Pre suffragettes the founding mothers

October 20, 2013 3:45 PM

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.
posted by adamvasco (7 comments total)

Terrific article, and some history I didn't know about. Thanks for the post!
posted by xingcat at 5:01 PM on October 20, 2013

Great read. That picture accompanying the article reminded me of a quote famous in bicycling advocacy circles, but maybe not elsewhere, from Susan B. Anthony:

“Let me tell you what I think of bicycling,” Miss Anthony said, leaning forward and laying a slender hand on my arm. “I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. It makes her feel as if she were independent. The moment she takes her seat she knows she can’t get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.”

From an interview by Nellie Bly in the New York World, 1896.

Relatedly, the interviewer Nellie Bly is a personal favorite historical figure of mine, inspirational and someone I've been meaning to read more on. The first paragraph of her Wikipedia article will give you a sense of why:

Nellie Bly (May 5, 1864 – January 27, 1922) was the pen name of American journalist Elizabeth Jane Cochrane. She was a ground-breaking reporter known for a record-breaking trip around the world in emulation of Jules Verne's character Phileas Fogg, and an exposé in which she faked insanity to study a mental institution from within. In addition to her writing, she was also an industrialist and charity worker.

posted by Celsius1414 at 5:11 PM on October 20, 2013 [4 favorites]

That's a decent overview, albeit strangely lacking in Josephine Butler (given the reference to the Contagious Diseases Act).
posted by thomas j wise at 5:17 PM on October 20, 2013

I'm so fascinated by privileged women who become revolutionaries in white gloves, who use the cloak of their privilege to allow them take steps that would doom a lower-class woman. (Like, Barbara Bodichon might have been cast out of polite society, but she wouldn't starve.) See also: Mary Harriman in NYC in the settlement houses, Jane Addams in Chicago, extensive quantities of suffragettes ... It's just really interesting to many famous women reformers and radicals are wealthy, well-educated women who use their privilege as a shield to allow them to engage in issues and with people that are otherwise perceived as taboo.

I was reading these old documents for an article on local women's history I was putting together for a local magazine, and when the health department finished with sanitary sewers and wanted to tackle syphilis (in the 1930s, I think?), they couldn't get anyone to listen to them because it couldn't be spoken about in polite society ... until a club of local wealthy women decided to take action on the issue and began holding lectures. In CHURCHES. And you just couldn't say Mrs. Richy Richardson, scion of important local families and president of the Ladies' Aid Society, was some kind of harlot for wanting to talk about social diseases! A decade or so later, a group with many of the same women began providing prenatal care and education to unmarried pregnant girls.

I don't know exactly how to phrase it right, but I see it over and over again, privileged women who take this chauvinist idea about women's virtue and turn that presumed innocence into a shield that protects them from slander when they engage in very taboo topics -- and I think it's very cool, how they turn that oppressive form of femininity into a weapon for reform.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:10 PM on October 20, 2013 [22 favorites]

...privileged women who take this chauvinist idea about women's virtue and turn that presumed innocence into a shield that protects them from slander when they engage in very taboo topics -- and I think it's very cool, how they turn that oppressive form of femininity into a weapon for reform.

Very cool. Too bad it doesn't happen now. The most recent thing I can think of is Betty Ford standing up and saying it's OK to seek help for drug and alcohol addiction.
posted by BlueHorse at 8:02 PM on October 20, 2013 [1 favorite]

Great article. Some of this was covered in my (Victorian) history O-level, but I always love to see more on Victorian women's history. (I just bought this book, which seems relevant to the topic at hand.)
posted by immlass at 8:14 PM on October 20, 2013

I'm so fascinated by privileged women who become revolutionaries in white gloves, who use the cloak of their privilege to allow them take steps that would doom a lower-class woman.

Meet my mother. She volunteered to be arrested because it was of very little consequence in her life. She's actually on probation now, has to perform community service (which she does plenty of, anyway), but she doesn't have to worry about her record or losing her job or anything. Go Mom!
posted by MrMoonPie at 6:44 AM on October 21, 2013 [3 favorites]