Feminism by Margaret Walters Page B

a doctor in America, and who was visiting England at the time. (Barbara Leigh 60
    Smith and Bessie Parkes helped to organize the talks Blackwell gave, not just in London but in provincial centres as well.) But unlike many of these early feminists, and because she believed strongly that women should make no more than moderate and rational claims, she had little sympathy with the emerging demand for the vote.
    Francis Power Cobbe, as noted in the previous chapter an advocate in the campaign for the Married Women’s Property Act and of education for women, did go on to campaign for women’s suffrage, believing that women could not necessarily rely on men to protect them or their interests. Her arguments to this end sometimes betray a hint of class arrogance: she was angry that ‘we women of the Th
    e lat
    upper ranks – constitutionally qualified by the possession of e 19th centur
    property (and, I may be permitted to add, naturally qualified by education and intelligence at least up to the level of the ‘‘illiterate’’
    order of voters) are still denied the suffrage’. She was always profoundly conservative, though her disapproval of the radical wing y: ca of the Conservative Party led her to resign from the emerging mpaignin
    suffrage movement in 1867.
    g w
    Emily Davies was another staunch conservative, in everything om
    except her recognition that education was central to any en
    improvement in women’s lot. ‘It is no wonder,’ the young Davies wrote, ‘that people who have not learned to do anything cannot find anything to do’. When she had to go to nurse her brother, who had fallen ill in Algiers, she had the great good fortune to meet Barbara Leigh Smith, who encouraged her, and reassured her that there were many other women who would sympathize with her longings and dissatisfactions. Back in England, Davies (along with her friend Elizabeth Garrett) visited Langham Place, which had become the headquarters of both the English Women’s Journal and a Society for Promoting the Employment of Women. She felt inspired and, when she returned to her home in the North, formed a Northumberland and Durham branch of the Society, as well as writing a series of letters to her local paper arguing the importance of increased 61
    employment opportunities for women. She was scathing about the meagre intellectual training available to girls like herself: ‘Do they go to school? No. Do they have governesses? No. They have lessons and get on as well as they can.’ And she described, with great personal feeling,
    the weight of discouragement produced by being told, that as women, nothing much is ever to be expected of them . . . that whatever they do they must not interest themselves, except in a second-hand and shallow way, in the pursuits of men, for in such pursuits they must always expect to fail.
    Women know how this kind of attitude ‘stifles and chills; how hard it is to work courageously through it’.
    But Davies was also encouraged by the growing recognition among the Langham Place group that education was all-important. In London, the recently established Queen’s College and Bedford minism
    College were offering something like an adequate schooling to Fe
    (some) middle-class girls, and in 1862 Davies managed to form a committee to further the prospects of women taking the University Local Examinations, which had been established in 1858. It took a great deal of slow, careful organization and negotiation before Cambridge agreed, as an experiment in 1865, that women could attempt the same exams as men. Though Davies was always a realist, she never retreated from her belief that girls must be offered exactly the same education as men, at both school and university level. Her book on The Higher Education of Women , which appeared in 1866, is careful not to state the claims too strongly.
    Davies admitted that women will probably ‘never do as well as men
    . . . But that does not seem to me a reason for not doing