Women went to remarkable lengths to secure their rights
AS promised last week, I am devoting this column to the situation of women in Glasgow before the First World War and the extraordinary lengths women went to in order to be full members of society.
The position of women in Victorian times in Glasgow was much the same as it was elsewhere in Scotland.
Women were expected to marry, bear children, be capable housewives and obey their husbands at all times.
Women who did have a job, such as teachers, were expected to leave their posts upon marriage.
Even as the 20th century arrived, the serfdom of marriage was still the anticipated lot of the vast majority of women.
Divorce was so frowned upon that a wife could rarely escape even the most traumatic of marriages and the number of Scottish marriages that ended in divorce in the first years of the century was as low as one in 170.
In the year 1900, just 142 divorce cases were started in the whole of Scotland.
There were more women than men in all classes and at all ages and that caused an imbalance which left many women unmarried and effectively celibate, while as many as 12% of women over the age of 25 were recorded as widows in the 1911 census.
For women in Glasgow, life expectancy was about 47, still better than men but not by much.
Child mortality was horrendous, but medical advances meant that fewer infants succumbed.
By the start of the First World War, infant mortality – recorded as a child dying before its first birthday – had fallen to “only” 109 deaths per thousand live births from a peak of 130.
Your class and where you lived often determined your baby’s chances of survival.
As quoted by Professor Sir Thomas Devine in The Scottish Nation: A Modern History, Glasgow’s Medical Office had concluded in the 1890s that: “In Port Dundas, Brownfield, Gorbals and Cowcaddens, one infant death occurred in every five born, compared with one in eleven in Langside, Mount Florida and Kelvinside.”
Social historians often look at prostitution as a guide to the status of women in a society, not least because there are usually good statistics available for the number and type of convictions in an area at a given period.
For many and varied reasons, but mostly for want of money, some women in and around Glasgow turned to selling their bodies to survive, and in the early 1900s prostitution was rife across Scotland.
In his 1921 book The Social and
Industrial History of Scotland, from the Union to the Present Time, Glasgow-based historian James MacKinnon explained the situation at the time of the First World War: “Prostitution is one of the saddest features of town life. One cause of it is the bad housing of overcrowded areas, which makes a decent home environment for the girls of the family impossible, and predisposes them to become the prey of the seducer.
“Another is the inadequate earnings of working girls in many occupations. Alcoholism is an invariable concomitant as well as a cause.
“In Scotland establishments for this purpose are illegal, and the police are active in the crusade against them ... But prostitution in itself is not a crime.
“Known prostitutes can only be arrested if found importuning.
“The hope of anything like an effective remedy lies in the betterment of the social conditions that tend to feed this social malady, especially of home life and family upbringing in the poor quarters of our cities, though the evil is by no means confined to any one class.”
A sad picture of women downtrodden, but the movement for change was growing among women in Glasgow and while numerous women’s campaigning organisations, unions by another name, were set up in the latter years of the 19th century and early years of the 20th to agitate for better working wages and conditions for women, one political issue came to dominate the Victorian and Edwardian eras – equal rights for women, most particularly universal suffrage.
We now see the right to vote as something every adult enjoys, yet back in the early 1900s it was a massive bone of contention across all sectors of society.
The Scottish Cooperative and Women’s Guild founded in 1892 was ostensibly about educating women on domestic matters, but its role in educating women to organ
Women were expected to marry, bear children, be capable cleaners and always obey their husbands
ise meetings and, crucially, how to speak in public made the guilds a fertile breeding ground for suffrage campaigners.
The Glasgow and West of Scotland Association for Women’s Suffrage was founded in 1902 – the year before the Pankhursts set up the Women’s Social and Political Union in Manchester – and its members very much believed in a non-violent approach to securing votes for women.
That made them suffragists, while those favouring more direct action became the suffragettes.
The Glasgow Association was very much a middle-class organisation and featured such women as Dr Marion Gilchrist, inset, one of the first women to qualify as a doctor from Glasgow University, and Dr Alice McLaren, the first woman to practise medicine in Glasgow.
The association held many meetings in Glasgow and elsewhere in central Scotland and was very influential – its leaders were considered women (and men) of standing in society.
Yet it was the suffragettes who gained all the publicity and, it must be said in view of the misogyny in the press at the time, considerable notoriety.
Three women suffragettes made the front pages with a rooftop protest at the old St Andrew’s Hall in 1909, while a campaign of disruption and destruction – post boxes were a favoured target – went on for years.
Two women, Ethel Moorhead and Dorothea Chalmers Smith, were jailed for attempting to set fire to a house in Park Gardens in Glasgow in July 1913 – Moorhead would later be the first suffragette to be forcibly fed in prison.
Moorhead and her colleague Fanny Parker would also be arrested for trying to commit arson at Burns Cottage in Alloway in July 1914.
The following month, however, would see an event which would transform the situation of women as well as changing Glasgow forever – the outbreak of the First World War.
I shall return to the subject of the suffragettes in future columns and detail how women won their voting rights and the implications it had for Glasgow.