Significant Sisters Read online

  Caroline Norton was not, of course, happily married at all. All her troubles and the start of her feminism began with her marriage to a violently anti-feminist man. Caroline was obliged to live the majority of her life in a totally unsuccessful struggle to find the sort of relationship with men she wanted. So too a century later was Margaret Sanger, disowning as she did a husband who was an avowed feminist. Bill Sanger’s feminism only unmanned him in her eyes and she found she could not do what she wanted without relegating both husband and children to second place. Nor could Emma Goldman, whose two marriages were both unconsummated and both made, in different ways, for practical reasons. Florence Nightingale denied herself the man she said she adored and Elizabeth Blackwell not only rejected suitors but tried to starve her body into having no sexual desires. Only Emily Davies seems to have had no conflict. She simply never met a man in whom she was interested, or who was interested in her. Her maternal instincts found an outlet in her great affection for and involvement with her Llewelyn-Davies nephews and niece. But none of these women thought the particular compromises she made satisfactory. The point was, and still is, that they were necessary not just because the way society was arranged made them so but because the women themselves felt them to be so.

  Another conflict they faced was between the desire to be feminine in appearance while decrying what this entailed. Two of these women were outstandingly beautiful and utterly feminine in the accepted sense. Caroline Norton was a striking figure who was not only breathtakingly lovely but dressed in style and graced any gathering she attended. She never for one moment considered not making the best of herself and saw no reason to hide her love of clothes and jewellery. But all the same she was irritated by the assumptions made because of her appearance. She knew people believed stories about her because of her looks and she knew they suspected the worst because it could be easily imagined. If she had been plain and dowdy and had dressed like her sister-in-law Augusta in a bloomer-type costume then she would have had more of a chance with the gossips of London. To be so obviously feminine was to be thought frivolous and empty headed and, in her case, more than possibly wicked. Josephine Butler, also extremely beautiful and immensely elegant, was never thought wicked but she too found her femininity caused problems. She encountered surprise and in some cases opposition just because she was so attractive. People, especially people in authority, would not take her seriously because of her looks. She did not look earnest in her gorgeous silk dresses therefore how could she be earnest? Her attractiveness was both a weapon (which she certainly used) and a hindrance.

  Yet neither Caroline Norton nor Josephine Butler thought for one moment of donning any kind of feminist version of sackcloth-and-ashes. They saw no point in denying the side of their natures which adored finery. Margaret Sanger, much later on, decided at one point to wear “mannish suits” to make her look more impressive but she soon gave up. The suits made her feel ugly and unnatural and inhibited her. The sneering at attention to and love of clothes and make-up which became fashionable in feminist circles during the nineteenth century was emphatically disapproved of by all these women. If becoming anti-man was the biggest wrong turn feminism took, becoming anti-adornment was the next. Emma Goldman, no beauty herself, raged against it. She almost never dressed up (most of the time she resembled a caricature of what a feminist was supposed to look like) but she hotly defended the right to do so. On rare occasions when she wore glamorous clothes she admitted she felt marvellous, refused to be ashamed of that feeling or to agree that all dressing-up was only to please men. It pleased her and that was enough. Elizabeth Blackwell too was pleased if she felt she looked pretty and only laughed when somebody reprimanded her, the first lady doctor in the world, for wearing flowers in her hair and dancing. Emily Davies thought no less of herself for buying smart new shoes with a present of money or for pinning on a new bonnet to attend a soirée; and Florence Nightingale had a passion for the beauty of real lace. Not a single one of these significant figures in feminist history saw any point at all in suggesting that women should stop beautifying themselves if doing so made them feel happier. They insisted this was a desire existing in its own right and having nothing to do with answering an image created by men.

  They did not deny, of course, that there was, all the same, an image that must be attacked. This was the image which said women should be passive and inactive except in matters concerning the home. All the women in this book savagely tore that image to pieces. Some of them had to start as soon as they were born because they had fathers who subscribed to it. Judge Cady, although he educated his daughter Elizabeth far beyond the contemporary level, made her childhood a misery by sighing she ought to have been a boy. Her feminism began when she rebelled against his notion of what being a girl meant. So too did Emma Goldman’s. She had a father who told her all a girl needed to do was learn to cook and give a man children. Florence Nightingale bowed for years to her father’s wish that she should be a conventional lady and only wrote secretly of her burning hatred of his philosophy. Gathering courage to break out of the mould he saw her cast in was far harder than serving in the Crimea. But some of these women were fortunate. They had fathers who actually encouraged them to break the image and helped them to do so. Elizabeth Blackwell’s father, Samuel, made no distinction in upbringing between his boys and his girls and neither did Josephine Butler’s in all respects that mattered most. Margaret Sanger’s father ordered her always to think for herself and speak out even if he resisted her ambition on many other levels and she was grateful to him. In most cases fathers were a much more formative influence, both good and bad, than mothers.

  Many of these women adored their mothers and respected and cherished them but none was inspired by them except, as it were, by default. Only Margaret Sanger raged against her mother’s lot in retrospect, and mourned her unnecessary death, and was in some measure pushed on by memories of her. Caroline Norton’s mother took her in at the height of the scandal surrounding her and heroically supported her and Emily Davies’s mother loyally wrote letters and acted as unpaid secretary at one stage of the Girton campaign, but neither of them fuelled any inner fires in the way that some of the fathers did. No mother seems to have said “Do not become what I have become – do not be like me”. Whereas at least some of the fathers urged their daughters to defy convention and make the most of themselves. On a tiny sample of eight this is hardly representative but it still indicates that not all men saw themselves as outside the struggle their daughters were experiencing in their fight to become feminists.

  * * *

  A history ought to be objective and not prejudiced by the historian intruding. But in this particular case it seems to me not only justifiable but also relevant that I should state where I stand. (Researching the material for this book has in fact radically altered where I do stand.)

  In many ways, I myself am the product of everything the eight women in this book fought for – much more so than the average woman. If I had been born in 1838 instead of 1938 my lot in life would have been truly appalling. As it was, I benefited directly and enormously from every feminist gain and I am immensely grateful that I did. There is not a day goes by without my experiencing the joy of acknowledging that I have the best of both worlds even if I am also bound to admit this happy state is not maintained without effort. My husband and my children are precious to me but then so is my work. I could not continue to be happy if either were taken away from me. As I have grown older, the work has become more and more important, so much so that I have to restrain myself from the dangerous thought that women without a career are to be pitied. It would only be myself without a career that would need to be pitied. If life is about attempting to achieve total fulfilment then I am simply one of those women for whom being a wife and mother does not amount to that fulfilment. Perhaps, in that case, I am the one to be pitied though I do not of course think so. But without feminism not only would I have merited more pity than anyone could give me but I would ha
ve wallowed in my self-pity which is far worse. I always wanted to be everything – wife, mother, housekeeper, writer. More significant, there was no role I disliked. The problem was not choosing but taking all of them on at the same time and surviving.

  I have survived, but I do not approve of how I managed it. I think the cost, to myself, has been great. True emancipation may have begun in my childhood soul but it did not flower as it should have done – not quite. I have been a feeble feminist. I have gradually come round to understanding that there is still a trap. It isn’t marriage itself; it isn’t motherhood alone; it is some subtle force which is not yet either fully understood or controlled. There is something in women which prevents them striking out as men do. Is it centuries of conditioning? Is it biological? Whatever it is, it intrigues me. It also intrigued the women in this book. The astonishing thing is that my life should touch theirs at so many points in spite of the vast changes which have taken place since their respective times and my own, and that I should be more struck by the similarities of our lot than impressed by the disparities in reading their thoughts. This sense of identification is what the study of feminist history needs to bring to women. Women, as Caroline Norton said so long ago, believe themselves to be isolated. It is up to feminist history to prove to them that they are not. There is a joint purpose and this brings not just comfort but hope.

  * * *

  This history is divided into categories, or, to use the Victorian term, spheres. I have chosen to examine eight different spheres in a woman’s life in which vital changes were made. With one exception all the spheres are quite clearly defined. In each sphere there was one woman who was an instigator, whose significance is undisputed, and so I have chosen to trace biographically the history of what happened to begin the process of change. But in addition these women are significant for another reason: with each one, feminism itself changed too. There are therefore three strands running together at the same time; one following the life-stories of the women; one following the process of change; and one following the development of the ideology behind feminism. Emma Goldman is in a special category. There is no single change instigated by Emma Goldman. She is there because she is a bridge between the old nineteenth-century feminism and the new late twentieth-century feminism. Although this is a history, it is an unfinished history and I felt the need to attempt to point towards what happened next. Emma Goldman does the pointing admirably. What she points to, and what I hope this book demonstrates, is that in spite of all the ups and downs, the victories and disillusionments, the spurts of strenuous activity and the doldrum years, there is among all this apparent confusion a strong sense of direction which has achieved, and continues to achieve, a better balance between the sexes in our society. That, fundamentally, is what feminism is about and a feminist is no shrieking harridan obsessed with destruction but a man or a woman who strives to secure a society in which neither sex finds gender alone a handicap to their progress.

  LAW

  Caroline Norton

  (BBC Hulton Picture Library)

  Caroline Norton

  1808–1877

  CAROLINE NORTON, THE beautiful, witty, talented granddaughter of Sheridan the playwright, had a very clear idea of her own significance. “I believe,” she wrote (in 1855 in her “Letter to the Queen”) “in my obscurer position, that I am permitted to be the example on which a particular law shall be reformed. Does that create a smile? History teaches that ‘in all cases of great injustice among men there comes a culminating point after which that injustice is not borne.’”1 That point had been reached twice in her own life. Once when she was separated from her husband, after his brutality towards her, and discovered he had the right to keep their three young sons from her; and once again when she discovered that she had not the right to keep her own earnings or inheritance even when she was supporting herself. On both occasions the discovery of what the laws of England were on the subject of the rights of married women produced in her such a passionate disgust and rage that she was able to begin a process of change that went on for a century and has still not ended. It was Caroline Norton who first decided enough was enough. It was time, she said, “that the gentlemen of England should cease to answer with a mocking sneer the attempts made by women to plead their own cause.”2 By the time she had finished, nobody dared any longer to sneer. The threat to the status quo was too real.

  And yet Caroline Norton has never been given her due in what passes for feminist history. She was despised by contemporary feminists who alleged, as though it were a crime, that she only thought of herself and had only started to take an interest in the wrong done to women by the law when she herself was wronged. This contempt, expressed most forcibly by Harriet Martineau, did not worry Caroline. She was quite relieved to be disowned by the feminists because she was terrified of being thought one of them. “I never pretended to the wild and ridiculous doctrine of equality”3 she protested. All she wanted, she said, was that women should be put in the position of other inferiors and offered the same protection. She “only” wanted justice, not equal rights. “The natural position of woman is inferiority to man. Amen! . . . I believe it sincerely as part of my religion: and I accept it as a matter proved to my reason.”4 The feminists of her day chose to believe this statement at its face value but even before she had written it Caroline herself had realized the deeper implications of so called “justice”. Her particular brand of feminism began as naïve and romantic but ended as something much more daring and closer to the ideas of those “strong minded women” she so abhorred. Like many women, both then and now, she began by genuinely believing men were superior to women and that the most women could claim, without flying in the face of both God and Nature, was protection. All she thought she wanted to change was men being legally empowered to be brutes. But once she started to examine married woman’s bondage she came to a truth she found too startling to acknowledge publicly: protection was not enough, men were not always and automatically superior to women and a measure of equality was absolutely vital if wrongs were to be righted.

  This was a shock to her. She found it hard to believe that the law said what it said. The facts she was obliged to learn about marriage for a woman were simple and cruel. Marriage was in fact a civil bond for men and an indissoluble sacrament for women. A married woman had no legal existence; she had no legal rights of property ownership; everything she owned, earned or inherited belonged to her husband; she could not determine where her children lived or how they were to be educated; she had no divorce opportunities; she had no rights either to keep or have access to her children in the event of being divorced by him or separated from him: the father’s right was absolute and paramount. It was this last injustice which inflamed Caroline most. “Is this abuse to exist forever?” she thundered in one of her pamphlets “because it was not at first perceived? Or are we waiting for some frightful catastrophe . . . It is a strange and crying shame that the only despotic right an Englishman possesses is to wrong the mother of his children!”5

  The “frightful catastrophe” she felt had befallen her, when her children were dragged screaming from her, brought her to feminism. What began as a fight for herself became a fight for all women. She once wrote in a letter “. . . if it should please God today to give me back my little children my interest . . . would still continue.”6 She saw no need to join any movement, believing as she did that women could not be made to band together because “. . . their experience [is] narrow. Each thinks the hardship of her own case more specially calculated to move compassion . . . They have a sort of unreasoning instinct that aggregate resistance will not serve them.”7 She was in fact to be proved wrong but there was nevertheless a basic truth underlying her opinion, especially with regard to the law. One woman had to be prepared to incur personal opprobrium before the law would move. Caroline Norton was that woman and to say she was not a feminist is to misunderstand, with her, the nature of feminism.

  * * *

  Caroli
ne Elizabeth Sarah Norton was born on March 22nd, 1808, the third child of Thomas Sheridan, son of the playwright, and Henrietta Callander of Craigforth in Scotland. When she was five years old her father, whose health had begun to fail, was offered a colonial secretaryship at the Cape of Good Hope which he was urged to take as the only chance of recovery. His wife and eldest daughter Helen went with him but Caroline and her younger sister Georgiana were left in the care of two aunts in Scotland. Unfortunately, Tom Sheridan died at the Cape in 1816 of TB. Henrietta returned as a widow with Helen and two more children Frank and Charles, born at the Cape. She was lucky enough to be provided with a grace and favour residence at Hampton Court in 1817. There, Caroline, Georgiana and their elder brother Richard Brinsley joined the rest of the family.

  Life at Hampton Court was happy. The Sheridan family were protected from the realities of their relative poverty by their excellent connections and the affection and respect felt for their mother. She taught them herself and was delighted to discover in Caroline evidence of the family literary talent. Caroline read and wrote early and by the age of eleven burned with literary ambition. She used to watch her uncle Charles Sheridan working in his study (over a collection of Romaic songs) and wrote that “I invariably left his study with an enthusiastic determination to write a long poem of my own.”8 She tried her literary wings with a pastiche of a famous contemporary series which she called The Dandies’ Rout and with a collection of little poems bound into a book with some of her sisters’ efforts.

  But Caroline was far from being the studious girl this implies. On the contrary, she and her two sisters were thought of as being rather uncontrollable and certainly far too high spirited. They were extremely boisterous in company and adored shocking their elders. “The Sheridans are much admired,” said Lady Cowper (Lord Melbourne’s sister), “but are strange girls, swear and say all sorts of things that make men laugh.”9 Caroline was the strangest and made men laugh the most. She even looked strange when she was young, with huge dark eyes and a great mass of wild black hair. Her habit of lowering her head and looking at people through her thick black eyelashes was thought of as furtive (later it was considered “flirtatious and indecent”). People were not comfortable with her nor she with them. In spite of her quick tongue she was actually quite shy – not in the accepted sense of the word but more in that she felt “different from others”. It was, she wrote to Mary Shelley years later, what she called “sauvagerie”, or “a feeling of not being able to amalgamate with other and new associates because of something in one’s mind different from and superior to the common nature.”10 She was only really herself with her family to whom she was devoted. The Sheridans had a distinct clan feeling which outsiders recognized and envied. The three sisters, all of them beautiful, were a very close and formidable trio but it was thought that their mother, who was herself quiet and dignified, let them run riot a bit too much.