BRILLIANT WOMEN
Television news presenter CATHY NEWMAN hails the brave heroines written out of British history books
I’VE LOVED history ever since I was a child reading about King Alfred burning his cakes. But a combination of the late 1980s school curriculum and a rather eccentric history teacher meant there were considerable gaps in my knowledge. To fill those gaps, I’ve spent a small fortune over the years on history books. And it was while reading one about 20th century Britain – written by a household name – that I realised women were rather thin on the ground.
Obviously, there was the Queen. And Margaret Thatcher. And the Pankhursts. But aside from that, it was one big man-fest.
Writing Bloody Brilliant Women was my small attempt to right that historical wrong.
It’s a history of 20th-century Britain but with women in the foreground rather than in the margins or the footnotes.
I start the book before 1900 to give a general sense of what life was like for women in Britain at the turn of that century. And what I hadn’t realised is that in many ways women were better off in the year 800 than they were in 1800. In the 800s, women owned land, ran estates and could walk out of an unhappy marriage, take their children with them and retain half the marital home.
BUT by the 19th century, a woman’s legal identity was absorbed into her husband’s, a medieval principle known as ‘coverture’. I blame the Norman Conquest! Not until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 were women permitted to be the legal owners of any money they earned and to inherit property.And not until 1884 and the Matrimonial Causes Act was a man denied the right to lock up his wife if she refused to have sex with him.Although it wasn’t ratified until 1891 after a case called the Jackson Abduction.
While her husband Edmund Jackson was away in New Zealand trying to find work as a farmer, Emily Hall decided she didn’t want to be married to him any more.They hadn’t consummated the marriage, she didn’t love him and was worried he’d married her for her money.
She wrote to him telling him this and assumed that would be the end of it. But Jackson was outraged. He returned to England, obtained a decree for restitution of his conjugal rights, tracked Emily down to the Lancashire village of Clitheroe and kidnapped her as she left church, bundling her into a carriage with such force that her bonnet was knocked from her head. She was his wife and he would do whatever he wished. After a legal appeal by Emily’s family, however, this view was challenged and the judge declared Edward’s counsel’s defence of wife-beating was “outrageous to common feelings of humanity”. In 1918 some – but not all – women were allowed to vote, hailed as a massive landmark for equal rights. But the more research I did for my book, the more it seemed to me that when it comes to politics, today’s women are still fighting to be heard.
Many women in the public eye have spoken about the trolling they endure on a daily basis. But the awful truth is that women in general – and female MPs in particular
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PUTDOWNS: Nancy Astor MP was adept at crushing hecklers – have been putting up with this stuff for years. When Transport Secretary Barbara Castle dared to make wearing seatbelts compulsory and introduce speed limits and breathalyser tests in the late 1960s she became a national hate figure – especially among men who thought being able to drive while drunk was their birthright. A darts team wrote calling her a “bitchy old cow”.
Nancy Astor, the first woman ever to take her seat in Parliament in 1919, was relentlessly heckled but developed a reputation for brilliant put-downs. “How many toes has a pig?” she was once asked. “Take your shoes off and count them,” she replied.
PIONEERS in other fields endured worse. Sophia Jex Blake was one of the first women to qualify as a doctor. The bullying Sophia and her colleagues endured in Edinburgh passed into feminist legend. She described how “a certain proportion of the students with whom we worked became markedly offensive and insolent, and took every opportunity of practising the petty annoyances that occur to thoroughly ill-bred lads – such as shutting doors in our faces”. The better the women did in their studies, the more the violence against them escalated. Mud was thrown at them and fireworks attached to the doors of their lodgings.
On November 18, 1870 the women arrived to sit an anatomy exam at Surgeon’s Hall, only to find a drunken mob blocking their entry and a live sheep wandering around the room. The none-too-subtle message was that a woman was about as welcome there as a farmyard animal.
The drip-drip effect of this hostility slows down change and erodes the effectiveness of hard-won reforms. Look at the Equal Pay Act. Fifty years after the 1970 law, female employees – from Asda shop workers to senior BBC presenters – are still battling for wages their male colleagues take for granted.
It’s just one more chapter in the endless story of unrecognised female achievement.
Take the case of an aeronautical engineer called Beatrice Shilling. Born in March 1909 in a small village in Hampshire, she was obsessed with motorbikes and raced them at over 100mph. She bought her first one at the age of 14. When other girls her age were pressing flowers, Beatrice was at the bottom of the garden taking its engine to pieces.
She trained as an engineer – incredibly difficult for women then – and just after the outbreak of the Second World War got a job