Bloody Brilliant Women: The Pioneers, Revolutionaries and Geniuses Your History Teacher Forgot to Mention

Less heavenly patriarchs intervened over the next century. A woman’s work was reduced to child-rearing and caring. Acquiring education, power, money? Not so much. There were exceptions such as the entrepreneur Katherine Fenkyll who, like Alice Chester, took over her husband’s business (he had been a draper) with huge success after his death in 1499. But apprentices to trades were usually male: only seventy-three women are known to have been enrolled as apprentices in sixteenth-century London, compared with thousands of men.6

Women weren’t thought to be worth properly educating, so they couldn’t acquire skills the blokes took for granted. In the early modern period, female education was generally a religious affair, designed to get round the fact that women were ‘born in sin’ as daughters of Eve, the ‘weaker vessel’; gossipy and obstinate, prone to idleness, volatility, hysteria – or any other vice which could be hurled at them.

Exceptions to this rule tended to be royal, or as good as. Sir Thomas More treated Margaret Roper and his other daughters to the same education as he had. Margaret could read Aesop’s Fables by the age of three and went on to study languages, history, philosophy, rhetoric and – her particular passion – astronomy. She married, as she was expected to do, but when More discovered that she and her husband William Roper were both studying astronomy, he wrote a bold, inspiring letter to her that sounds – sounds – as if it is legitimising her intellectualism: ‘I am ever wont to persuade you to yield in everything to your husband; now, on the contrary, I give you full leave to strive to surpass him in the knowledge of the celestial system.’

Yet there remained a sense that a woman’s mind was ‘naturally bad’; that Margaret was remarkable not in herself but because her education represented a triumph over women’s inherent defects – defects which, More conceded, ‘may be redressed by industry’.7

So it was that the future Queen Elizabeth I was tutored industriously by Roger Ascham between 1548 and 1550. Ascham was impressed by Elizabeth’s intellect: ‘Yea, I believe, that beside her perfect readiness in Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish, she readeth here now at Windsor more Greek every day than some prebendary of this church doth read Latin in a whole week.’ Aged eleven, she presented her stepmother with a translation from the French of Navarre’s Mirror of the Sinful Soul protected by a needlepoint canvas cover she had made herself. Truly, she possessed all the virtues!

But the adult Elizabeth justified her success by declaring that she was different from other women, possessing the (male) heart and stomach of a king. Pictures show her armoured, manly. But she was the exception which proved the rule. Edmund Spenser’s female knight Britomart in Book III of his epic Gloriana poem The Faerie Queene is supposed to represent Elizabeth. But as the poet makes clear: ‘virtuous women wisely understand/That they were born to base humility/Unless the heavens them lift to lawful sovereignty.’

Elizabeth Joscelin’s The Mothers Legacie (1624), a conduct manual written in the form of a letter to an unborn child, is revealing about prevailing attitudes towards female education. While it was vital that women be taught ‘good housewifery’, writes Joscelin, ‘other learning a woman needs not.’ She goes on: ‘Though I admire it in those whom God hath blest with discretion, yet I desired not much in my owne, having seene that sometimes women have greater portions of learning than wisdome.’

One female Restoration writer who bucked the trend for feminine modesty was Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. She craved reputation, recognition, visibility – all the markers of success men believed were their due, for, as she wrote in the preface to Poems, and Fancies, ‘they hold books as their crown, and the sword as their sceptre, by which they rule and govern.’ Not only was Cavendish prolific, but she refused to be restricted to a single genre, turning her hand to biography, poetry, science fiction, philosophical and scientific treatises – anything she felt like. Thanks to her talent for self-promotion – she designed her own extravagant, daringly masculine costumes and travelled with a full complement of carriages and servants – she became one of fashionable society’s must-see attractions.

When Cavendish visited London in 1667, Samuel Pepys became obsessed with obtaining a sighting of her. After several failed attempts, he finally caught up with her when she addressed the Royal Society on 23 May – the first woman ever to do so. Unfortunately, Cavendish was overcome with nerves, possibly because of the presence in the room of so many scientists she had been rude about in print, and she gave a poor account of herself. Pepys was scathing: ‘The Duchess hath been a good comely woman; but her dress so antic and her deportment so unordinary, that I do not like her at all, nor did I hear her say anything that was worth hearing.’

This was pretty unfair, especially as Cavendish had received ‘no formal education in even the most basic writing skills’.8 In fact, as an aristocratic woman, she had arguably received a worse education than her immediate social inferiors, who’d been trained up as governesses, ladies’ companions and teachers. Yet her instinct, as with so many latter-day women, was to blame her failings on herself, rather than an unjust society. ‘It cannot be expected I should write so wisely or wittily as men, being of the effeminate sex, whose brains Nature hath mixed with the coldest and softest elements.’

The sense that education for women might be genuinely important – because the lack of it isolates them from spheres of legal and political influence – doesn’t gain momentum until the end of the eighteenth century when radical ripples from revolutionary France cause turbulence in Britain.

‘Talents put a man above the World, & in a condition to be feared and worshipped, a Woman that possesses them must be always courting the World, and asking pardon, as it were, for uncommon excellence,’ wrote the aristocratic social-reformer Elizabeth Montagu to a friend in 1763. To help level the playing field, Montagu and like-minded ladies such as Mary Monckton turned their houses into salons where women and men could meet and mix as intellectual equals. The salon was a French import and the point was conversation, not debauchery – no drink was allowed, or card playing. Montagu’s function as hostess was to encourage and bestow patronage on writers she liked.

Salonieres became known as ‘bluestockings’ – not, at this stage, a pejorative term for a studious woman – after a male guest, Benjamin Stillingfleet, turned up to one wearing blue worsted stockings because he hadn’t been able to afford black silk ones. Exactly how the term came, by the late eighteenth century, to apply only to women isn’t clear – possibly because it was two women, Monckton and Elizabeth Vesey, who decided to ‘own’ it by calling their salon the Blue Stockings Society. James Boswell, biographer of Samuel Johnson (he of the Dictionary) went along to one of Monckton’s salons and noted that ‘her vivacity enchanted the Sage [i.e. Johnson], and they used to talk together with all imaginable ease.’ The novelist Fanny Burney was sceptical, describing Monckton in 1782 as ‘between thirty and forty, very short, very fat … [and] palpably desirous of gaining notice and admiration’, and Montagu as having ‘the air and manner of a woman accustomed to being distinguished, and of great parts’. So much for the sisterhood.

If Johnson was happy to drink tea and chat with educated women, he still thought of them as essentially decorative; still believed, like most of his kind, that ‘a man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table than when his wife speaks Greek. My old friend Mrs Carter [a celebrated female linguist, who tutored her brother so that he, unlike her, could have the privilege of going to Cambridge] could make a pudding as well as translate Epictetus from the Greek and work a handkerchief as well as compose a poem.’

Some feminist historians go so far as to argue that the Enlightenment – the period from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries when intellectual discourse was dominated by thinking about human reason, science and our relationship to the natural world – didn’t benefit women at all: ‘Just as there was no Renaissance or Scientific Revolution for women, in the sense that the goals and ideas of those movements were perceived as applicable only to men, so there was no Enlightenment for women.’9

Certainly, its defining philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his people-power bible The Social Contract (1762), declared that educated women were ‘unpleasing and unnecessary’. His influential novel Emile (1762) promoted his belief in biologically determined difference between the sexes, even recasting wit, the salonieres’ stock-in-trade, as a harmful vice: ‘A female wit is a scourge to her husband, her children, her friends, her servants, to everybody.’ Even if timidity, chastity and modesty were not innate female attributes, he argued in Letter to D’Alembert (1758) that ‘it is in society’s interest that women acquire these qualities; they must be cultivated in women, and any woman who disdains them offends good morals.’

Passages such as this infuriated the English feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft – that ‘hyena in petticoats’, as the politician Horace Walpole called her. In just six weeks she bashed out the scrappy but momentous manifesto Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), its key goal the demolition of Rousseau’s arguments. ‘The first object of laudable ambition,’ she wrote, ‘is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex.’ Once women were given the same education as men, they could go on to be doctors and lawyers or run complex businesses, just as men did. Why, she thought, liberating women in this way would even make them nicer to be around! As she put it: ‘Would men but generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience, they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers – in a word, better citizens.’

The process of intellectual stunting began in childhood, Wollstonecraft argued. Gender stereotyping had the effect of returning grown, mature women ‘back to childhood when they ought to leave the go-cart for ever’:

Every thing that they see or hear serves to fix impressions, call forth emotions, and associate ideas, that give a sexual character to the mind. False notions of beauty and delicacy stop the growth of their limbs and produce a sickly soreness, rather than delicacy of organs; and thus weakened by being employed in unfolding instead of examining the first associations, forced on them by every surrounding object, how can they attain the vigour necessary to enable them to throw off their factitious character?

By the 1790s, when Wollstonecraft was writing this, ‘bluestocking’ had become an insult and the fledgling women’s movement fatally associated with the ‘Jacobin’ values of revolutionary France. On 10 September 1797, at the age of just thirty-seven, Wollstonecraft’s chaotic, itinerant life ended after she gave birth to her daughter Mary, future author of Frankenstein, and developed septicaemia.

The light of progress flickered only dimly. Some dedicated girls’ schools had been founded in the early eighteenth century, endowed by merchants and livery companies, but as a rule they focused on ‘accomplishments’ such as needlework rather than the kind of learning laid on for boys. Between 1785 and 1786 (when the money ran out), Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra studied at the Abbey School in Reading, a boarding school run by a Mrs La Tournelle who had a cork leg and a passion for theatre.

It was probably similar to Mrs Goddard’s school as described in Austen’s 1815 novel Emma – ‘a real, honest, old-fashioned Boarding-school, where a reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold at a reasonable price, and where girls might be sent to be out of the way and scramble themselves into a little education without any danger of coming back prodigies.’

The loss of ground in the mid to late eighteenth century was a real blow for women. Even if she had acquired a smattering of education, the most an intelligent, independent-minded woman could hope for was to be a governess or a teacher or a ladies’ companion. As their husbands ventured out into the world and were rewarded for their thrusting virility, they would stay at home being chaste and docile, reading the sort of novels Jane Austen would later parody in her mock-gothic Northanger Abbey. This so-called ‘cult of sensibility’ seems to have been a very British phenomenon. As the critic and historian Janet Todd remarks: ‘Foreigners marvelled at the idleness thrust on English women, whose business was little more than coquetry in youth and motherhood or fashion in later years.’10

For feminist academics Bonnie Anderson and Judith Zinsser, the early nineteenth century ‘marked the nadir of European women’s options and possibilities’.11 Paradoxically, though, by embracing the most traditional female virtues, women acquired a moral authority as the ‘consciences of society’ that they later put to radical use.

The tradition of female radicalism and dissent ushered in by Mary Wollstonecraft would bear fruit in the new century – eventually. First, though, the relationship between men and women would have to become more equal as part of a broader process of social reform. Women would have to stop being virtuous and passive simply because it was expected of them. They would have to be able to divorce their husbands and seek legal redress in cases of abuse and rape.

This started to happen as early as 1837 when a woman called Caroline Norton fought for the right to have access to (though not custody of – that would be a crazy idea!) her three young sons after walking out on her drunken, abusive husband, the MP and failed barrister George Chapple Norton. Her fastidiously detailed list of the obstacles married women encountered in existing law makes for grim reading:

An English wife may not leave her husband’s house. Not only can he sue her for restitution of ‘conjugal rights’, but he has a right to enter the house of any friend or relation with whom she may take refuge … and carry her away by force …

If her husband take proceedings for a divorce, she is not, in the first instance, allowed to defend herself … She is not represented by attorney, nor permitted to be considered a party to the suit between him and her supposed lover, for ‘damages’.

If an English wife be guilty of infidelity, her husband can divorce her so as to marry again; but she cannot divorce the husband … however profligate he may be.

Sadly, Norton failed in her bid to secure formal access to her children. She was only allowed supervised visits after her youngest son, William, died after falling from a horse in 1842. But her campaigning blasted a path for transformative legislation like the Custody of Infants Act 1839, the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 and the Married Women’s Property Act 1870.

Before long, a new generation of bluestockings was exploiting the zest for reform. They understood only too well that far-reaching change was required and that it was as important to improve the lot of working-class women as it was to lift restrictions on middle-class women looking for work.

Education was vital because of the insight it gave women into the way men controlled the world. At the end of the day, irrespective of whatever other rights they secured, it was education that would give women the keys to the kingdom and enable them to insert themselves into history in the way they deserved.

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On the morning of 7 April 1853 Dr John Snow, renowned at the time as Britain’s most skilful anaesthetist, took a cab from his home in Sackville Street in central London to Buckingham Palace. He made contact with Sir James Clark, Queen Victoria’s Physician in Ordinary, and Dr Charles Locock, Queen Victoria’s first Physician Accoucheur – from the French, meaning ‘one who is present at the bedside’ – and the three men waited in an anteroom next to the Queen’s bedroom to be summoned. In the early stages of labour, Victoria preferred to be attended only by her beloved Prince Albert and ‘monthly nurse’ (nanny-cum-midwife) Mrs Lilly.

At around midday, the Queen asked Snow to come to her bedside. He measured out 15 minims (0.9ml) of chloroform onto a handkerchief which he folded into a cone before placing it over the royal mouth and nose. It had taken six years to persuade the Palace that chloroform was safe, but finally, on the occasion of her eighth pregnancy, the Queen had decided to give it a go. Leopold’s proved to be her easiest birth so far. As Snow noted: ‘Her Majesty expressed great relief from the application, the pains being very trifling during the uterine contractions, whilst between the periods of contractions there was complete ease.’

Victoria had always hated pregnancy and childbirth, which she nicknamed the Schattenseite or ‘shadow side’ of marriage. She called her own pregnancies ‘wretched’ and when her eldest daughter Vicky fell pregnant for the first time and wrote to her mother in anticipation of sage advice, Victoria replied: ‘What you say of the pride of giving life to an immortal soul is very fine, dear, but I own I cannot enter into that; I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments; when our poor nature becomes so very animal and unecstatic.’

‘In the Christian tradition,’ the historian of anaesthesia Stephanie Snow points out, ‘suffering during labour provided a permanent reminder of Eve’s original sin in the Garden of Eden and opponents of anaesthesia were swift to draw on the Biblical admonition that “in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children”’.12 By agreeing to use chloroform during Leopold’s birth, Victoria had done something modern, dangerous and radical, horrifying one notable contemporary obstetrician, who admonished her for ‘a too-bold step’.13 She’d taken a huge medical risk, in the process scotching the centuries-old notion that pain during labour was natural and virtuous.

If Anaesthesia a la Reine was at first an option only for wealthy, fashionable ladies, it didn’t stay that way for long, becoming part of a portfolio of new medical techniques – for example, sterilisation with phenol; wearing gloves to perform internal examinations – which made childbirth not just less onerous for women but not as frequently fatal.

The Victoria who wrote so candidly to Vicky sounds nothing like the Victoria we think we know. Ditto the Victoria who, in 1860, is considering suitors for Princess Alice when she suddenly confesses: ‘All marriage is such a lottery – the happiness is always an exchange – though it may be a very happy one – still the poor woman is bodily and morally the husband’s slave. That always sticks in my throat.’

Does this mean Queen Victoria was a feminist? It’s possible, as Simon Schama has pointed out, that Victoria was familiar with early feminist writing, particularly Barbara Leigh Smith’s exposé of the harsh realities of marriage, Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women (1854). In 1862, in an act which could be interpreted as sisterly, she appointed the women’s-rights activist Emily Faithfull as her Printer and Publisher in Ordinary – ‘not a position she would have given to someone who had incurred her disapproval’.14

But Victoria had her limits. The idea that women might want to work; might want rights; might want, through suffrage, actual involvement in the running of the country – this enraged her. ‘It is’, she wrote, ‘a subject which makes the Queen so furious she cannot contain herself.’ The whole idea was a ‘mad, wicked folly … with all its attendant horrors on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety.’

Two steps forward, three steps back.

The unnoticed contradictions here suggest a Queen and a society stumbling, blindfolded, through new territory. By the end of her reign, as we shall see, the way ahead would be rather clearer.

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One of the joys of writing this book was the numerous lively conversations with friends, family, colleagues and contacts I had along the way. So many people made inspired suggestions of women who deserved to be included. I thank them all at the back, but here at the front I want to pay tribute to two women, both dead now, who were incredibly important and inspirational to me when I was growing up. This book is their legacy.

In 1968, shortly after graduating from Oxford – the first person in her family to go to university – my mum joined the staff of the west London girls’ school Godolphin and Latymer as a chemistry teacher. Helping to run the department was a woman called Frances Eastwood. Frances was much older than my mum and only two years away from retiring, but she was helpful and welcoming and before long the pair had become firm friends. She lived with another Godolphin teacher, Dorothy Newman (no relation), who had been Head of Classics before retiring in 1961.

While I was growing up my parents’ relationship with their parents was always slightly tense and strained. As a result, Frances and Dodo (as we called Dorothy) became de facto grandparents to my sister Sarah and me; we regularly stayed at their house in Hythe where they would feed us hunks of bread they baked, topped with a thick layer of home-made cherry jam. But their gentle kindness and generosity never blinded us to the fact that they were fiercely clever, independent-minded women who had known hardship as well as opportunity.

Frances had read chemistry at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (and lived just long enough to see me win a place at the same college). Dorothy, meanwhile, had read Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge in the 1920s and remembered with fury how until 1948 – 1948! – women were not allowed to be full members of the university. Like many clever women of the period they never married or had children, blaming a lack of suitable men left alive after the First World War. It feels intrusive to speculate whether this was the whole story. Intrusive, but necessary, as the social historian Virginia Nicholson makes clear in Singled Out, her brilliant book about Frances and Dodo’s generation of what used to be called ‘spinsters’. They were known collectively as the Surplus Women after the 1921 Census revealed that there were 1.7 million more women than men in the population.

Remembering women like Frances and Dodo she encountered in her childhood, Nicholson recalls the questions that went unanswered because they were too rude to ask:

Why didn’t they ever marry? Did they mind? Did they harbour secret sadness? What did they do about the lack of love in their lives, and the lack of sex? Did they care that they had never had children? Did their spectacles and tweed jackets protect them from terrible vulnerabilities?15

As it happens, I don’t think Frances and Dodo were sad or loveless or vulnerable. The point for me is that they existed in an atmosphere of quirky female self-sufficiency and, while obviously bluestockings, were practical as well as cerebral. When Godolphin and Latymer was evacuated from Hammersmith to Newbury during the war – it shared a building with Newbury Grammar School – Dorothy as Senior Mistress helped to ensure its smooth operation and, with Frances’ help, ran one of the hostels for evacuated pupils.

I often wonder what Frances and Dodo would make of the way the modern world treats women. I think they would be horrified by the volume of abuse women are expected to soak up on Twitter – actually, they would be horrified by Twitter, full stop – but thrilled by such developments as the celebrity of historian Dame Mary Beard, Jane Austen’s appearance on a bank note and Laura Bates’ Everyday Sexism campaign.