Good Wives Read online

  I still wear it, forty years later. It’s a broad ring. If I take it off, the skin underneath is startlingly white and soft, and my finger looks somehow sad and pathetic. Once, about twenty-five years ago, I lost it. It turned up some months later, down the back of a sofa. But the interesting thing is not just how upset and sentimental I’d been while it was missing, but that I had actually bought a substitute to wear, another silver ring as near to the lost one as I could find. So perhaps the ring does mean something. I must want people to know I am married, that I am a wife. But what I also want them to know is that the word ‘wife’ does not mean what it meant while I was growing up. A wife today is not, or need not be, the same creature as a wife in 1949, or even 1960, and she is a million miles away from the wife of 1845 or 1860. In fact, the understanding of what a wife is has changed so much in the last hundred and fifty years that it calls into question whether the referring to a woman as ‘a good wife’ is still, as it once was, a compliment today. Does it not imply rather that she is nothing more than that? Is it still a title to be borne with pride? Or is it an admission of defeat?

  I don’t know the answers, but I’d like to. The question widens into another one, of course: is marriage still valid if you have no religious faith? The statistics for the number of marriages that fail are startling – there were 145,000 divorces in England and Wales in 19991 – but so are those for the number of marriages, which still took place – 131,757 women still became wives. Why, in the twenty-first century, in a social climate where it is acceptable to live in a partnership, and even to have children within one without any stigma, why, I wanted to discover, does any woman still want to be a wife? Is the trade-off worth it? I thought I’d like to look at what a ‘good wife’ once was, what she became, and what (if anything) she now is, and set it within the framework of my own marriage and my own times. To do this, I chose to examine the marriages of three women who, in my opinion (though not always in the opinion of their contemporaries), were ‘good’ wives in very different ways. Their lives cover the best part of one and a half centuries during which the common understanding of ‘a good wife’ changed beyond recognition. What I myself have made of being a wife is part of that change.

  The three women to whom I was drawn did not lead ordinary lives and yet each of them reflected in what she made of the role of ‘wife’ the standards of her own time. They faced the same problems in their domestic and emotional lives as all women faced, and had to struggle with the same challenges to their independence. Once the façade of the marriages is ripped away and the personal details of each woman’s day-to-day existence are revealed, the astonishing thing is how similar their difficulties were to my own during forty years of being a wife. Echoes vibrate down the years in spite of the enormous changes that have taken place both in life in general for women and in the laws and customs affecting marriage. It is the sense of identification which shocks, not that of alienation.

  And yet it was the feeling of being utterly remote from the life of Mary Livingstone, with whose story I begin, which first made me curious to understand what a ‘good’ wife was. I was visiting my daughter, who lives in Botswana, and had taken with me Tim Jeal’s biography of David Livingstone. In it, I came across a passage in which Livingstone writes to a friend with news of his impending marriage, describing his wife-to-be in such insulting terms that I was immediately defensive on her behalf. Even more insulting was the way in which the biographer accepted that the sole reason Livingstone married Mary was because he needed someone to look after him and give him the necessary status in the eyes of the Africans he was trying to convert. It didn’t matter if she was plain and fat so long as she could run his house properly and make him comfortable. This Mary did, in the most difficult of circumstances; the sufferings she endured during the exhausting journeys she was obliged to make with her husband were such that I could hardly bear to read about them. Few women had to endure what she did in her marriage but on the other hand her spirit of submission to her husband was shared by millions. Marriage in the mid-nineteenth century, when Mary became a wife, was about servitude of one sort or another. Nothing had changed since Francis Bacon’s pertinent observation:

  Wives are young men’s mistresses,

  Companions for middle age,

  And old men’s nurses.

  But nevertheless, women still wanted above all else to marry, such was the ignominy, and the insecurity, of remaining a spinster. It made me shudder to think of being a wife like Mary Livingstone and yet, once I’d become intimately acquainted with her marriage, I was embarrassed to see that in some respects I had had something of her attitude in my own interpretation of ‘good wife’. I might have thought myself entirely liberated from any kind of submission but however outrageous the thought, perhaps I, too, sometimes had accepted a secondary role without realising it.

  It was a relief to move on to Fanny Stevenson, the wife of Robert Louis Stevenson. Fanny had guts. She wasn’t going to be like Mary, bowing her head meekly and doing whatever her husband wanted. She was an American, and within her lifetime great changes were taking place in women’s lives, with the early feminists fighting to win the vote together with all kinds of other previously withheld privileges and rights. Fanny thought herself the equal of her husband (in all except genius). And yet, following her life, with all its romance and excitement, moving from America to France and back, and finally to the South Seas, it was chastening to discover that Fanny was not after all, in essence, so different from Mary as a married woman. She was humiliated to have to accept that she was constrained simply through being a wife. Louis, her husband, held all the ace cards – his welfare, his ambitions, his concerns were always the more important. The lot of the wife still had not changed enough between the marriage of Mary (in 1845) and Fanny’s marriage to Louis (in 1880), even though the early feminists were doing all they could in those intervening years to reinvent the role (that is, when they were not trying to abolish marriage as an institution). Nevertheless, women went on becoming wives, however unsatisfactory the condition of marriage, and the status of spinster went on having few attractions. By the end of the nineteenth century, 82 per cent of women in England were married or widowed.

  Then, at last, came a real revolution in thinking. Jennie Lee, daughter of a Scottish miner, born in 1904, was one of those women who decided as a girl that she would never become a wife. She fascinated the House of Commons in 1929 when she arrived there, and she fascinated me. Beautiful, sexy and daring, Jennie gave her whole heart to socialism and was determined to devote her life to a political career. Marriage would never be allowed to get in the way of her ambition. She would have affairs, but never at the expense of her career. But it was for the sake of her career, and that of her lover Aneurin Bevan, that eventually she capitulated and married him in 1934. He was destined for a prominent role in government (he was to become Minister of Housing and Health in the 1945 Labour government and go on to be instrumental in founding the National Health Service) and it would have been disastrous for his political future to live with a woman to whom he was not married, as well as utterly disastrous for Jennie’s own ambitions to be identified as that woman.

  So Jennie, most reluctantly, became a wife, though determined to redefine the role to suit herself. In doing so, she was way ahead of her times and yet, in turn, her attitude was a sign of those times. Women, in the inter-war period, had begun to want careers and marriage, and the two could not run in tandem without some change in the understanding of what being a wife meant. Two Acts were of great importance in opening gates for women, the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act 1918, and the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919. Slowly, women were entering the professions and relishing a different kind of self-fulfilment from that bestowed within marriage. They were on their way to what has become known as ‘having it all’, and Jennie Lee was one of those who tried to make that work. She was not always sure she had passed the test. She became as puzzled as I have often been about
her role as wife, fearing that in spite of her efforts the onus was on her, as the woman, to give way during times of stress in marriage in order to support the man. It was all so much more complicated than she had ever thought, trying to make a ‘good’ wife mean something other than what it had meant for centuries before.

  The question still is: what is a wife? Who is ‘good’?

  PART ONE

  Mary Livingstone

  1821–62

  I

  IN MARCH 1839, a battered-looking troopship struggled into Table Bay, Cape Town, and finally anchored at the quayside. It had already been many weeks at sea, on its way to England from China, and conditions on board were bad, with the smell from the animals it carried (to provide provisions) unbearably foul. But eagerly waiting to board was the Moffat family – Robert Moffat, a missionary with the London Mission Society, his heavily pregnant wife, his six children and his African servant. Robert desperately wanted to get to London where his translation of the New Testament into Setswana, over which he had laboured for years, could be printed. He knew perfectly well that there would be no sort of comfort on this ship but no other was scheduled to arrive and he could not wait any longer. His wife, though she was within three weeks of giving birth to her ninth child (two had died), did not try to hold him back, seeing it as her duty to put his work first. He had, she wrote home, ‘poured his whole soul’ into his translation and nothing must stand in the way of seeing it printed.

  So the entire Moffat family embarked, with Mrs Moffat helped on board by her eldest daughter, Mary, eighteen the following month. Mary was afraid of the sea. Born and brought up at Kuruman, the mission station her parents had established 600 miles (965 km) north of Cape Town, to the south of the Kalahari desert, the sea had existed for her only in the stories she’d heard of the voyages out from England (stories full of storms and shipwrecks and drownings) until, when she was fourteen, she had her own experience of it in sailing from Port Elizabeth to Cape Town. It had been a terrifying voyage and she had never forgotten it. She dreaded this much longer voyage ahead and there was nothing to reassure her about either the ship or the weather. A gale was forecast and there was a great hurry to get everyone on board and beat the storm. Mary was kept busy attending to her six-year-old brother James, who was feverish and suspected by his mother of sickening with measles. Mrs Moffat was anxious about him and it may well have been this anxiety, together with the strain of embarking, which contributed to the onset of her labour. Hardly had the heavy, squat ship managed to lumber its way against the huge waves out into the bay than she gave birth to a girl, quickly named Elizabeth and baptised by her father.

  Meanwhile, James’s condition worsened. His sister Mary could not pacify him and hearing his cries his exhausted mother called for him to be brought to her. She held the new-born baby in the crook of one arm and cuddled James with the other, barely able to raise her head from the pillow. The ship plunged violently as it held its course, in rapidly worsening weather, with the rain and wind driving against it strongly. But James, secure in his mother’s arms, was now peaceful. His fever mounting, he was deluded and spoke of angels all around him. Two days later, he died. His tiny body was wrapped in sailcloth and lowered over the side after the most brief of services. A birth, a death, a storm – it was traumatic for the whole family. For the young Mary, it served as the most devastating of warnings: this was what a good wife such as her mother had to endure. She had to be strong and unselfish and never try to thwart a husband’s wishes. The blueprint could not have been more clearly drawn for her. If she had not realised that marriage was primarily for the procreation of children, and that it involved submission to a husband’s needs of one sort or another, then she learned it on board that terrible ship. Her mother, returning to her home country after twenty years of being a missionary’s wife, had suffered more than her family could possibly know. But she had suffered gladly.

  The wife of a missionary had a harder time than most wives of that era but nevertheless serving and supporting a husband was the common experience of all wives in the mid-nineteenth century. Mrs Moffat was proud to be the wife of a man so dedicated to the work of converting the heathen and was triumphant that she had overcome her parents’ objections to a match that would take her so far away from them. Arriving in Cape Town in December 1819 and marrying Robert immediately, she was sure she’d made the best decision of her life, writing home that her cup of happiness was almost full – she loved her husband passionately and could think of nothing more thrilling than being his wife. Small, slight and delicate though she was, nothing dismayed her. She and Robert set off from Cape Town in an ox-wagon hundreds of miles into the interior where he was to establish a mission station, and there was not a murmur from her about the discomforts of the journey or the endurance called for in the boiling heat. This pretty young woman, aged twenty-five, showed herself at once to be far tougher than she looked and far more able and willing to adapt to her new circumstances than her parents had thought possible. She never complained, never wept, but instead was determined to find everything exciting.

  Once settled at Kuruman, where Robert was to build his mission, the young Mrs Moffat quickly realised how different her life was to be from the lives of those married women of her class she had known in England. There was no lying on sofas directing servants in how to run the household. On the contrary, she hardly ever sat down (and there were no sofas). Her role as wife entailed constant physical activity – in order to look after Robert she had to do everything herself, and this included a good deal of manual labour. Kuruman was a desolate place when the Moffats arrived, the river a mere channel and the country surrounding its low banks, barren and stony. The dry, sandy plain they settled in was covered for much of the year in long, straw-like grass with scattered bushes and a few dark green camel-thorn trees. Beyond it was the true desert, except towards the north-east where, some 200 miles (320 km) away, there were woods. In this inhospitable landscape, in temperatures of searing heat, young Mary Moffat from Manchester had to set up house in a hut. She had to learn how to cook, how to wash her clothes, how to cope with insects, and all this without any of the help she would have had as a middle-class wife in England. Her leisurely, privileged life at home was soon a dream. She became little better than a skivvy and, since she would not drop the standards she had been used to, she made things even harder for herself (like many wives before and since). Refusing to adopt African ways she insisted on imposing her own, and so, instead of using the river to wash clothes, she had to have a wash-tub made.

  But more important than the domestic work was her support of her husband in his missionary endeavours. She discovered that a missionary’s wife had to be a very special being. In her opinion, and she was full of strongly expressed opinions, she belonged to a peculiar category of wives. Looking after her husband’s material welfare was only one part of being a missionary’s wife. Back in England, the wives of her acquaintance knew little about their husbands’ work, and certainly most of them were not involved in it, but here in Africa, Robert’s work was, to a very real extent, also her work. Before she had arrived to marry him, Robert had written to his father that ‘a missionary in this country without a wife is like a boat without an oar’.1 She had to row with him or the boat would not move forwards. When he went off, as he frequently did, in search of more converts, it was his wife who had to hold things together at the mission station. No one else would. The Africans would simply drift away and revert (with some relief) to their old non-Christian habits unless Mary kept up his Christian standards. She found it hard, writing to him once when he was away that ‘It requires the exercise of some fortitude to be calm and serene … you know I dread your departure exceedingly … [I] suffer a good deal myself from low spirits in my great solitude.’2 Hers was not the solitude of an English wife, sighing with boredom in an empty house, but of a missionary’s wife, living in a hut among people whose language she did not at first (and for some considerable time) speak, af
raid of wild animals, not to mention marauding tribesmen, and having to do every single thing herself. But she coped, always.

  This is what her daughter Mary witnessed throughout her childhood. A wife coped. It was the first rule of being a wife. Mary Moffat’s children were never afraid when their father was absent. When he was at home, they saw, as many children still do, that their mother’s load was increased rather than lightened. As his wife, she thought it her job to safeguard his health and that meant arranging for him to have peace and quiet to get on with his work. By the time she had had four children – Mary (1821), Ann (1823), Robert (1827) and Helen (1829) – this was a struggle, but somehow she saw to it that her husband was given the seclusion he needed. It was she who, in effect, ran the Kuruman mission station.

  Yet her daughter Mary saw that her mother was clearly a happy wife, who loved her husband. Coupled with this love was a shared religious faith hardly less passionate – it justified everything they had to go through together. All this the young Mary, Ann and Helen absorbed as they grew up, it was part of their training to be wives in their turn. The standard set was the highest, but their mother had achieved it.

  Mrs Moffat ran a disciplined household. Visitors to Kuruman were impressed by how immaculate everything was, how ordered and comfortable. The Moffat daughters were brought up to be capable of performing every household task themselves without depending, as their counterparts in England depended, on others. They knew not only how to sew (though that was part of every girl’s upbringing in England too) but how to cook, how to garden, and how to nurse. From the earliest age they had to be useful – it was physically exhausting merely to exist at Kuruman and no one could be allowed to shirk hard work. A missionary wife was a maid-of-all-work and so were her daughters. They were not ornaments, pretty things there to delight the eyes of men. Their mother herself had known what it was to be admired in society, but they were completely unaware of this kind of behaviour. At Kuruman there were none of the usual Victorian functions at which Mary, Ann and Helen could witness the social side of a middle-class wife’s role – how to entertain a husband’s colleagues, how to pour tea in the drawing-room, how to leave calling-cards, how to preside over a formal dinner-party. They did not see their mother entering public rooms on her husband’s arm or making polite conversation. People did visit Kuruman but they were either missionaries themselves or big-game hunters and, though the hospitality was generous, it involved no ceremony. The girls learned to be polite but the mysteries of social intercourse in the Victorian style remained unknown.