Introduction: Messages from Men of Letters

Abstract

Much has been written about the women who led movements for their equal status with men in the first phase between the mid-nineteenth century and the achievement of the suffrage in 1918. Not a little of the fascination of the story arises from the contrast between the tactics of those who believed that victory would be won by direct, and even outrageous, attacks on the Citadel of male privilege and those who preferred to work through constitutional and conciliatory means and by private and public persuasion. Thus the respective contributions of the militant Pankhursts and of the law-abiding Millicent Garrett Fawcett in the struggle for the suffrage have often been compared. Millicent’s sister, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, appeared, until becoming an uninhibited Suffragette in her retirement, to cultivate the image of a respectable married lady, conventional in everything except in asserting the right, and demonstrating the competence, of women to practise medicine: her undiplomatic, enormously energetic, contemporary Sophia Jex-Blake meanwhile with her devoted little band of would-be women doctors won both wide sympathy and unpopularity by confrontation with and martyrdom at the hands of bewildered male doctors and brutish medical students. In Oxford Annie Rogers and in Cambridge Emily Davies insisted that women should proceed to degrees through the same courses as men; whilst Bertha Johnson at Oxford and Ann Clough and Eleanor Sidgwick at Cambridge were at first prepared to compromise by accepting separate classes for women which might not appear aimed to lead to degree examinations.

Man was the problem of the 18th century. Woman is the problem of the 19th.

Victor Hugo