Bloody difficult woman
A new book celebrates the defiant spirit of Britain’s groundbreaking heroines
JENNI MuRRAy is indignant. Thomas Carlyle infuriates her with his famous line from 1840 that ‘the history of the world is but the biography of great men’.
Steve Biddulph, an amiable modern authority on raising boys, provokes her furious cry of ‘Rubbish!’ with his — not wholly unreasonable — line designed to cheer up lads: that men down the centuries built planes, railways, cars, ships, hospitals and medicines and ‘made it all happen’.
Her mission in this entertaining, breezy (and only intermittently irritating) book is to record the lives of 21 significant women who, often against the odds, not only served the advance of female equality but made significant discoveries or changes. What you might call — to borrow Ken Clarke’s description of Theresa May — a score of ‘bloody difficult women’.
It’s a personal choice, and confining it to Britain does leave out world-beaters, from Marie Curie to Malala yousafzai.
It means we get a Mary Quant rather than a Coco Chanel, and the thundering mid-range composer Dame Ethel Smyth rather than the exquisite Hildegard of Bingen. Not to mention Nicola Sturgeon’s one-note independence campaign rather than Aung San Suu Kyi’s long, heroic struggle for her Burmese people. Maybe there will be a global sequel. Still, Murray’s concise prose makes easy reading, and in the end it’s one I’ll keep on the shelf — possibly scrawling some notes down the margin such as: ‘Why no Queen Victoria?’ And: ‘Does Jane Austen, with her fondness for rich landowners, ladylike conduct and prudent marriages, really outrank George Eliot and the Brontes just because she “typifies everything I love about being British”?
‘Where’s Joan Littlewood, theatrical pioneer, when you’ve weirdly found room for Quant and Sturgeon?
‘And did you leave out Julian of Norwich, author of the first book in English written by a woman, just because she was a nun and a theologian?’
She explicitly omits Marie Stopes, who vastly changed attitudes about sex and contraception, because of her views on eugenics (though they were widely shared at the time, and Stopes spoke strongly against Hitler in the end).
BuT Murray does include the famously ‘unsisterly’ Margaret Thatcher with a kind of reluctant, wincing admiration, having encountered her in interviews. On one treasurable occasion in Murray’s reporting youth, she was rescued by Thatcher from a crush of paparazzi when she had lost her cameraman. ‘A hand popped out from behind the coppers, grabbed mine and pulled me in to the circle.
‘“Come along dear, stay by me, we don’t want a talented young journalist to be squashed to death, do we?” ’
The pleasure in it, though, is mostly from the lesser-known figures: a marvellous account of Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first computer algorithm, of Caroline Herschel’s astronomy, Aphra Behn’s startlingly raunchy plays and of Constance Markievicz, the Irish rebel of the Easter Rising, who fought the British indeed but with firm military courage and, though she never took her seat, was the first woman to be elected to the Commons.
Good also to learn more about the scientist Mary Somerville in the early 1800s, hungry for scientific knowledge, impassioned by algebra, greedily listening in to her brother’s maths tutor and learning more. She married a man who disapproved of all this but — ‘fortunate for her and for science’ — he died three years into the marriage, leaving her a poor single mother rising at dawn to study Newton’s Principia.
She remarried, having four more children, explored calculus and mixed as an equal with the great scientists of Europe. I hadn’t known much about her, but she shines here.
On well-known figures, Murray is fine, though less adventurous. Boadicea (or Boudica) defying the Romans is all very well, the knives on her chariot wheels and description of her as a fierce treacherous lioness of obvious appeal to one’s feminist susceptibilities.
We know about Elizabeth I, and Mary Wollstonecraft, Emmeline Pankhurst and Nancy Astor MP, with her humour and doughty fights for women’s and children’s welfare.
For each of these there are good anecdotes, especially Astor’s spats with Churchill (‘If you were my husband, I would poison your tea!’ ‘Madam, if you were my wife, I would drink it’).
There is a certain politically correct inconsistency, though, in including the wealthy, privileged Astor while churlishly refusing to include Florence Nightingale in favour of Mary Seacole because the lesser nurse was of mixed race, a prosperous Jamaican family, but ‘had no proper training or influential connections’.
Hard times, of course, make the best copy. The 18th-century novelist Fanny Burney’s descriptions of her breast cancer surgery, without anaesthetic, are reproduced in gory detail here.
Some of the best lines, delivered with audibly gritted teeth by Murray, are male putdowns.
Not just Carlyle, but John Knox saying, in Elizabeth I’s accession year, that the ‘imbecility of their sex rendered women unfit to bear rule’, as well as the list of arguments the suffragette and writer Millicent Fawcett encountered about why women shouldn’t vote.
These not only include presumed neglect of their families and supposed intellectual and physical weakness, but the idea that women ‘were too pure to be involved in politics’.
Purity hangs over the fates and destinies of these women a lot, and it would be interesting to draw a line through the idea of chastity and virtue, demanded far more down the centuries in women than in men.
(Millicent Fawcett and her fellow suffragette and social reformer Josephine Butler in the 1880s argued that it was unfair that prostitutes should be forcibly examined for venereal disease when their customers weren’t.)
SOME of the women Murray chooses had pretty ripe lives: Barbara Castle, a real heroine of the Left and of women’s legal rights, had numerous flings and a long affair with a married man: a lonely time which journalist Anthony Howard weirdly argued helped her develop a ‘muscular cast of mind’.
But for audacious free-thinking, the palm goes to the composer Dame Ethel Smyth, who wrote the suffragette movement’s March Of The Women.
At one stage, she was simultaneously having an affair with the wife of one marriage and the husband of another.
After the debacle, she stayed with the man (in different homes) but he was ‘never jealous of my women friends . . . every new affection enriches older ties’.
She ended up wrapped in tweed suits and Old English Sheepdogs, living alone in a cottage in Woking and described as ‘a thin, resolute woman, touched with no sense of the shocking, who laughs at all the follies of the world’.
She was no Beethoven, but she definitely did it her way. They all did.