Girl Trouble Read online

  There is a brisk tone about the writing of these ‘revolting daughters’. Their arguments are robust and unapologetic. This in itself reflects the strength of the late Victorian woman’s movement. About three decades earlier, a young – and desperate – Florence Nightingale had given vent to her feelings of frustration and despair about the position of the middle-class daughter-at-home. She had similarly seen her life and the lives of girls in comparable circumstances as representing enforced passivity and intellectual starvation. Sacrificing girls on the altar of domestic duty was like crippling them, she had insisted. It was the mental equivalent of the Chinese practice of binding girls’ feet.7 Florence Nightingale had been dissuaded from publishing her essay ‘Cassandra’ by contemporaries (largely male) who had found it too bitter and polemical. Her arguments had clearly anticipated those expressed by the revolting daughters of the 1890s. But the feminists of the 1890s sound altogether more confident. Florence Nightingale’s essay reads like a howl of pain from an isolated individual. The tone of the revolting daughters conveys awareness that they are by no means alone in their views. The women’s movement had given them the voice of confidence.

  At the end of the 1920s, writing what was effectively the first general history of the Victorian women’s movement (The Cause), Ray Strachey entitled the first chapter of her book ‘The Prison House of Home’. She observed that ‘The first stirrings of the feminist movement began through the awakening of individual women to their own uselessness.’8 According to Strachey, the growing realisation that many women shared similar views about the powerlessness of their social situation and what should be done about it brought ‘a freemasonry of understanding’. This was the base of a feminist movement, ‘the Cause’. Much had been achieved in the second half of the nineteenth century. There had been significant progress in widening opportunities for both the education and the employment of women. Political agitation had centred on married women’s property rights, child custody arrangements, the fight for a single standard of sexual morality, and of course demands for the vote.

  Advances in education, in particular, fostered confidence in the girls and young women of the 1890s and 1900s. This increase in confidence marked them out as a new generation, enjoying opportunities which had not been there for their mothers. Around mid-century, provision for basic schooling had been patchy. Girls’ secondary education had barely existed. Private establishments (ladies’ academies) were mainly in the business of grooming girls for marriage. After the Education Act of 1870, most working-class girls received some kind of elementary education, however basic. In contrast, many middle-class girls stayed at home, where they devoted themselves to helping their mothers and to family duties. Well-off families would employ a governess, but it was comparatively rare to send girls away to school.9

  The plight of those who failed to marry could be miserable. If the family was well off, unmarried daughters might spend long hours on the kind of pursuits derided by Florence Nightingale as pointless. These included every variety of fancywork such as crochet, beading and pokerwork (the scorching of designs on velvet). Seaweed and ferns could be pressed into albums. Flowers might be fashioned from wool, coloured wax or seashells. Seashells could be glued on to boxes. Bouquets fashioned from seashells could be arranged under glass domes, ad infinitum. Where money was lacking, and there was a limited budget for servants, daughters could take on domestic work, although too much of this would compromise the middle-class status of the family. The occurrence in a family of too many unmarried daughters, or a father’s untimely death, could precipitate real crisis. Then, a spinster daughter might be farmed out to the household of other relatives, or have to face the terrifying fact that she would have to earn her own living. Here, very few options were available to middle-class girls, apart from governessing.10 The often miserable fate of the down-at-heel governess was of course a standard theme of mid-Victorian literature.

  The urge to widen the options available to girls who could not, or did not choose to marry was central to middle-class feminism. Improving education was crucial. One of the movement’s most effective educational campaigners was Emily Davies.11 Uncompromising in principle, Davies was an intrepid opportunist in strategy, employing all manner of tactics and relentless pressure in pursuit of her goals. It was Emily Davies who made sure that a government inquiry into the state of middle-class education in 1864 inspected girls’ schools, along with boys’. It was Emily Davies who saw the importance of girls taking the same public examinations as boys, in order to prove that their brains were up to it. And at a time when the very idea of a woman’s college in the universities tended to be greeted ‘with shouts’, it was Emily Davies who successfully navigated the foundation of Girton College, Cambridge. This was the first residential college for women, beginning its life in a small house in the village of Hitchin in 1869. Emily Davies’s skill in disarming opposition became legendary. For instance, she would counter any objection that brainy women were ugly and unwomanly by seating the prettiest girls on the front benches at examination times.

  Emily Davies was one of the most persistent of those working to widen educational opportunities for girls, but the movement included many effective campaigners, both women and men. Between them they employed a wide range of strategies and approaches. Two of the earliest ventures designed to improve girls’ education were Queen’s College (1848) and Bedford College (1849), both in London. Queen’s College came about through the initiative of Frederick Denison Maurice, an academic and Christian Socialist. Bedford’s founder was a wealthy widow, Mrs Elizabeth Reid, who was keen to ensure that her college, unlike Queen’s (which was controlled by men) should be governed entirely by women. Two young women in particular, Frances Mary Buss and Dorothea Beale, both former students at Queen’s, went on to distinguish themselves as headmistresses of new, academically achieving girls’ schools, the North London Collegiate School, and Cheltenham Ladies’ College respectively. These schools (and their headmistresses) were very different. Cheltenham was exclusive. Miss Beale, very class-conscious, welcomed applications from parents who were gentlefolk but drew the line at ‘daughters of trade’. Miss Buss, on the other hand, was all in favour of widening access, especially for clever girls. The two schools became in effect templates for new kinds of institution.12

  Education for middle-class girls began to lose its genteel domestic, drawing-room atmosphere. The newer girls’ schools started to look more like the institutions we recognise as schools today. There were purpose-built classrooms and corridors; rulebooks, timetables, subjects and termly reports. In some cases there were even laboratories, sports fields and halls for gym. After 1872, founders of another new venture, the Girls’ Public Day School Company (originally a limited liability company, later a trust) worked to establish a network of high schools for girls throughout Britain.13

  At the tertiary level, Josephine Butler and Anne Jemima Clough promoted university lectures for ladies in the North of England. Miss Clough, and the Cambridge academic Henry Sidgwick worked to establish Newnham College, Cambridge. Similar efforts in Oxford led to the foundation of Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall. An important milestone was passed in 1878, when the University of London became the first university in the UK to open its degrees to women. Others followed.14 Women students were often dubbed ‘undergraduettes’ and housed in separate buildings and hostels. They were carefully superintended by Lady Tutors lest they should get too friendly with the men.15

  By the 1890s, intelligent middle-class girls had many more options than had been available in the 1840s and 1850s. If their parents were supportive (and willing and able to cough up around £16 per year – around £1,000 in today’s terms), they might attend a good secondary school and even qualify for college or university. Opportunities for professional training were still limited, but teaching in an efficient secondary school was a much better prospect than becoming a governess in a private home. An ambitious girl could take inspiration from recent successes and role m
odels. Feminists rejoiced, for instance, when Agnata Frances Ramsay from Girton College achieved an outstanding first in the classical tripos at Cambridge in 1887. None of the male candidates had achieved higher than the second class in that year. Even the satirical magazine Punch, normally quick to poke fun at feminism, was generous. It published a cartoon showing a woman being shown into a first-class railway carriage marked ‘Ladies Only’.16 Three years later, Newnham College’s Philippa Fawcett, daughter of the prominent suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett, achieved a brilliant success in the mathematical tripos. Her score was considerably higher than that of the man who took the prize for being top (‘senior wrangler’) that year. Women, however, were not eligible for the title. They were not even allowed to graduate in Cambridge until 1948. Nevertheless, successes of this kind helped to mark this restriction out as an injustice.

  Girls who left home to spend time at college or university often recorded a sense of intoxication at their new-found freedom. There was the delight in arranging and decorating a room one could call one’s own.17 Letters home often brimmed with details about colour schemes, cushions, firescreens and potted plants. There was the pleasure of reading widely and having access to libraries and to other intelligent minds. There was time to exercise, to play team games or simply to explore the surrounding neighbourhood on foot or bicycle. Then there were cocoa parties, late at night, when girls could sit up talking about ideas, ideals and friendships. And there were the varied social and cultural activities associated with turn-of-the-century universities, literary and debating societies, and so forth. Before the First World War, many of these societies were single-sex, but outside the more traditional universities of Oxford and Cambridge there were more opportunities for female students to fraternise, daringly, with young men.18 Girls at college wrote enthusiastic letters home and reported on their new-found freedoms and privileges in articles which were published in school magazines. The word got around that even for the serious-minded, college could be fun.

  The career of Sophie Bryant (née Willock) illustrates some of the new possibilities for women that were brought about by educational reform.19 Bryant was born near Dublin in 1850. Her father, a mathematician, gave her lessons as a girl but she received no formal schooling. The family then moved to London, and at the age of sixteen Sophie won a scholarship to Bedford College. She married three years later, but her husband died soon afterwards: at twenty years old, she found herself a widow. In 1875 Sophie Bryant was appointed to teach mathematics by Frances Buss, headmistress of North London Collegiate School. She proved an inspirational and supportive teacher, encouraging a steady stream of pupils to go on to study mathematics at Girton. Bryant also worked for her own degree, and in 1881 was awarded a BSc from London University. In 1884 she distinguished herself as the first woman to be awarded the university’s DSc. Bryant succeeded Miss Buss as headmistress of North London Collegiate School in 1895. By then she was a well-known figure in educational circles, much respected and well-liked. One of the first women to take up cycling, she was also fond of rowing and climbing mountains. She was an ardent suffragist. In many ways Sophie Bryant was a perfect example of the New Woman.

  An affectionate portrayal of the New Woman appears in George Bernard Shaw’s play Mrs Warren’s Profession (1894). Mrs Warren’s daughter, Vivie, has studied at Girton: she is strong-minded, confident and self-possessed. She has a backslapping manner and a terrifyingly vigorous handshake. Shaw grounds his play in contemporary history. There are references to ‘Philippa Sumners’ (Philippa Fawcett), and her distinction in being placed ‘ahead of the Senior Wrangler’. Vivie is shown as intellectually able and worldly to boot: she calculates whether the effort which must go into examination success is worth it from a monetary point of view. There is no sentimentality in her make-up. Eschewing personal relationships, she seeks her salvation in work. Literary and journalistic stereotypes of the New Woman tended to mock and to satirise as much as they reflected reality. ‘Girton Girls’ were depicted as going bicycling in masculine tweeds or slouching in armchairs, sloshing whisky and brandishing latchkeys. Women writers bore some of the responsibility for this. ‘George Egerton’ was the pseudonym of Mary Chavelita Dunne, whose short stories, particularly in a volume entitled Keynotes, became one of the literary sensations of the 1890s.20 George Egerton’s style owed much to her enthusiasm for Scandinavian writers: Ibsen, Strindberg and Knut Hamsun. Her stories set out to explore what she saw as the terra incognita of the female self, unadulterated by male imaginings. Her female characters are ‘good chaps’, they use slangy expressions and are prone to broody silences, and to going fishing. The stories were an immediate hit in Britain and America. Their awkward modishness and lack of humour made them a gift to satirists. Punch responded with ‘She-Notes’, by ‘Borgia Smudgiton’ (Owen Seaman), and cartoons and parodies multiplied.21

  In 1895 the minor novelist Grant Allen hit a cultural nerve with The Woman Who Did.22 The novel featured Herminia, the daughter of a clergyman, whose Cambridge education led to advanced ideas and a belief in ‘free love’. When her daughter failed to understand her, the miserable Herminia swallowed prussic acid and put an end to it all. Grant Allen declared himself a feminist, but many feminists were scornful and keen to distance themselves from both his ideas and his book. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, for instance, loftily declared that free love had nothing whatsoever to do with feminism.23 Novels and plays and journalism about the New Woman fed on themselves, with a repertoire of well-rehearsed imagery and constant reference to each other – for example, The Woman Who Did, The Woman Who Didn’t, The Woman Who Wouldn’t Do.24 The historian exploring this literature can find herself in a hall of mirrors facing multiple distortions of reality. There were however some constants. The New Woman, even if not a Girton Girl, was likely to be highly educated and to have a mind – and a voice – of her own. For anti-feminists, this was part of the problem: in their view, womanliness required gentle submission. Vociferous critics of the New Woman genre saw its heroines as desexualised, victims of an overblown passion for learning. They condemned this literature as decadent, morbid and hysterical.25

  By the 1890s, the gains that women had made in education had unsettled many. There was growing unease about whether education made girls unladylike. College photographs from the 1890s tend to show girls wearing stiff collars and ties over long tailored skirts. The fashion was manly and austere but practical. Few went so far as to espouse bloomers, or the bifurcated garments recommended for bicycling by advocates of Rational Dress.26 Some college women were stylish and fashionable, taking great care over their appearance – sometimes deliberately to disarm criticism. In Newnham College, for instance, a young Mary Paley Marshall wore flowing Pre-Raphaelite gowns. In later life Mrs Marshall nostalgically recalled sitting dressmaking with classics scholar Jane Harrison. They were embroidering tennis dresses: Jane’s decorated with pomegranates, Mary’s with a design of Virginia creeper.27 But women academics could also be deplorably dowdy. Student Winnie Seebohm wrote home from Newnham in the 1880s to complain about the appearance of her history tutor, Alice Gardner:

  You should see Miss Gardner’s get-up – droopy straw hat, Shetland shawl thrown on without any grace, and big heel-less felt slippers in which she shuffles along. Then she evidently uses no mirror for her toilet, for this morning she came down with the ends of her hair sticking straight out like a cow’s tail – she drags it back tight, twists it, and sticks one hair pin through. The style of dress here is certainly not elegant.28

  Alice Gardner’s disdain for fashionable clothing became legendary. Lecturing in Bristol during the First World War involved her in regular train journeys. On one occasion, she sat on a railway bench, took off her hat and nodded off. Passers-by, struck by her dowdy appearance, took pity on her and chucked their spare change into the hat.29 Some women who went to college in this period reported a climate in which too much attention to clothing and appearance was seen to indicate a lack of high-mindedness or
serious purpose. But this could be misinterpreted. Both Emily Davies at Girton and Anne Jemima Clough, the first Principal of Newnham, laboured to persuade the girls in their charge to dress in a modest but feminine fashion, to stave off charges of pseudo-masculinity or eccentricity.30