Feminism by Margaret Walters

women who had written with great sympathy and insight about women’s lives and struggles, seem sometimes to have shied away 56
    from an emerging feminism. Mary Ann Evans – George Eliot –
    despite her remarkable understanding in Middlemarch (1871–2) of the way a woman’s intelligence and talents may be denied an adequate outlet, and despite the fact that she became a close friend and supporter of Barbara Leigh Smith, remarked in 1853 that
    ‘woman does not yet deserve a better lot than man gives her’. And she praised the way an ‘exquisite type of gentleness, tenderness, possible maternity’ may suffuse ‘a woman’s being with affectionateness’. In 1856, the novelist Mrs Gaskell, author of Ruth (1853) and North and South (1855), dismissed the very notion of women training as doctors:
    I would not trust a mouse to a woman if a man’s judgement was to Th
    e lat
    be had. Women have no judgement. They’ve tact and sensitiveness, e 19th centur
    genius and hundreds of fine and loving qualities; but are at best angelic geese as to matters requiring serious and long medical education.
    y: ca
    And in 1857 Elizabeth Barrett Browning argued in Aurora Leigh mpaignin
    that:
    g w
    A woman . . . must prove what she can do
    om
    Before she does it, prate of women’s rights,
    en
    Of woman’s mission, woman’s function till
    The men (who are prating too on their side) cry A woman’s function plainly is . . . to talk.
    Barbara Leigh Smith (after she married, she broke with convention and simply added her husband’s name, Bodichon, to her own) was born into a family that was wealthy but untypical: her parents were not married. Her father had always encouraged her to read, and made her a generous allowance, which meant she could afford to travel widely. She spent time in Europe with Bessie Rayner Parkes, who went on to write Remarks on the Education of Girls , and who also insisted that single women would prove crucial to any improvement in the lot of all women. (A review at the time mocked 57
    both Parkes and Leigh Smith, who had just published a pamphlet on Women and Work , sneering that ‘women are fatally deficient in the power of close consecutive thought’.)
    In 1857, recuperating in Algeria after an illness, Leigh Smith met the man would become her husband, the physician Eugene Bodichon. They spent a year in America after their wedding, where, in Boston, New York, and New Orleans, she met women who were interested in education, as well as others who had trained as doctors. At Seneca Falls she had long conversations with Lucretia Mott, who was an activist both in the anti-slavery movement and in the emerging campaign for women’s rights. Leigh Smith would go on to work on the areas which seemed most urgent: the legal problems of married women, the urgent necessity for better education and training for women, as well as the need to extend the limited employment possibilities available to them.
    In 1854, Barbara Leigh Smith had produced a pamphlet titled A minism
    Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws of Fe
    England Concerning Women . She began by considering the contradictions limiting single women: they were allowed to vote at parish, but not, even if they were tax-paying property owners, at parliamentary elections. She moved on to the even greater disabilities facing married women: ‘a man and his wife are one person in law; the wife loses all her rights as a single woman, and her existence is entirely absorbed to that of her husband’. She discussed the question of marriage settlements, and the custody of children if parents separated; and even uncovered the curious and troubling legal fact that, once a couple were formally engaged, a woman could not dispose of her property without her fiancé’s knowledge and agreement. Her manifesto sold for a few pence; it was very widely read, and went to three editions. In December of the following year, she and a group of like-minded women