The Women's - Revolt
IN 1851 there were 24,770 governesses in England. Their salaries were from £10 to £25 a year. In addition to teaching, dressing and bathing children, they were often expected to do needlework for their mistresses. This work was almost the only provision open to women who had to make their own living. They grew into old maids, the subjects of a good deal of the humour of the time. Even so, they felt that they had preserved the appearance of respectability ; and it was better to be an English governess than to work sixteen hours a day as a dressmaker or seamstress and live in still more
wretched poverty.
The movement for the freedom of women had already had its heroes and martyrs. Mrs. Strachey traces the beginning of the - Woman's- Revolt to the combined influence of the French RevolUtion and the Industrial Revolution. In 1792
Mary Wollsfonecraft wrote and published her Vindication of the Rights of Women. There were other pioneers : Harriet Martineau, Mary Carpenter, and Caroline Norton, for example. But until the middle of the century they had been single pioneers ; and it was not yet possible to speak of a Woman's Movement.
Some of the most interesting material which Mrs. Strachey has gathered is on the early workers to enlarge the scope of Women's activities. Perhaps the most important is the information she gives us of the intimate feelings and ideals of Florence Nightingale. Although she believed in Woman's Suffrage and signed petitions, thinking that " it is the first principle or axiom that every householder or taxpayer should Iiiive a voice," she declared nevertheless that she did not expect much from the movement. In one letter she wrote, "- I am brutally indifferent to the rights and wrongs of my own sex." On the other hand, the liberation of women was no secondary principle to her. She combined great impatience with her fellow-women with a radical and lifelong passion to see them play a full part in the community.
The most interesting document is her cri du coeur, Cassandra, never previously printed in full. On the advice of John Stuart Mill, Jowett and other friends, she kept it private. Certainly it contains some very poignant sayings, and an insight and frankness which we are not accustomed to attribute to the Victorian Age Women go about maudling to each other and teaching to their daughters that ' women have no passions.' In the conventional society, which men have made for women, and women have accepted, they Must have none; they "tstisract the farce of hypocrisy, the lie that they are without passion—and therefore what else can they 53i to their daughters, withoUt giVing the lie to themselves ? . . . kut the laws of God for moral wellbeing are not thus to be obeyed. We fist mentally, scourge. ourselves morally, use the intellectual bitir-shirt in order to subdue that perpetual day-dreaming, which is se dangerous. We resolve 'This day month I will be free from it ' ; twice a day with prayer and written record of the times when we have indulged in it,- we endeavour to combat it. Never, with the slightest success. By mortifying vanity we do ourselves no good. it is the-want of interest in-our life which produces it; by filling up thaVsiantef interest-in 011r life we can alorie-remedy it, -..- Passion,. idSigkiet, -moral netikit3r—these three have never been- satisfied in a
woman. In this cold and oppressive conventional atmosphere, they cannot be satisfied. To say more on this subject would be to enter into the whole history of society, of the present state of civilization."
It was in the second half of the century that the Woman's Movement became organized and explicit ; from that time the severer inequalities began slowly to disappear. At first, with John Stuart Mill in Parliament urging their claims with all his capacity and enthusiasm, it seemed that the final victory could not be far off. It was in 1867 that Mill brought about the first Parliamentary debate on Woman's Suffrage ;, and this action of his he held to be " by far the most important, public service " which he rendered in the House of Commons.. For many years after there was a general feeling that the whole subject was a great comedy and where expounders of, woman's claims were not met with abuse they were met with, ridicule. But Mill's speech was so sincere that he startled, even his antagonists into abandoning their frivolity. The task, however, was by no means over. There were a hundred times when success seemed within grasp ; and a hundred times it was lost, either from such unrelenting oppo-. sition as Gladstone's, from the inertia of the electorate, or from mistaken tactics. To many women the cause of Woman's. Suffrage called for the undiscouraged work of a lifetime. Dame Millicent Fawcett, for example, was active in the movement at the time of Mill's first speech. She was at the head of the non-militant suffrage workers when the first. Woman's Suffrage Bill was carried over fifty years later. Meanwhile the struggle was being carried on with much individual heroism in other fields. The battle for the educa- tion of women on equal terms with men was as difficult and as long drawn out. Whenever a privilege was won, a setback was sure to occur if it were made use of. Several times women had the tactlessness to come out at the head of examination lists and rouse the jealousy and alarm of men students. The most. startling example was when Philippa Fawcett, the daughter of two veterans of the Women's Movement, was placed above the Senior Wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge. In the same year Miss Alford, of Girton, was bracketed with the Senior Classic.
Mrs. Strachey deals gently with the militant suffragettes ; and no one can forget the endurance and strength of deter- mination that their leaders showed. It is doubtful, however, if they advanced the cause for which they fought with so much energy. Probably the anger of their crusade, and the sufferings they challenged, had more effect in hastening Women's Suffrage in other countries than in England. Else- where they became shining examples of martyrdom. In England itself they created a situation in which it seemed impossible to declare an honourable peace.
In addition to a wide survey of the Woman's Movement in all its fields, Mrs. Strachey gives portraits of the women who were to the front in fighting social abuses during the whole period. She confesses her own partisanship, and certainly she is often too contemptuous of her opponents. Her boOk, none the less, is full of drama and by good chance issues in a happy ending. Almost all the legal disabilities have dis- appeared, and in the relation of the sexes we are left mainly with spiritual problems.
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