The woman who invented child benefit

Eleanor Rathbone commemorative stamp (Royal Mail, 2009)

All this talk in the media about taking away child benefit paid to ‘higher’ income families (those earning £30K or more is often suggested) has made me remember Eleanor Rathbone, and wonder what she would have thought of the proposal.  Rathbone (1872-1946) spent much of her life working to make life fairer and better for women, especially those who were poorer and more vulnerable. She campaigned on widows’ pensions, the welfare of refugees, divorce reform and equal citizenship for women (the latter between 1918-1928 when women over 30 were given the vote when for men the age of franchise was 21). But Rathbone’s name is associated mostly with her fight for family allowances which, she was convinced, should ‘go into the purse not the wallet’ – ie be paid to the mother directly, with no chance of monies being channelled to a different purpose by a ‘feckless’ husband.

After years of activity in local Liverpool politics, Rathbone stood for election to Parliament as an independent and won the seat of Combined English Universities in 1929 which she held until her death in 1946. She immediately began working to improve the lot of women by working out and promoting a scheme of ‘family endowment’. She laid the theoretical foundations in a 1924 study, The disinherited family: a plea for direct provision for the costs of child maintenance through family allowances.  Although Rathbone was supported by the likes of Beveridge, little headway was made for a few years, although Rathbone worked hard to keep the issue at the forefront. In 1941 she convinced some 150 MPs to sign a petition urging the government to introduce a state scheme and a resolution was passed the following year; when the wartime government began planning a social security programme, a Family Allowances Bill was finally introduced. Rathbone was dismayed however that this would be paid to husbands and she mounted an urgent campaign to create instead an ‘endowment of motherhood’ to be paid to women. For moral and economic reasons this would, Rathbone believed, give mothers security and rights, as well as providing better chance of the money being used for the purpose it was intended: the welfare of children.

This ‘child benefit’ payment was universal and paid into the purse. Rathbone knew that mothers could be vulnerable and less able to cope with changes in circumstance; she was also aware that payment direct to mothers made a statement about women’s equal status. For these reasons, my guess is that Rathbone would fight hard against any moves to limit the payment of child benefit today.

Anne Lister, b. 1791, Britain’s first modern lesbian?

Anne Lister portrait, c.1830 (Calderdale MBC Museums)

Maxine Peake as Anne Lister (BBC)

I’m looking forward to the BBC’s film The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, to be broadcast on BBC  Two next Monday (31 May). Lister’s diaries, when they were decoded in the mid 1980s, caused a mini sensation among historians. They opened up the private world of an early 19C woman, a business woman and landowner, who accepted her sexual nature and recorded her sexual encounters in explicit terms. She also actively and openly sought female lovers, and a long-term partner, and seems to have been accepted by her family, employees and the people she lived among.  Her story blows away the vision of 19th century womanhood so often presented in the typical ’bonnets and corsets’ period drama.

In the Spring 2010 issue of HerStoria we carried a major 3-part feature on Lister. Jill Liddington, who has been researching Lister for many years and who was consulted by the BBC’s programme makers, profiled Lister’s life; how she entered into a same-sex ’marriage’ (in all but name) which was blessed in her local church, and how she unsettled historians’ view of gender and class. Jill also took us on a women’s history walk around Lister’s estate, Shibden Hall near Halifax. Alison Oram’s accompanying article looked at Shibden Hall in detail and debated the ambivalence with which historic houses present women’s sexuality. I’m crossing my fingers that the BBC film does Lister justice.

The Royal Society and female Fellows, why so few?

The Royal Society has just announced its new Fellows for 2010. Out of 44, there are 5 women; out of 8 foreign Fellowships, there is one woman. This means that women comprise around 5% of the Fellowship of this elite scientific academy.

The first two women Fellows (Marjory Stevenson and Kathleen Lonsdale) were elected in 1945. A woman, physicist and electrical engineer Hertha Ayrton, nearly got elected in 1902 – but her nomination caused huge controversy, and the then president was very concerned that allowing women entry would ruin the Society’s status and reputation (see my article in the latest edition of HerStoria about the controversy). A few years later another eminent woman scientist took the Royal Society to task, in forthright terms, in an article in The Times.

Why have women Fellows been so slow in arriving? It’s a reflection, of course, of women’s continuing absence from the highest levels of science, the group from which Royal Society Fellows are recruited, but is there any other explanation too? Does our culture still hold that women’s science is, somehow, of less prestige and importance than science done by men? That certainly seemed the attitude among some Fellows when neuroscientist Susan Greenfield was nominated for a Fellowship in 2004; their comments implied that should she be elected the Society would be ‘trivialised’ (very similar to the language used to argue against Ayrton’s election in 1902). Note that Greenfield still has not got a Fellowship, although the 2010 list saw Melvyn Bragg receive an honorary one.

Rachel Sheld, writing recently in the Independent, quoted Professor Athene Donald, the deputy head of physics at Cambridge University, about her experiences at the Royal Society:  “If you are on high-level committees, you’ll be asked to make the tea. Recently, on a committee, the chairman thought I was the secretary. And I’ve been in committees where we’ve been addressed as “gentlemen”, despite the fact that there are women there. It is very off-putting.”  (See article here)

It’s very depressing to note how little seems to have changed since Ayrton’s time.; and how it seems women scientists still have a harder job to be taken seriously.

Hertha Ayrton (1906) from Hertha Ayrton, A Memoir, by Evelyn Sharp (Arnold, 1926)

The Nobel prize, women scientists and collaboration

The 2009 Nobel Laureates have just been announced and how wonderful that Elinar Ostrom has been awarded the Nobel  for Economics –  the first for a woman (she won along with her two male collaborators). The chemistry prize also went to a woman this year,  Ada E. Yonath,  who won the award along with her male collaborators.  Since the Nobels were established in 1900, 40 women have been recipients (including Marie Curie who won two). Despite Curie’s success, women are far less well represented in the sciences.  Two women have won the physics prize (Curie in 1903 and Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963); four have won the chemistry prize (Curie in 1911, her daughter Irene Joliot-Curie in 1935, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin in 1964 and Yonath this year).

There has been  plenty of controversy  in the history of science about women who have not been honoured. These are typically female collaborators who were overlooked when the prizes were given out  - only to fellow team members  who happened to be men.  Throughout the 20^th century it seems that all-male scientific collaborations were viewed in a different way to those comprised of both sexes. In the latter, women were invariably assumed to be the junior partner or assistant. A leading historian of science, Margaret Rossiter, has called this the ‘Matthew-Matilda effect’, describing the process by which Matthew always gets the credit in such scientific collaborations, at Matilda’s expense.

It’s interesting to note that Marie Curie’s name was not originally mentioned in connection to the 1903 Nobel prize for physics. The Swedish Academy were considering just her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel. This caused a fellow scientist (mathematician Gosta Mittag-Leffler) to write to Pierre to urge him to make Marie’s equal contribution known, which he did. At the award ceremony, the president of the Swedish Academy quoted from Genesis that ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him’.  To modern ears this is not a ringing endorsement of an equal partnership, but laced with assumptions about Marie’s womanly status as ‘helper’ to her man….

One woman who it is widely acknowledged should have got a Nobel in 1945 but didn’t is Lise Meitner. She was overlooked, despite her key contribution to the discovery of nuclear fission, and the prize went to her collaborator Otto Hahn. She was the physicist in the team, Hahn the chemist, and it was she who gave the first theoretical explanation of the fission process. The injustice was generally acknowledged in the scientific community then, as now. One of the reasons why Meitner was ignored was that she was  Jewish and had to leave Germany, where  she and  Hahn were working together, in 1938 due to the Nazi threat. They continued their collaboration by mail however, and archive letters show that Meitner guided Hahn through his later experiments.

Rosalind Franklin missed out on the Nobel for her contribution to the structure of DNA. It is questionable whether she really qualified though, as she was not working centrally on the problem. What is certain is that she was treated very shoddily by Crick and Watson (who won the 1962 Nobel for Physiology or Medicine, with Franklin’s colleague Maurice Wilkins, who is acknowledged to have played a very minimal part). They used her x-ray photographs of crystal structures without her knowledge, and without crediting her. These photos proved key to them piecing the puzzle together. Had Franklin not died young, four years before the award, the story may have been very different.

In 1974, another woman was left out of the Nobel Prize for physics for the discovery of pulsars. Jocelyn Bell-Burnell was a research student at Cambridge when she first detected the pulsars, and then published her results jointly with her supervisor, Anthony Hewish . As a result they both shared a prestigious scientific prize. But when it came to the Nobel it was a different story  - Bell-Burnell was not included. There were complaints from top astronomers – but that was that.

Let’s hope with two prizes going to women this year, and given how important collaboration now is in science, that women scientists  of the 21^st century will no longer be ‘Matildas’ but will get the credit for their work.

Darwin, women and BBC Radio 4

Good to hear BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour include a piece on Darwin’s attitude to women in today’s programme (28 July). HerStoria carried an article on this in our Summer issue out at the end of May/beginning of June. I sent copies of HerStoria with this article to Woman’s Hour as soon as it came out (although if they got the idea for the feature from HerStoria they’re not letting on). As HerStoria and Woman’s Hour remarked, we don’t often hear about Darwin and gender so the feature is worth a listen on the BBC Woman’s hour web. (Although it’s not a substitute for the article in Summer’s HerStoria which is fun and informative – but I would say that!)

Sportswomen – a history of not being taken as seriously as the men?

It’s the start of Wimbledon and already the women are being undermined. Michael Stich, BBC commentator and former champion, is quoted as saying that women tennis players are there partly just to look good, adding that their role is as much about ’selling sex’ as it is about playing tennis. On top of this, women champions are notoriously paid much less than their male counterparts, and at the moment it seems that women’s ‘grunting’ is more of a problem than the men’s – simply not ladylike perhaps? At least women tennis players at Wimbledon make the news, there has not been much about the England women’s cricket team despite their winning the World Twenty20 final this month and the 50-over World Cup in March.

It seems to me that there is still a residue of unease about women playing sports competitively. At the end of the nineteenth century (the first Wimbledon tournament took place in 1877) competitive sport was still a symbol of masculinity and team sports were a way for boys’ public schools to instil ‘manliness’ into their pupils. Men competed, but for a woman to compete was to compromise her womanliness. Despite this, around this time women increasingly took up sport, especially at the new colleges for women. Gymnastics was thought to build up their ‘delicate frames’  for study and new activites, such as tennis, hockey and golf, soon followed. However some historians of sport  suggest that the games introduced for women were mostly ‘domesticated’ ones which substituted rules, teamwork and co-operation (think netball or hockey) for the  aggressive competitiveness of men’s sports such as running or rowing.

Maude Watson, Wimbledon Ladies Champion 1884

Whatever women played however, they had to play in a ladylike fashion (no grunts!).  Just look at the attire of the first woman to win Wimbledon in 1884, Miss Maude Watson (who played her sister Lilian in the final, so the Williams’ sisters were not the first!)

It was in the 1920s that French tennis champion Gertrude Ederle, very daringly, pioneered short sleeves and bare legs for women on court. To appear this way was shocking to some early-20C sensibilities as to them it implied overt sexuality – something with Mr Stich, here in the 21C , seems to have got in a muddle with too.

Women doctors and too busy to blog!

Herstoria Summer 2009

The summer edition of HerStoria will start mailing out at the end of May – at last I have time to catch my breath and blog! This issue is  much busier than our first and we are about a week behind with our schedule (still on a steep learning curve here!) I’m holding my breath and hoping subscribers won’t mind it being a few days later than promised. (Note to self: remember next year that May contains 2 bank holidays when suppliers shut down!)

In this issue is a women’s history walk of Liverpool, which was truly fascinating to research. It was a case of going back to basics  as most of the guides available (and there are a few, some published to celebrate Liverpool’s year as Capital of Culture 2008) have very little on women. I was amazed with some of the women who turned up, including the City’s first woman doctor who practised in Liverpool from 1884. Women had a very torrid time trying to access medical training and be allowed to register to practice. They were told that women doctors were improper, that women did not have the required intellect and stamina, that there would be no jobs for them anyway, and that even if there were they could only ever work with women and children. When the first group of women completed (successfully) a medical course and examinations at the University of Edinburgh in 1873, the University refused to give them their degrees . The women had had to go to court to gain admittance anyway, and had been met with protests from male medical students. In the end the women went abroad to qualify. Why was the opposition so intense? Perhaps because they were perceived as a threat to business, especially if women patients decided to leave the private  practices of male physcians in favour of those of someone of their own sex…. I am constantly amazed and humbled by the way women kept on and were not derailed by the opinions and obstacles put in their way. More walks of other cities are planned for future issues.

I’ve also had great fun putting together HerStoria’s (historical) celebrity pages – after all, even supposedly high brow newspapers have them these days, and celebrity wasn’t invented by our generation ……

Another Starkey soap opera…

Here we go again – David Starkey attracts lots of publicity for his new TV programme on Channel 4 by attacking anyone (but mainly women) who are able to see further than his myopic, narrow idea of history. For him ‘proper history of Europe before the last five minutes…is a history of white males’ and today’s history is becoming dangerously ‘feminised’.

Starkey goes on to complain that  ’our new world has a set of prejudices’. Yes David, absolutely right…. and misogyny seems one of yours.  But this belittlement of anything connected with women (he infers women’s history is ’soap-opera’ – a loaded word!) is not new but has been identified as representative of a certain type of masculinity (as gender historians may well tell him).  In the nineteenth century, male scientists and scholars fought to keep women out of their learned societies because to have women members or fellows would ’trivialise ’ their organisation and lower its status … turn it into a soap opera perhaps?  Starkey seems to connect historical authority with maleness and wants to keep it that way.

Women historians have done a splendid job of rebutting  his arguments, see June Purvis on guardian online. Anyone on Facebook can join the HerStoria campaign to create a reading list for David Starkey to inform him about women’s history, as he does seem somewhat confused about what it is. In the meantime, thousands  more people now know that his programme starts tonight …. I wish I was as good at publicising HerStoria magazine!

Love Independent Booksellers!

Yes, with reference to Hannah’s comment, News from Nowhere in Liverpool is stocking HerStoria, and also Gay’s the Word in London WC1. We are hoping more independents will stock us soon and we plan a ‘Where you can buy HerStoria’ page on our web.

I’ve been reminding myself recently how important the independents are … they offer so much more than the homogenized big chains, and are so much more innovative. Launching HerStoria would have been so much more difficult without them!

Women, business and the post office

‘Just your luck to launch a new magazine in the middle of the biggest economic crisis in 100 years !’  This is a remark  made to me quite often (mostly in jest! ). Despite this, as ever with women’s business initiatives, at HerStoria optimism and hard work  are our touchstones. Obviously we need HerStoria to be financially secure, but our aim is to fly the flag for women’s history, not to rival Rupert Murdoch!

The problems of the economy were brought to the front of my mind today when I received a letter from Royal Mail detailing their annual price increase. From 6 April 2009 postage costs are rising from between 8-12%, something which has a major impact on us as HerStoria is a mainly subscription magazine. (We’re NOT going to put our rates up however!) 

Post in the past

Our post comes very late in the day. I’m always surprised by what seems the relative efficiency of postal deliveries in the 19c and early 20c. I remember doing archive  research on the vast correspondence of a married couple living at that time. They wrote to each other 2 or 3 times a day (sometimes  from abroad)  and seemed always to receive the mail the next day (or even that day!). I’m sure there are many historical reasons for this seeming contrast, but you cannot fail to admire the Victorians for their efficient systems. The couple I researched often used ready-franked half-penny postcards, an innovation introduced in 1870 which extended the famous ’penny post’  which had been in use since 1840.  I wish it were so simple now!  

Women and the Post Office

It was around that time (1873) that women were first permitted to work as clerks in the Post Office, under supervision, as part of an experiment in the Returned Letter Office. The number of women employed in the Post Office increased dramatically when it took over the management of the telegraph system. Many women became telegraph operators at the end of  the 19c; as early as 1853 the International and Electric Telegraph Company had introduced  a staff of young women, supervised by a ‘matron’, who quickly replaced most of the men. The job was seen as routine but not too arduous – ideal for women who were also cheaper to employ.

In 1875, as women’s employment grew, the Post Office imposed a ‘marriage bar’ which meant that married women were ineligible for appointment and that single female employees had to resign if they married.  This ban was not removed until 1946, over 70 years later. In today’s recession there are reports that women sometimes face an ‘unofficial’ marriage bar, not hired because employers’  fear they may take maternity leave and be eligible for maternity benefits. (Wasn’t this the gist of Alan Sugar’s recent complaint against working women of childbearing age and grumble that maternity rights had  ’gone too far’ ?) 

The 19c and 21c -  as an historian of the 19c I am often struck by the parellels, and left wondering who were the most advanced?!