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Mary Ward: Women and Political Action

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Book cover Mrs Humphry Ward and Greenian Philosophy

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Abstract

In her mid-sixties and in poor physical health, Mary Ward’s demanding and prominent role in political activities and debates in Edwardian society, as discussed in Chapters 10 and 12, make it increasingly difficult to account for the contradictions in her views of women’s roles within the state and her evaluation of her own activities as non-politically motivated. Her fame and connections were such that the ex-President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt considered her ‘the woman who has influenced all those who speak and read English more profoundly than any other alive’.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Mrs Humphry Ward, Towards the Goal (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917), Preface.

  2. 2.

    Ruth Adam, A Woman’s Place: 1910–1975 (London: Persephone, 2000), pp. 48–52.

  3. 3.

    Henceforth this work is referred to as England’s Efforts in the text.

  4. 4.

    There are numerous editions and reprints of these works, which are noted in Thesing and Pulsford, Mrs Humphry Ward. The editions cited in this thesis are the English first editions and also an American edition, which contains a different preface Mrs Humphry Ward, England’s Effort: Six Letters to an American Friend (London: Smith, Elder, 1916); Towards the Goal; England’s Effort: Six Letters to an American Friend, 4th ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1918).

  5. 5.

    Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward, Chapter XII, pp. 224–245. The final years of Mary’s opposition to female suffrage are described in Bush, Women Against the Vote: Female Anti-Suffragism in Britain.

  6. 6.

    Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward, p. 224.

  7. 7.

    Ibid., Chapter XII, pp. 224–245. Frederic Harrison (1831–1923) was known to Mary from her Oxford days. James Knowles was the editor of Contemporary Review and founded Nineteenth Century, and published many of her articles. See Appendix 2 for a list of Mary’s main contacts.

  8. 8.

    Bush, Women Against the Vote: Female Anti-Suffragism in Britain.

  9. 9.

    Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward, p. 224.

  10. 10.

    Bush, Women against the Vote: Female Anti-Suffragism in Britain. Consulted here in Mrs Humphry Ward, et al., “An Appeal against Female Suffrage (1889),” in Before the Vote Was Won: Arguments for and Against Women’s Suffrage, 1864–1896, ed. Jane Lewis (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987).

  11. 11.

    Henceforth this work is referred to as Appeal in the text.

  12. 12.

    This point is made in Bush, Women against the Vote: Female Anti-Suffragism in Britain, p. 148.

  13. 13.

    Ward, “An Appeal against Female Suffrage (1889),” p. 410.

  14. 14.

    Ibid., p. 412.

  15. 15.

    Ibid.

  16. 16.

    Ibid., p. 413.

  17. 17.

    Ibid.

  18. 18.

    These came from Millicent Fawcett and Emilia Dilke (formally Mark Pattinson’s wife). Bush, Women against the Vote: Female Anti-Suffragism in Britain, p. 153. Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward, p. 229.

  19. 19.

    The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward, p. 239. Janet Trevelyan referred to this as Joint Advisory Council of Members of Parliament and Women Social Workers.

  20. 20.

    Harrison, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, p. 68.

  21. 21.

    Bush, Women against the Vote: Female Anti-Suffragism in Britain.

  22. 22.

    Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward.

  23. 23.

    Bush, Women against the Vote: Female Anti-Suffragism in Britain, p. 158.

  24. 24.

    Ibid., p. 209.

  25. 25.

    Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward, p. 228.

  26. 26.

    Peterson, Victorian Heretic: Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere, p. 7.

  27. 27.

    Bush, Women against the Vote: Female Anti-Suffragism in Britain, p. 61.

  28. 28.

    “British Women’s Anti-Suffragism and the Forward Policy, 1908–14,” Women’s History Review 11, no. 3 (2002).

  29. 29.

    John Sutherland, Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers (Houndmills, Basingstoke: MacMillan Press, 1995), p. 65.

  30. 30.

    Adams, “Somerville for Women: An Oxford College, 1879–1993,” pp. 78–81.

  31. 31.

    Green, “Education for Girls (1878),” p. 326. For an evaluation of how Green’s views on suffrage, see Tyler, Civil Society, Capitalism and the State: Part 2 of the Liberal Socialism of Thomas Hill Green, Chapter 8.

  32. 32.

    Green, “Education for Girls (1878),” p. 326.

  33. 33.

    “Two Lectures on the Elementary School System of England,” p. 445.

  34. 34.

    “The Reform Bill, 25 March 1867.”

  35. 35.

    Roosevelt also wanted help to sway American opinion from Woodrow Wilson, who did not want to involve America in the War. Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward, pp. 269–270. “Review of England’s Effort,” The Bookman 50, no. 300 (1916), http://search.proquest.com/docview/3055112?accountid=27803; Tylee, “‘Munitions of the Mind’: Travel Writing, Imperial Discourse and Great War Propaganda by Mrs. Humphry Ward,” p. 173.

  36. 36.

    Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward, p. 273.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., pp. 271–287.

  38. 38.

    Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian Pre-Eminent Edwardian, p. 350; Ward, England’s Effort: Six Letters to an American Friend, Preface, p. v.

  39. 39.

    Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian Pre-Eminent Edwardian, p. 352.

  40. 40.

    For an insight into what women were achieving and their roles during the War, see Adam, A Woman’s Place: 1910–1975. Adam discusses the propaganda techniques, pamphlets, etc., designed to persuade women to contribute to the War Effort through their own work and as moralising influences on men to enlist. Mary is cited in relation to her anti-suffrage activity, on p. 32.

  41. 41.

    Ward, England’s Effort: Six Letters to an American Friend, Preface, p. xvi.

  42. 42.

    Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward, p. 272.

  43. 43.

    Ward, Towards the Goal, p. 25.

  44. 44.

    England’s Effort: Six Letters to an American Friend, p. 8.

  45. 45.

    Ibid., p. 4.

  46. 46.

    Ibid., pp. 4–5.

  47. 47.

    Ibid., p. 4.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., pp. 30–57.

  49. 49.

    Ibid., p. 53.

  50. 50.

    David Lloyd George (1863–1945) was the Liberal leader of the Coalition Government from 1916 to 1922. Ibid., pp. 31–33.

  51. 51.

    Ibid., p. 53.

  52. 52.

    This term was used to explain the way in which previously skilled jobs performed by trained men were divided into parts with the less skilled elements being subcontracted and reallocated to less skilled workers, i.e., women. Adam, A Woman’s Place: 1910–1975, p. 57.

  53. 53.

    Ward, England’s Effort: Six Letters to an American Friend, p. 41.

  54. 54.

    Ibid., p. 73.

  55. 55.

    Ibid.

  56. 56.

    Ibid., p. 34.

  57. 57.

    Ibid., p. 83.

  58. 58.

    Ibid., p. 37.

  59. 59.

    Towards the Goal, pp. 226–227. These disputes are significantly muted, as the histories of the militancy of Clydeside workers and the engineers’ disputes show. For an example of militancy and Marxism in Clydeside, see Gary Girod, “‘We Were Carrying on a Strike When We Ought to Have Been Making a Revolution’: The Rise of Marxist Leaders in Glasgow During WWI and the Illusion of a Communist Workers’ Republic in Scotland,” Voces Novae: Chapman University Historical Review 2, no. 2 (2011).

  60. 60.

    Myra Baillie, “The Women of Red Clydeside: Women Munitions Workers in the West of Scotland During the First World War” (MA (partial fulfilment), McMasters University, 2002), pp. 9, 113.

  61. 61.

    Ibid., pp. 113–114. The National Federation of Women Workers was formed in 1906 by Mary MacArthur and grew in response to the sweated trades. By 1914 it had 20,000 members and is credited as being the most successful attempt to unionise women. See Mary Davis, “The National Federation of Women Workers,” http://www.unionhistory.info/timeline/1880_14_Narr_Display.php?Where=NarTitle+contains+%27National+Federation+of+Women+Workers%27+AND+DesPurpose+contains+%27WebDisplay%27. For information on Mary Macarthur, see Angela V. John, “Macarthur, Mary Reid (1880–1921),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30411.

  62. 62.

    Baillie, “The Women of Red Clydeside: Women Munitions Workers in the West of Scotland During the First World War,” pp. 42, 89–90, 113 and 114.

  63. 63.

    Ibid., p. 111.

  64. 64.

    Peter N. Stearns, “Working-Class Women in Britain, 1840–1914,” in Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1973), p. 109. Jane Lewis also provides information on both middle- and working-class women and work in Jane Lewis, Women in England 1870–1950: Sexual Division and Social Change (Sussex: Wheatsheaf Books, 1984).

  65. 65.

    Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward, p. 245.

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  1. Centre for History of Women’s Education, University of Winchester, Winchester, UK

    Helen Loader

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Loader, H. (2019). Mary Ward: Women and Political Action. In: Mrs Humphry Ward and Greenian Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14109-7_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14109-7_13

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