported. This hid the huge cost of producing babies and children, housing, clothing, feeding and nursing the family so that children could enter education, training and work, and husbands could attend wage-earning work. The census definition of unpaid work also ignored all food or goods produced by the women of the household and consumed by the family, and anything that might earn money but which was not known as ‘work’ – like craft, art and writing, and all the unpaid clerical, administrative and other work that wives did automatically for husbands. Women of all classes were expected to help their husbands, and this invisible work was so widely understood that many posts were given to men in the knowledge that their wives would work for them, unpaid: ‘Most schoolmaster posts went to married men on the understanding that his wife would act as a matron or housemistress at a boarding school or teacher’s assistant at a day school.’223
This gave employers and husbands a licence to exploit their wives. Both elite and working-class women, engaged in the endless round of labours inside the home, were, officially, at leisure. As it was not work, it needed no pay. Women’s activities in the home had no measurable value. Their time was valueless. Officially: women were doing nothing for no measurable reward.
Ironically, most paid labouring women were working in homes as domestic servants. In 1901, service in private houses formed the biggest single occupation of women, at 31 per cent of women workers.224 It was badly paid work with long hours, open to girls as they left school at the age of 12. A woman worker wrote in 1906: ‘When I was about fourteen years of age I went to service for about eighteen months and I did not like it at all because you was on from morning to night and you never did know when you was done and you never did get your meals in peace for you are up and down all the time, you only get half a day a week and you never get very large wages in service. You never know when you are going to get a good place.’225
Many servants hated their work. Middle-class Frances Wilder explained how she entered domestic work after the death of her father, a senior civil servant: ‘Though he was one of the best of men in a general way he did not think it necessary that his daughters should have more than a very secondary education, and . . . I was quite unfitted to earn my living which I had to do. I took up domestic work – the condition and spirit of which I loathe . . . I have not felt in my element with employers who (as so many still do) possess the feudal spirit towards those who serve them.’226
Domestic work was physically arduous, with long hours, a female speciality – unsurprisingly, it was badly paid. The value added by workers in the factory was evident; the value added in the home was invisible. Servants too were expected to be invisible, cleaning and lighting fires in empty rooms, silently preparing the house in the morning and closing it down at night. Architectural changes, like servants’ quarters, back stairs, basement kitchens and tradesmen’s entrances further hid servants and their service from their employers ‘upstairs’. Domestic servants lost status as the family rose through the levels of the middle classes, and they were not considered part of the family.
Better education for girls of the middle and upper classes continued, and the 1870 Education Act required all girls to attend school from the age of five to 13, with the 1880 Act making attendance compulsory. In 1873, the government required girls to receive some sort of physical exercise, adopting the Swedish system of gymnastics while boys did military drills. By the 1890s, such was the concern about the health of children that physical education was made compulsory. Boys were encouraged into competitive team games like football, hockey and cricket, and girls were offered netball and rounders. The poorest schools had to make do with drill and Swedish gymnastics, but working-class girls, expected to help at home, had no time to practise after class. Girls’ sports usually ended when they left school.227
More girls stayed on later, working as pupil-teachers in their school, which would be enough to qualify them as governesses or teachers. The pay and conditions were extraordinarily poor. But one commentator, W.R. Greg, explained it was women’s own fault: ‘It was ill paid and ill esteemed because it was ill done. Governesses were a depressed and despised class (where they were so) for the same reason that needle women were a distressed class: because, as every woman could read and write and use a needle, as every woman could teach a little, and sew a little, every uneducated woman who was destitute became a sempstress, and every educated or half-educated woman became a governess.’228
By 1900, Church of England day centres had begun to train teachers and university colleges opened. Amazingly, the low pay for women teachers continued even when they were better trained. Women accepted low pay because the work was respectable in clean conditions and might even take them – as governesses – into elite homes. By 1901, three-quarters of all teachers were women.229
Elite women who could afford the time and the fees could attend lectures; first at Cambridge and then London and Oxford universities, and from the 1870s they were allowed to take the final exams.230 But at Oxford they were not allowed to graduate or be awarded a degree until 1920, and not until after the Second World War at Cambridge (1948), where male graduates were so appalled that female graduation had even been proposed to the Senate in 1946 – and defeated – that a mob of hundreds of men marched on the women’s college of Newnham, broke windows and battered the college gates with a handcart, trying to break in.231 Sarojini Naidu, poet and campaigner for Indian independence, was the first Asian student to study at King’s College London, and Girton College, Cambridge, in 1895–8, and Amy Ida Louisa King was the first woman of African descent to graduate from Girton in 1903.232 But women who had fought hard to get to university and study found professions closed to them: 80 per cent of female Oxbridge graduates became teachers – earning about three-quarters of their male colleagues’ wages.233 When Gwyneth Bebb and two other women challenged the Law Society for admittance after they graduated with law degrees, their case went to the High Court, where the judges ruled that women’s ban from the law was part of ‘long, uniform, and uninterrupted usage; which we ought to be very loath to depart from’.234
The idea of religious work for both Roman Catholic and Anglican women started to become popular from 1850. Convents opened for religious professionals, providing an easy solution to the so-called problem of ‘surplus women’, and 3,000 Roman Catholic nuns joined 235 convents in England in 1837; by 1900, they numbered around 10,000 women in 600 convents. Anglican sisterhoods had also developed and by this time 90 Anglican convents had been established.235 Women, who were already thought to be more spiritual than men, could now live in a completely separate sphere enclosed in a convent, emerging only to perform charitable and spiritual missions. Ironically the high quality of convent schools caused alarm that girls might be getting a superior education to boys.236
By 1870, women preachers were mainly to be found in the newly established Salvation Army, a radical, joyful, exuberant evangelical organisation aimed at the working-class poor. Founder Catherine Booth and her daughters, known as ‘Hallelujah Lasses’, deliberately created a carnival atmosphere for their message. Booth worked alongside her husband William, declaring that no woman was ‘subject to man in any sense in which one man is not subject to another; both the law of God and man recognize her as an independent being’.237
Women became leaders in other religions. Fatima Cates was a founding treasurer of the Liverpool Muslim Institute, which established an orphanage, a school and a mosque – the first in England, where Sadika Hanoum (birth name Teresa Griffin Viele) worked as a journalist. The first purpose-built mosque in Woking was funded by Begum Shah Jahan of Bhopal.238
