I had sat here last night to write all about the amazingly cool life of Millicent Garrett Fawcett, born on June 11, 1847, whose father way back in the 1850s thought his children -- boys and girls -- should have a good education.
Millicent's story is pretty cool. She was a big part of the effort to get British women the vote.
But as happens when I write these diaries, I noticed a little note in her story -- her sister was a doctor.
Britain's first female doctor.
And another idea began to form itself in my head.
I remembered back to when my sisters and I were in grade school and we were forever competing for who got the highest grades. (I was bitterly disappointed when I was only in the 92nd percentile for something because I was sure my sisters would do better.)
Now my sisters are teachers and I am a newspaper editor. We do not compete anymore. Why bother?
And I got to thinking there must have been some really fierce sibling rivalry that pushed Millicent and her sister, Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, to try so hard.
Another option, and which the research bore out, is that in fact, the girls were sort of invited to be brilliant, as my father is fond of saying:
Before the bedroom fire, the girls were brushing their hair. Emily was twenty-nine, Elizabeth twenty-three and Millicent thirteen. As they brushed, they debated. ‘Women can get nowhere’, said Emily, ‘unless they are as well educated as men. I shall open the universities.’ ‘Yes,’ agreed Elizabeth. ‘We need education but we need an income too and we can’t earn that without training and a profession. I shall start women in medicine. But what shall we do with Milly?’ They agreed that she should get the parliamentary vote for women.
Ho-hum. We will have our sister get women the vote.
This is how people talk when they are three or perhaps six -- we will all grow up to be beautiful and marry princes and live in fabulous castles and do wonderful things and change the world ...
... except they did. And they did it in amazingly exciting ways that saw them meeting and being influenced by way too many ridiculously cool people and doing way too many groundbreaking things for them to possibly have been
two (later three)
women
... unless they were two determined women with a lot of equally determined friends and they just happened to set out to do stuff and burn, bury or dismantle the hurdles people threw at them. (Fortunately, those things are pretty hard to get airborne, so they probably just sort of landed far away and Millicent and her sister sort of tossed them aside when they got to them.)
It is like a reality TV version of "Gilmore Girls" -- which included short bits by, among other people, Christiane Amanpour, Norman Mailer and Madeleine Albright.
In no particular order:
Millicent and her future doctor sister, Elizabeth, were educated at a school run by Robert Browning's aunt.
Elizabeth was supposed to marry a member of parliament, but she instead focused on that whole becoming-a-doctor thing (the focus needed partly to find a medical community that would accept that a woman could actually do something useful in medicine), so the MP married Millicent. (The MP's introducer? This guy.)
The MP, one Henry Fawcett, is of no specific note (though to be of note in this diary, you would practically have to be Jesus) except that he supported Millicent -- which one would expect, given that he had been interested in her equally strong-willed sister. He was already a supporter of women's rights, but he was now also blind, so he was (as one would expect if one had a clue about Maslow's hierarchy of needs) in no mood to restrict his wife's actions. So while they were married, she gave him a kid and he gave her time to do things like publish a book.
And along the way, Millicent and Elizabeth met and worked with nearly every influential suffragrist (and more than one suffragette) and a giant pile of government figures and people involved in higher education and, for all I know, several dozen spies. ("Hey, could you ladies go push for gender reforms in education in France? And while you're there ..." Think I'm nuts? Think again.)
The book did, uh, y'know, decently enough, if eleven printings and 40 years of interest are any indication. You can read it here. I draw your attention first to the preface to the first edition, then to it and two other prefaces.
Portion of the preface to first edition:
When I was helping my husband ...
HELLO! I AM A BOOK WRITTEN BY A WOMAN! CAN YOU HANDLE THAT?
The Brontes had to write as men. Millicent Fawcett wasn't interested. She was, for my money, targeting the audience of people receptive to having a woman as an author. I think this is the case first because people do not write things by accident, and second and furthermore that as a member of a political family and having had to deal with her husband's political correspondence and writing, she'd have gotten pretty good lessons in how to either hide your intent or blow it
right
the
fuck
up
then.
And I'll bow to someone who's studied late 19th-century British political rhetoric and is here to tell me I'm assigning a recent value to a nonrecent instance, but I don't see how this wasn't a giant semantic feminist decision.
Portion of preface to first edition:
It is mainly with the hope that a short and elementary book might help to make Political Economy a more popular study in boys' and girls' schools that the following pages have been written.
Portion of preface to second edition:
Each page has, however, been carefully revised, and at the end of each chapter I have added, after the questions, a few little puzzles, which the learner is expected to be able to solve for himself or herself ...
Portion of preface to ninth edition:
In some or all of these [economics lessons taken from recent and important British news items] the intelligent boy or girl is already interested or prepared to be interested.
A semantics lesson, now, because you who know me knew something like that was coming, and those of you who are new to me are about to find out what I do well. But first, an example.
In 1999, "Elements of Style," which is about as generally authoritative as you get on matters of writing well, came out with its fourth edition, only there were slight changes to the text, as is common in editions (because why bother buying a second copy of the same book unless you're going to give it away?).
Here is an account of one of the changes, and the reader is invited to chuckle at the opinion of the unquoted writer, who not only has missed crucial elements of style (Doc Searls as possessive? Apostrophize him, sir!) but, er, has missed the boat on a number of other things as well.
The change was in the treatment of "he" as a gender-neutral pronoun. In 1999, White's stepson, Roger Angell (who had edited the new version, owing to Strunk's thoroughly long-ago passing and White's joining him in the unable-to-edit-because-I-died department), stripped out White's "spirited defense" of using a gendered pronoun in genderless situations.
This was, the dutiful reader is invited to realize, some 129 years after Millicent Fawcett thought to address in third person boys and girls as potential readers of her book.
THREE TIMES.
And the third time, she assumed that female students would be interested in discussing economics and current events in a serious setting (because she had helped to provide that serious setting).
When you are in a society in which there are barely any schools for girls and not only is the average girl not getting a good education, she is getting an education meant to benefit her husband and/or her pursuit of same husband, you are sticking it to the man like Barack Obama running for president and winning not in 2008 but in 1850 if you publish a book that assumes women and girls are going to be having serious conversations about economics (such as the one about the benefit to society when rallies for equality in educational achievement and recognition resulted in rioting and damage to the market square).
They weren't allowed to do so much as take the standard math test until 1881 -- why would anyone want to combine math and logic and economics and English for girls? Hell, I have a serious job at a serious company, and I do not understand (or try to understand) much about economics because IT IS BORING AND COMPLICATED and other people get paid to explain it in simple terms. (For a quick five points, identify the portions of this argument used to dispute the notion that girls should be taught [complicated subject].)
But this book was written for economics students around 50 years before any women were allowed to vote for the MPs who would be representing their economic interests. And it does four very important and specific things regarding women and economic literacy:
1) It validates the women who want to be taken seriously when they say this or that was a bad idea.
2) It invites to serious discourse the women who are not entirely confident of themselves when it comes to anything academic.
3) It issues a polite but forceful and analytical STFU to men who think a woman's place is in the home, not the brain.
4) It invites the following conversation between mother and daughter:
Mother: So I was talking to my friend Agnes, and she said there's this woman author who wrote a book about economics and says it's for girls and boys. Now, my mother always told me I should just focus on finding a good husband, but ... if you're interested in economics, I could see if she could lend me her copy ...
Daughter: No, I don't really care about money.
Mother: Oh, okay. I guess it was a silly thought.
Daughter: But did that woman author write about flowers? Because I was wondering if you could get a rose to be white.
Mother: A white rose? That's an interesting idea.
Daughter: Or a blue orange? Wouldn't that be funny?
Mother: Imagine me, selling blue oranges at the market! "Yes, they're perfectly safe, and do you know who made them? No, not my husb -- no, not my -- are you going to let me tell you? It was my daughter! Yes!"
And out of inclusive pronoun use is born a botanical pioneer.
So here was Millicent, married to an MP, with a young child and making a name for herself. What next, what next? Well, this child should have education options, so one idea is to expand the educational options for the child and her friends, such as by helping to found a college for women.
And what of the friends who don't have the money for school and have to turn to the streets? They also must be kept safe. So she helped lead the effort to repeal the stupid-yet-dumb Contagious Diseases Acts, which punished sex workers for contracting the diseases their clients had (but did nothing to the clients). It was to smart social policy what a tax cut is to ending a recession -- it made the wrong people feel better about themselves and screwed the rest of the working public.
Having gotten things done for the drastic social and educational betterment of women, Millicent then turned to their political betterment -- specifically, any.
Because, of course, women did not have the right to vote.
So she went about and got it. (She had help, naturally, including from a woman I plan to write about, Josephine Baker, who kicked ass on the level of Clara Luper, whose last name should at least be considered as the standard unit of ass kicking -- though she'd be in pretty stiff competition with Aphra Behn, Araminta Ross and about 600 other women.) Also got an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews and was made a dame, both of which I guess make sense to give someone who really did leave this world in a better spot than it was when she found it. (" ... we can't do WHAT? Oh this won't do. Won't do at all. Will. Not. Do. Where do I START?")
One of the votes she secured was that of her daughter, who ... well, that is another diary for another time, but she found she was good enough for the college her mother helped found, and she was also on its field hockey team, and there's also the bit about her being better at math than anyone else in her year. (Have a look at university instructor attitudes back in the day, and those based on clothing. Bonus points -- the instructor writing the letter may well have been writing derisively about the student who would outperform his students -- and him -- on the Tripos. Suck it, Thomson. And extra link for more fun reading. These diaries are usually at least half about the links anyway, so have at them. Should I perhaps put them all in an annotated list at the bottom in the future?)
Last fun bit: Philippa Fawcett's achievement was celebrated in Clough Hall, named after a fellow education pioneer Anne Clough, whose brother Arthur was some nurse's assistant.
And if you don't mind, that is about all the reading about and researching of famous and pioneering people I think I can stand for tonight. Happy further reading; scold me in the comments for missing something big.