Feminism by Margaret Walters Page A

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    including Bessie Parkes and Anna Jameson – formed a Married Women’s Property Committee (England’s first organized feminist group), which circulated petitions for law reform throughout the 58
    country, and had soon had gathered some 2,400 signatures. The Committee’s intervention led to a series of amendments which alleviated the financial situation of married women, even if the changes still did not radically redefine their rights.
    Leigh Smith had also produced an article, first published in the newly founded English Women’s Journal in 1858, in which she argued strongly against the view that middle-class women, because they were expected to marry, should be prepared for nothing else.
    Large numbers would probably never marry, and might have to support themselves; but even those who did marry, she argued, should be equipped to educate their children, and, if necessary, to take on work outside the home. Moreover, she insisted on the value The lat of work for its own sake.
    e 19th centur
    To bring a family of 12 children into the world is not itself a noble vocation . . . To be a noble woman is better than being a mother to a noble man.
    y: campaignin
    She even invoked Queen Victoria, who was, after all, both a mother and a working monarch. At the same time, Leigh Smith insisted on g w greater recognition of the value of the very real work that women om
    already did, looking after the home and raising their families. Leigh en Smith actually set up a primary school in London, which survived for nearly ten years. Boys and girls were taught together; and her own nieces and the children of her friends learned alongside the children of workers who lived in the neighbourhood.
    The English Women’s Journal , which was at first largely funded by Leigh Smith, seems to have reached – and often inspired to action –
    a reasonably wide audience. Even George Eliot, who had initially been very doubtful, wrote at the end of 1859 reassuring her friend that it ‘ must be doing good substantially – stimulating woman to useful work and rousing people generally to some consideration of women’s needs’. But Leigh Smith and Bessie Parkes were soon confronted, at first hand, with the problems of women’s 59
    employment. Readers of their Journal , desperate for work, began coming to their office, which had moved from Langham Place to Cavendish Square. They decided to keep an employment register –
    only to discover how few opportunities were in fact available for women. Many men bitterly resented the prospect of women entering their trades; women, they argued, would lower wages for everyone, and their presence might well force men into unemployment.
    Employment possibilities concerned other women as well. Earlier that year, Harriet Martineau – who was familiar with the work of the Langham Place group, and probably influenced by it, though she was never actually a member – had published, in the Edinburgh Review , an article called ‘Female Industry’ which took a cool, hard-headed look at the few openings that were actually available to women. She saw clearly that the situation of women was changing; more and more women had no choice but to go out to work. The concept of ‘earning one’s bread’ was, she argued, a fairly recent one minism
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    for men as well as women.
    We live in a new commercial and industrial economy, but our ideas, our language and our arrangements have not altered in any corresponding degree. We go on talking as if it were still true that every woman is, or ought to be, supported by father, brother or husband.
    Poor women might labour in the fields or in factories; apart from that, Martineau could see only two – equally low-paid –
    possibilities: needlework or teaching. Like Barbara Leigh Smith, she insisted that women’s education must be extended and improved, and that a ‘fair field’ should be opened to their ‘power and energies’.
    She praised Elizabeth Blackwell, who had trained as