What wonderful replies! Thanks for posting this lightlypoached
It inspired me to to look up more on Victorian feminists, and I found this article from 2013 in the New StatesmanAmerican. It's by Simon Heffer who is basically advertising his own book, and it includes a splendid roll call of indomitable women who challenged the norms of their time in education, law, medicine ...
Simon Heffer’s book “High Minds: the Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain” is published by Random House.
Politics:17 October 2013
Meet the Victorian women who fought back
Once, Queen Victoria was the only woman in the realm with no legal impediment because of her sex. She reigned over a society that was full of intelligent women going mad with frustration - and then they began to do something about it.
Extract on Marriage
By the 1870s, having won rights to divorce and to own property, and having established places of education, women at last had the confidence to take on the men who would keep them down. None did it better than Elizabeth Garrett’s sister Millicent Fawcett, who shredded the arguments against feminism of one of the most reactionary political thinkers, James Fitzjames Stephen. She questioned his belief in the submission of women, as the weaker sex, to their husbands as a precept of the common law, asking:
“Is the wife to obey the husband when, in obeying him, she does something she believes to be wrong? If the answer is ‘yes’, the possession of a husband may become the screen of all kinds of iniquity, from murder and robbery downwards. If the answer is ‘no’, everything is conceded that the advocates of equality in marriage demand, for many wives may and do think it wrong to encourage a spirit of despotism in their husbands by invariably allowing the husband’s authority to be supreme.”
Fawcett ridiculed Stephen’s premise that, in return for submission, women received protection. “That is to say, in return for submission married women get the protection of losing all control over their own property; they also have the inestimable advantage of possessing no legal right to the guardianship of their own children even after the death of their husbands.” Twisting the knife, she pointed out that “in return for the submissiveness of women, little girls of twelve years old are, for the purposes of seduction, legally regarded as women – a most noteworthy instance, this, of the kind of protection the present state of the law affords”.
She quoted an article in the Times from April 1872: “Every day the reports of our police courts and of our criminal tribunals still repeat the tale of savage and cowardly outrages upon women: and every day we have reason to marvel, not without a mixture of indignation, at the leniency with which some of our judges treat offences of this kind.” The article had concluded, with deep disapproval, that an Englishman, “within certain limits, may beat his wife as much as he pleases”. Fawcett quoted the same newspaper, four months later, observing that “recent trials have revealed a prevalent indifference to the maltreatment of women, which is a heinous disgrace to English nature”
There's lots more wonderful quotes from the eloquent and passionate women described in this article. While it is heartening to be reminded of the splendid fights made on women's behalf in the past, it's also disheartening to be reminded right now that these rights are always under attack and need to be defended in each generation.
www.newstatesman.com/2013/10/founding-mothers