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THE PROLOGUE FROM

NOTABLE SUSSEX WOMEN: 580 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES


A book by Helena Wojtczak

One sex is habitually overlooked when inhabitants and officials of towns and counties look for eminent or otherwise interesting former residents to claim as their own. Not one woman graces the list of ‘Notable Inhabitants’ on Worthing Borough Council’s website, nor is any member of the female sex included on the list of ‘Famous ex-Residents’ on the Hastings & St Leonards Observer website. No woman’s name appears on any of the six commemorative plaques in Worthing. Arun District Council honours only one woman (and eighteen men) on its blue plaques; similarly, Eastbourne’s plaque ratio is one female to eighteen males. West Sussex County Council has erected thirty-four plaques; only one is for a woman. This pattern is repeated in county guides and similar publications.

And yet, as this book amply proves, there is no shortage of notable women connected with Sussex, women who were considered sufficiently eminent to warrant entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, to deserve obituaries in the national press, who were the subject of published biographies, whose books sold in their tens of thousands, who were household names in their day, pioneers in their field, or whose achievements were recognised with awards, medals, honours and even damehoods.

Some are still in the limelight. Switching on the radio at random times, I have in the past year heard the voices of Mabel Constanduros, Jo Douglas, Gladys Morgan and Marjorie Westbury on Radio Seven; chanced upon feature articles about Barbara Bodichon, Anita Roddick, Annie Besant, Hertha Ayrton, Frances Wolseley, Vesta Tilley, Elizabeth David, Princess Beatrice and Emily Wilding Davison on Radio Four, where Gert & Daisy appeared in a feature on female comedy duos, Madeleine Masson’s biography of Christine Granville was recommended as ‘A Good Read’ and Georgette Heyer’s Arabella was the ‘Book at Bedtime’. On TV, I saw a play about Fanny Cradock on BBC4 and footage of her appeared in a comedy show. New biographies of Princess Beatrice, Anna Jameson and Fanny Cradock were published in the past year, one of Georgette Heyer is in the pipeline and Marie Belloc Lowndes’s The Lodger is again being adapted for the big screen. Last month, Catherine Cookson DVDs were given away free with the Daily Mail; today a new exhibition of Linda McCartney’s photography opens. During a visit to Cowes I spotted new housing named for Princess Beatrice. Books by more than a dozen of the authors within have been reprinted in the past seven years after being out of print for over half a century. Recordings of over two dozen singers and actresses in this book have been uploaded within the past two years to the website Youtube.com, including some born in the nineteenth century such as Gracie Fields, Florrie Forde, Binnie Hale, Elsie Randolph, Edna Best, Ruby Miller and Clara Butt. Thorough research would doubtless reveal many more examples of continued interest in notable Sussex women, many of whom died decades ago.

Not every woman within these pages warrants anything so grand as a blue plaque; but they are worthy of attention for their contribution to society, the arts and sciences and the great struggle for women’s emancipation; for rebelling against the narrow destiny set for women; for their audacity in invading men’s spheres of public and professional life. In many cases these biographical sketches tell of women’s refusal to stay within the confines of ‘woman’s sphere’. This expression was once in common usage; it described the man-made boundaries imposed on women, restrictions within which they were expected, usually obliged and often coerced, to conduct their lives. Rather than being omitted and ignored when plaques are awarded and lists compiled, it could be argued that notable members of the female sex deserve more, not less, recognition than their male counterparts for their achievements because they operated within a framework of sexual prejudice and met resistance and obstruction when stepping outside of their sphere.


Putting notable Sussex women into context

As ninety-five per cent of the women featured within were born into the middle and upper-classes between the turn of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, this overview refers only to women of those classes and to that time period.

It began in childhood, when boys and girls became aware that one sex owned and ran the world and the other was clearly subordinate. Society was organised around the needs of men, who had assumed exclusive control of law and government and given themselves every possible advantage over women in the other crucial areas of society: education, occupation, inheritance, family life and religion. While a boy was raised to be independent and to take his place in society as a landowner, businessman, army officer, career professional or statesman, his sister was taught that her only ‘career’ would be that of wife and mother, whether or not that suited her. Girls’ education was meagre (since teaching them beyond what they needed for domestic life was deemed pointless) and all universities were closed to them. While her brothers went to public school, a typical middle or upper-class girl was taught at home by an unqualified governess from whom she learned literacy, numeracy and ‘ladylike’ subjects. If lucky she might be sent to a ladies’ seminary or finishing-school, but even there she was offered nothing academic or vocational. For example, Frances Power Cobbe attended Miss Poggi’s ‘Exclusive Establishment for Young Ladies’ at 32 Brunswick Square, Hove, for two years (1836–8). The fee, £1,000, could have sent a boy to Oxford University for three years. Despite this, she found ‘there was no solid instruction, no real mental training’.

Access to money, above anything else, is what gives a person autonomy and, until the mid-twentieth century, lack of it obliged dependence upon others, which brought with it obedience to their wishes. Both methods of acquiring money — inheriting it or earning it — were set up to severely disadvantage women. Property, businesses and wealth were passed from father to son; daughters received less or nothing. Noble titles also passed down the male line, denying women another source of power, influence or status. Nor was it possible for women to accrue wealth through employment. Until the late nineteenth century, the only career available to educated women was teaching infants or girls. Whether as governesses working in private houses, or as teachers in schools or seminaries, their wages were pitifully low. Some women with capital started a small business, typically educational,(1) but this rarely expanded beyond one establishment. Before 1882 married women were hindered in business because they could not enter into a business contract, sign a legal document, or sue a debtor (or anyone else) except with their husbands, giving the men in effect control of their wives’ business matters.(2)

Marriage, among other things, usually ended the employment of middle-class women. Except during the wars, from the 1890s until the 1950s state-owned or quasi-government organisations did not recruit married women and existing staff were forced to resign if they wed, regardless of their wishes, needs, rank, usefulness or length of service. This ‘marriage bar’ applied only to occupations which needed (at least a modicum of) education and had a career structure — char-ladies were safe!

By arranging inheritance in such a way as to prevent most women from coming into wealth, and by excluding them from lucrative employment, men gave themselves two paramount advantages: they kept most of the country’s resources in male hands and forced women into involuntary dependence upon fathers, brothers and husbands.

Religion was a major influence on the lives of women. Home Bible-readings, compulsory church attendance and obedience to father, husband, Jesus and an all-seeing, all-powerful male God to whom one begged for mercy was the norm and those who disobeyed were the exceptions and were castigated as sinful.

Women’s two roles in law and government were to obey the legislation men made and to pay the taxes that men levied and spent. The legal system was solely in the hands of male police, barristers, magistrates and judges and women were not even permitted to serve on juries.(3) Despite being the majority of the population they were excluded from local and national government and no woman could vote in parliamentary elections. The exclusion of women from the law-making process rendered them dependent upon men to change the system. As this required men to surrender their gender privileges, it often took decades of campaigning to persuade enough MPs to vote for a change in the law.

Marriage and motherhood

Of those in this book only fifty-nine per cent (and only ten per cent of the senior academics) married, compared with over eighty per cent of the female population in general. Many intellectual women regarded marriage with a cynical rather than romantic eye, and with good reason, for it was a double-edged sword. A woman would increase her social status, become mistress of a household and the mother of children, but in exchange she gave up some of the most fundamental human rights.

Although men vowed ‘With all my worldly goods I thee endow’, in fact the very opposite was true. Until the law changed in 1870 and 1882, everything a woman owned, earned or inherited was the property of her husband from their wedding day.(4) This enormous transfer of power turned women into paupers dependent upon handouts from their ‘lords and masters’ and therefore subservient to them. A senior divorce judge even admitted that this was done in order to trap women within marriage. During the wedding ceremony all brides promised, within earshot of an ever-watching God they had been indoctrinated to fear, to obey their husbands. Passive submission to his sexual desires was a wifely duty, and the frequent childbearing and childrearing this inevitably led to further increased women’s vulnerability and dependence upon men.(5) Children were (until 1925) the sole property of their father and, in the event of his death, their mother did not even have rights of guardianship until 1886.(7) The law gave fathers exclusive rights to make all decisions concerning their children’s upbringing, and so the cycle began again when they favoured sons over daughters for education and inheritance.

No matter how disgruntled a woman might be with marriage in general and hers in particular, it was in her interests to keep it intact, because if provoked her husband might exercise his legal rights over her in full measure. Prior to 1870 separation left her destitute: her husband retained her income and inheritance, both current and future, unless she could get a divorce, which was expensive and difficult, especially as a husband’s adultery was not sufficient grounds until 1923.(8) Unfaithfulness on her part gave her husband grounds for divorce, but as an adulteress she would be publicly disgraced (often in the national press) and might never see her children again. Until 1884 a spouse who left could be sent to prison for refusing to return;(9) until 1891 a husband could abduct his runaway wife, imprison her in his house and enforce his ‘conjugal rights’(10) (marital rape was not illegal until 1991).(11)

Staying single

Despite the enormous imbalance in the numbers of the sexes,(12) unless they entered holy orders, society viewed spinsters as objects of pity and ridicule, insultingly labelled them as ‘surplus’ (i.e. to men’s requirements) and devised schemes to deport them. The most powerful women were wealthy widows and unmarried heiresses; however, in common with all other single women, to be considered respectable even they could not have a sex life, cohabit with a man or bear a child out of wedlock.

It was acceptable, however, to set up home with another woman, especially after the First World War, which killed or maimed millions of men of marriageable age. Although lesbianism was never illegal (13) it was taboo, driving lesbians to secrecy and leaving today’s researchers to guess which cohabiting women were lovers and which were platonic friends. It is useful to bear in mind that our culture’s obsession with frequent, lifelong sexual activity is a relatively recent phenomenon; previously it was normal for unmarried women to remain celibate throughout their lives, especially as ‘decent’ women were expected to have no sexual feelings.

The movement for women’s emancipation

From the mid-1700s a number of isolated individuals wrote about men’s poor treatment of women as a class. Stirrings of more widespread discontent led to an organised movement that began around the mid-1860s and focused on education, employment and the vote [294]. From then, with the help of sympathetic male benefactors and MPs, women greatly improved their position in each of those three areas and by the 1890s there were several feminist newspapers (one of them edited by notable Sussex woman Florence Fenwick Miller) that teemed with news of women’s achievements and campaigns. A large number of women in this book contributed to the changing status of their sex; either directly, by campaigning, or indirectly, by pioneering their way into male professions. Some of the most famous names in feminist history lived in Sussex.(14)

Notable Sussex women

Notable Sussex women fall into three broad groups: over half were in the arts or sports, nearly a quarter were philanthropists or social reformers and the remainder were pioneers or professionals. A handful fell outside these categories and some belonged to more than one. About ninety per cent followed a profession or devoted their lives to a cause. The difficulties they encountered corresponded with how far they strayed from their ‘sphere’.

Artists and sportswomen

Fifty-seven per cent of notable Sussex women were published writers or poets, exhibited painters or sculptors, professional musicians, well-known actresses or champion sportswomen. It comes as no surpise that this category is the largest, for the literary and performance arts were easier for women to enter than many other professions: no paper qualifications were needed and no governing body could prevent them from working in their chosen field. Every middle- or upper-class girl was taught to read, write and appreciate art, poetry and literature, and a good many learned to draw and paint, giving them the basic tools needed to become professional writers or artists, provided they had the necessary talent and could surmount the various obstacles.

Charlotte Brontë remarked that because women were generally confined to the home, most female novelists had limited life experience upon which to draw for storylines and characters, whereas male writers had seen something of the world. Furthermore, it was often difficult for women to obtain the peace and solitude required to think, plot and write, because of the demand, criticised by Florence Nightingale, that women should be available to others at all times and must instantly abandon any hobby or pastime in order to amuse or serve them. Because they were usually dependent on their fathers, brothers or husbands, girls and women had to win the approval and goodwill of a man to secure not only the time and space in which to nurture their talents, but also the funds for materials and equipment. Girls blessed with a musical or artistic gift found it harder than boys to secure professional training, because they had first to obtain their fathers’ permission (and funding) to engage a private tutor or attend a specialist college. It was therefore easy for men to prevent their daughters from pursuing anything they considered ‘inappropriate’ for the female sex or wasteful to spend money on something she would abandon upon marriage. For her own sake, a father could not condone activities that might make his daughter unmarriageable. Being seriously absorbed in developing an artistic, literary or musical talent would deter potential husbands: most men wanted a wife who would give him, his household and his children her undivided attention, not one wrapped up in her own pursuits.

Women who overcame the many obstacles and became professional writers or painters were aware of undercurrents of prejudice against women in the arts, which is why some invented a male pseudonym and others concealed their gender by using only their initials or remaining anonymous.(15)

A good many middle-class girls were taught to dance, sing and play the piano, but only as ‘accomplishments’ — something acquired for the pleasure of others in a domestic setting and certainly not for financial gain or public performance, which were thought vulgar. Many budding performers met with parental disapproval because it was not respectable for a girl to make a living on the stage. While a dignified Shakespearean thespian, a matronly, operatic contralto or a concert pianist would rise above suspicion, female entertainers in comedy, variety, pantomime, music hall and the circus were thought to have ‘loose morals’. Indeed, their peripatetic, unchaperoned lifestyle was highly conducive to serial romances and sexual adventures. In addition, the profession was overcrowded and many struggling actresses resorted to casual prostitution to survive periods of unemployment.

In several respects female performers were a century ahead of their time: those at the pinnacle of their profession earned ten, even twenty times the average working woman’s wage; they were the only women of their era to reveal their legs or to wear men’s clothing in public; they generally retained their maiden names after marriage and continued with their careers while raising children; many had extramarital affairs and divorced and remarried (sometimes more than once) when that was rare among — and considered scandalous by — the general population.

Few competitive sports were open to women, who were hampered by long skirts and corsets, by the cultural ideal of woman as passive and delicate, and by physicians’ insistence that strenuous sports could cause infertility, a serious threat in a social climate where childbearing was seen as every woman’s raison d’être. It was acceptable for women to compete (in a ‘ladylike’ fashion) at archery and croquet, and towards the late nineteenth century at lawn tennis, golf and cricket, ladies’ tournaments taking place from the 1890s, when the first women’s hockey and football teams were formed. Sports requiring revealing costumes were completely unacceptable until the 1920s.

Philanthropists, social workers and reformers

This category makes up twenty-four per cent of our notable women. Like their male counterparts, those who inherited wealth always helped those less fortunate by founding or supporting educational, medical and welfare establishments. Many middle-class spinsters received a small income from their family, which left them free to devote their lives to unpaid social work or public service. Some came to see reform as the only lasting way to cure society’s ills, which in some cases drew them outside of philanthropy and into the very male world of politics, where they met the greatest opposition when attempting to get votes for women [293].

Pioneers and professionals

Twenty-two per cent of notable Sussex women were either the first of their sex to achieve something or followed careers that were considered the province of men. Compared with philanthropists or artists, theirs was the hardest struggle and involved overcoming various hindrances, which might include inadequate education, parental opposition, social disapproval, official obstruction and, in some cases, legal obstacles. Careers required serious study and self-confidence, but girls were raised to be modest and were cautioned to hold themselves back because being ‘too clever’ would scare away a potential husband. Furthermore, eminent physicians issued dire warnings that sustained intellectual study was beyond women’s abilities and would lead to infertility.

The rare and lucky girl who managed to obtain both funds and paternal consent for higher education still had to find an establishment that would admit members of her sex: until the late nineteenth century universities and medical schools were strictly for men. Through personal philanthropy special colleges for women were opened, starting with Queen’s College and Bedford College in London in the 1840s. In the 1870s the London School of Medicine for Women was founded and degree examinations at the University of London were opened to women; at Cambridge, Girton and Newnham women’s colleges were established and their students were admitted to Tripos examinations at the university from 1881, by which time Oxford also had two women’s colleges: Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville [see p289]. All began as small, privately-owned, exclusive establishments attended by a tiny minority of highly privileged young ladies. By 1910 there were just over a thousand female students at ‘Oxbridge’; however, Oxford refused to grant a degree to any woman until 1920, while Cambridge held out until 1947. Initially tutors at ladies’ colleges were men; there were no suitably-educated women to take their places until the 1870s.

By the end of the nineteenth century teaching girls was no longer the only career open to educated women. There were several thousand trained and qualified nurses, over 100 physicians (6) and a few dozen government-appointed ‘lady inspectors’ of factories, schools, workhouses or workshops. During the First World War women’s branches of the army, navy and air force were formed, and nurses serving in army hospitals at home and abroad proved themselves capable of working under dangerous conditions and of dealing with wounded soldiers. This created new career opportunities for educated women, not only as servicewomen and military nurses but as officers and chiefs of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps, the Women’s Royal Air Force, the Women’s Royal Naval Service and Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service [see p297].

Although employed in the very lowest-grade office jobs from the 1870s, and as clerks and secretaries from about 1910, women rarely held senior positions in business until the late twentieth century. Each male bastion was eventually conquered, initially by the efforts of individual pioneers, although legal-minded women were assisted by legislation such as the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919, which allowed them to train and work as solicitors and barristers and to serve as magistrates. Although many public-sector workers won equal pay in the 1950s, real equality in the workplace did not begin to be possible until after the implementation of the Equal Pay Act 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act 1975.

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Footnotes

Figures in square brackets refer to page numbers within the book Notable Sussex Women
1. Typical women’s businesses were shops catering mainly to a female clientele, e.g. milliner, dressmaker, and employment agencies for servants.
2. The Married Women’s Property Act 1882 gave wives the right to enter into legal contracts.
3. Women in the public gallery were usually told to leave court during rape or other sexual assault cases.
4. There were a few exceptions: the very wealthy could obtain a prenuptial legal settlement, but it required the consent of the fiancé; a wife owned her paraphernalia (e.g. her clothing) and although her husband owned the rental income from her property he could not sell it. The Married Women’s Property Acts became law in 1870 and 1882. The first gave wives ownership of their earnings and inheritance up to £200. The second gave wives control of all their property and made them liable to support their children and husbands.
5. There was no woman-controlled contraception or legal abortion until the 1960s.
6. Three of the first five qualified female physicians appear in this book: Elizabeth Blackwell [224], Sophia Jex-Blake [236] and Frances Hoggan [135].
7. The Guardianship of Infants Acts 1925 and 1886.
8. By 1857 only four British women had ever obtained a divorce, which required an Act of parliament. The 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act enabled divorce via the courts, allowed women to retain their property after divorce and restored the legal rights they had enjoyed as spinsters.
9. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1884.
10. A test case in 1891, known as the Jackson Abduction Case, or the Clitheroe Case, ended this right.
11. A husband’s exemption from prosecution from rape of his wife was ended by the Law Lords in 1991.
12. In 1891, for example, women outnumbered men by 900,000.
13. Male homosexuality was illegal until the Sexual Offences Act 1967.
14. Madame Bodichon [193], Emily Davies [39], Florence Fenwick Miller [165], Elizabeth Blackwell [224], Sophia Jex-Blake [236], Emily Wilding Davison [96], Anna Jameson [137], Mary Richardson [227] and Margery Corbett Ashby [201].
15. Twenty-two of the writers and painters in this book used a male or genderless pseudonym or published as ‘Anon’.

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© HELENA WOJTCZAK 2008