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In encouraging women into music, Alice Mary Smith thought promises of ‘greatness’ counterproductive.
‘Why are there no great female composers?’ asked the Victorians. But Alice Meadows White, née Smith (1839-1884), never afraid to voice a challenging opinion, believed that the excited demand for a ‘great’ female composer was actually discouraging a potential host of good ones.
Britain’s first qualified female doctor, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, had a message for the first women to study for London University’s degree in medicine.
On October 1st, 1877, Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson gave the Inaugural Address at the London School of Medicine for Women, which she had helped to establish three years earlier. Only the previous year, the UK Medical Act had allowed the country’s medical authorities to license women as doctors for the first time, and it is difficult to think of better advice to anyone hoping to bring about important social change.
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.
A rowdy but good-humoured crowd gathered in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, to protest against electoral malpractice and Government cronyism.
As the Nineteenth Century opened, workers in England’s rapidly growing industrial centres were driving national prosperity. But they had few MPs to represent them, electoral malpractice was rife and most of them were not allowed to vote anyway. The feeling that Government was a hostile enemy from whom neither justice nor sympathy could be expected was only confirmed in August 1819.
Maria Montessori takes some of her pupils up onto a roof terrace, and witnesses a eureka moment.
Whereas many educators in her day ran classrooms like battlegrounds between teachers and unwilling pupils, Italian doctor Maria Montessori (1870-1952) was convinced that children rejoice in learning so long as teachers do not meddle. The following anecdote appeared in a pamphlet written for the Board of Education in 1912, and shows that joy in abundance.
Daniel Defoe argues that it is in every man’s interest to watch the women in his life realise their full potential.
One of the first public men in England to address inequality between the sexes was Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), author of ‘Moll Flanders’. Defoe wanted a ‘female academy’ set up to educate women to their full potential, and argued that it was in every man’s interest.
An Arthurian knight commits a dreadful crime against a woman, and is sent by Queen Guinevere on a fitting errand.
Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ include a story told by a much-married lady from Bath named Alison. She prefaces it by complaining at great length that she has been made to feel guilty for marrying five times, and still more so for demanding some equality in the home. Yet, she says, sometimes that works out rather well.