Educational reformer Emily Davies argued that Victorian women had more to offer society than a purely ornamental erudition.
Many social ills, wrote pioneering suffragist Emily Davies, have their origins in a lack of imagination, that gift of empathy which smooths away much of the roughness of our common life. There was more to be gained from letting a woman use her imagination as an MP, than from teaching her quadratic equations merely so she can shine more brightly at a dinner-party.