I looked first for the house in London where, in 1855, Barbara Leigh Smith hosted the first meeting of the campaign for married women’s property rights. A petition to change the law decreeing that husbands owned everything marked the start of her lobbying career. But Blandford Square was remodelled when Marylebone station was built, and the building is long gone.
Then I tried Langham Place near Oxford Circus. Here a plaque marks the site of the Queen’s Hall, destroyed in the blitz, while another commemorates a dinner attended by Oscar Wilde. But there is nothing to mark the place where Barbara and her friends established the English Woman’s Journal and headquarters of their Langham Place group, which campaigned for women’s education and jobs, along with a club that charged members one guinea a year.
It isn’t that Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (the last is her married name) has been entirely neglected. There are biographies, and a portrait owned by Girton College, Cambridge, is at present on show in Tate Britain’s Now You See Us exhibition. For admirers, it’s heartening to see her recognised in this way. Barbara was a painter as well as a reformer, and a champion of female artists.
But with women’s rights to be educated, work, own property and vote secured, and even the Garrick Club – last bastion of a once all-male club-land – now admitting women, does it really matter that she, her friends and numerous other women who fought for women’s rights, aren’t better known? Having spent the past three years writing a book about them, I think the answer is yes.
It isn’t that all feminism’s forebears have been forgotten. But those who are remembered tend to be celebrated for their most singular and charismatic deeds. Suffragettes pouring acid on golf courses and women’s libbers flour-bombing the 1970 Miss World contest have both recently featured in films. I love these stories. But they are not instruction manuals. And from the perspective of now, with a huge problem of violence against women, an ongoing crisis around care – widely recognised to disproportionately affect women, as carers and as the majority of dementia sufferers – and deep concern about maternity services among pressing current issues, it is important to think carefully about how change happens. Harriet Wistrich’s new book Sister in Law contains no hunger strikes or bra fires. But it shows how feminist lawyers worked with activist groups including Southall Black Sisters to carry on work begun by the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s.
With 263 MPs, the parliamentary representation of women is at an all-time high of 40%. For the generations past who fought for women’s rights, this is a triumphant vindication. But female MPs are still a minority and have many claims on their time and efforts. Parliamentarians are representatives, not substitutes, and it would be a mistake to conclude that these numbers make civil society groups redundant.
From equal pay to abortion, it has always taken grassroots as well as legislative action to advance women’s interests. Women’s rights were won by a movement comprising multiple campaigns over decades, not a handful of famous faces. The Langham Place women (who called themselves a “Reform firm”) were part of this. Two of its members – Barbara Bodichon and Emily Davies – went on to found Girton, the first women’s college at Cambridge. Another society (again including Barbara) led the overlooked first stage of the campaign for women’s suffrage. Female trade unionists were crucial to pushing forward women’s rights at work, and recognising where labour and women’s rights came into conflict (some male trade unionists were as sexist as their bosses, and feared that female workers would undercut wages). In the 1920s the Six-Point Group was a precursor to lobbying organisations such as the Fawcett Society. Feminist criminal justice activism, dating back decades, has been crucial in highlighting failures and biases in the handling of domestic and sexual violence.
One reason why I think feminism’s history has been disregarded is a paradoxical legacy of the liberal, reforming tradition that Barbara Bodichon was part of. If things are perpetually improving, then no progressive is ever progressive enough. In recent years the left has been successful, at least in part, in demanding a re-evaluation of history – above all of the legacies of imperialism. This shift in perspective was long overdue, not least because responding to the climate crisis requires the rich world to recognise its historic debts.
But while it is imperative to confront the horrors of colonialism, we should avoid blanket condemnations of Victorian values – which were more complex than is often assumed – and their corollary, a conviction of the moral superiority of the present. Zadie Smith, whose most recent novel dealt with slavery, commented on this self-congratulatory tendency last year, when she said: “We live on top of a monstrosity now … When we say ‘How could they ever?’, how can we ever?’ … Are you going to get on a plane this summer? We do it all the time.”
This might seem a long way from where I started, looking for Barbara Bodichon’s traces in London. But for feminists, I think a renewed engagement with the past is essential. I am not arguing for a policy of veneration, either of 19th-century campaigners or those still living. Generational conflict is part of politics and always has been. But the failures and divisions of the past, as well as the victories, can be learned from. Barbara herself was a tactful diplomat who understood that if women were to move into areas of life that men wanted to keep them out of (universities, art, politics), they needed to work together.
Absorption in history can also be a form of escape. I’ve experienced this myself while working on my book. But for reasons of politics as well as pleasure, dead feminists could do with some respect.
Susanna Rustin is a Guardian journalist and the author of Sexed: A History of British Feminism
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