CHAPTER TEN
Contrary to popular belief, English women do not wear tweed nightgowns.
HERMIONE GINGOLD, Saturday Review, 1955
It is not often you meet someone who has had a bottom transplant. The man in question, jowly, balding, 5oish, in a pinstripe suit and well made shoes, looks the picture of British probity. You know he prides himself that his word is his bond. By day, he runs a merchant bank. At night, he likes to be spanked until the blood runs. His obsession has become known as le vice anglais.
The surgery on his backside, which put the best part of a thousand pounds in the hands of a Harley Street cosmetic surgeon, became necessary after a lifetime of corporal punishment. Like a cut on a boxer’s eyebrow, there are only so many times the same wound can be reopened before you have to rebuild with fresh skin. His beatings began as a child at the hands of his father. Kissing between father and son had been banned at the age of five, on the grounds that it was effeminate. Corporal punishment was to be ‘taken like a man’, so when the boy was beaten as a punishment he was expected to show no emotion. If he survived the ordeal without crying, his father congratulated him. Over the next ten years, ‘my backside was assaulted by no less than seventeen people, including parents, nanny, teachers, prefects’. He says it with no hint of self-pity, laughing at the recollection. At this stage, the beatings, the common coin of English private education at the time, had no sexual connotations. They were just part of a schooling system that aimed to achieve Squire Brown’s ambition for his son Tom and turn him into a ‘brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a gentleman, and a Christian’.1
It was only when the young man got to university that the recollection of childhood and adolescent beatings became the stuff of sexual fantasy. He read Swinburne, Fanny Hill and the Story of O, but found English girls reluctant to make his compulsion real. Marriage was no better: the thought of caning left his wife cold. There was a succession of treatments with three different psychiatrists to try to ‘cure’ himself of his obsession. The third eventually advised that he would be better off spending his money to find discreet ways of satisfying his need than passing his whole life feeling bad about it. His wife, with whom he conducted an otherwise normal married life, producing four children, agreed that he could satisfy his tastes elsewhere, on condition no one, especially the children, saw his backside until the weals had healed.
And so his life was divided into compartments. Most of the time he lived the life of a pillar of society, fathering children who were then sent away to the same sort of expensive schools where his bottom had first been tanned, while he travelled the world as a British banker, a pillar of respectability. At night, he would seek out women, preferably muscular black women, who – for a price – would beat him. On a visit to New York he discovered a thriving sado-masochistic club scene, where he met others who liked whipping or being whipped. He found his greatest thrill of all was not merely to be caned but to be caned in public. Since then, the merchant banker has indulged his taste as often as he can among groups of friends or at clubs of like-minded strangers.
It is a very hard compulsion to understand. To an outsider nothing seems to bear out the comment of the medieval visitor to England that ‘the English take their pleasures sadly’. It is not a uniquely English obsession – Rousseau admits to a taste for spanking in his Confessions – but it has become known as le vice anglais. Try to use any public telephone box in the centre of London and you will find half a dozen prostitutes’ calling cards staring you in the face advertising corporal punishment. A Dutch pornography merchant once told the writer Paul Ferris that ‘caning is a super-speciality with the English. In England, they say, fucking is not allowed, but spanking is’.2 It certainly goes back a long way: in Plate Three of Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress, Moll the prostitute has a cane hanging on the wall. Much of the literature on the subject, under titles like The Romance of Chastisement, is English. In the nineteenth century entire brothels were devoted purely to flagellation. The English even invented machines which were capable of whipping several people at once.
Foreign visitors have been baffled by the obsession, assuming at one time or another that the practice was originally Anglo-Saxon, or due to the fact that the English ate too much meat. Conventional wisdom has it that it is an upper-middle-class taste, acquired by boys at their miserable Victorian boarding schools, where caning was the ultimate deterrent. ‘Where are the instruments of pleasure?’ asks the man of his mistress in Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso. ‘I was so used to it at Westminster School I could never leave it off since … Do not spare thy pains. I love castigation mightily.’3 (Dr Busby, a headmaster of Westminster in the seventeenth century, was ‘regarded by flagellants as perhaps the finest expert with the rod that England has ever known’.4 The school’s other great contribution to the sport was to number among its alumni John Cleland, author of Fanny Hill, which, with its depiction of beatings, did much to spread the belief that the English were obsessed with being whacked.) Certainly, authors of Victorian pornographic tales of beatings sign themselves with names like ‘Etonensis’ or ‘Old Boy’, suggesting that the stories were written by, and intended for, men who had been beaten at school. Apparently, there is a regular gathering of devotees of spanking, all dressed in specially made school uniforms at ‘Muir Academy’, a club for English fetishists in, of all places, Hereford.
I had, naïvely, assumed that it was really a game, in which women merely pretended to inflict painful beatings, while the victim imagined himself to be a naughty schoolboy. But the merchant banker said I was wrong: ‘If there’s no pain, there’s no point: you might as well be beating the sofa.’
And did he think this compulsion was the result of being beaten as a child?
Well, it was the most plausible explanation the psychiatrists gave. When my father beat me, he was insistent that I didn’t cry or flinch. If I managed it, he congratulated me. The shrinks thought I had associated receiving pain with earning love and respect. And as for schools, it’s certainly noticeable that English people like to be beaten with a cane, which was what was used in English schools, while Scots seem to prefer the leather tawse, which was what was used in Scottish schools.
It would be silly to claim that ‘the English vice’ is widespread among the English. It is not. Nor, despite its name, is it unique to the English. Aficionados say it is more commonplace in northern European, Protestant countries than in southern European, Roman Catholic cultures. But its central ambiguity – that punishment is reward; pain, pleasure – rings with English hypocrisy. You might expect that with the end of corporal punishment in schools the practice would be in decline. But apparently not. It’s thriving. ‘There are people of all social classes involved – one of my favourite kindred spirits is a bus driver. And plenty of women, too. I don’t know what it is about the Diplomatic Service, but the wives of two senior ambassadors, whenever they are in London, make their first call to me, to come round and spank them.’
There is a scene in Kingsley Amis’ novel, Take A Girl Like You, where the heroine, Jenny, moves house to take up a teaching job in a strange town in the late 1950s. She is chatted up by a young man. He has a look on his face ‘which she had got quite used to seeing on men’s faces – some of them quite old men – when they first saw her’. He opens innocently by asking if she’s French. He has pressed the wrong button. Jenny’s experience of men who ask if she’s French – or Italian or Spanish or Portuguese – is that their intentions are more commercial.
‘There had even been that time in Market Square at home when a man had accosted her and, on finding she was not a tart after all, had apologized by saying: “I’m awfully sorry, I thought you were French.” What could it be like to actually live in France?’5
France and ‘abroad’ are the homes of forbidden pleasures, the place you went to get dirty books (Ulysses was produced in Paris) or – the word is, appropriately, French and has no precise English equivalent – to lead a louche life. Kingsley Amis’s novel was published in 1960, the year in which, thirty years after its original publication on the Continent, the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover was first produced in Britain. (‘Is it’, memorably asked Mervyn Griffith-Jones, the prosecutor in the ensuing obscenity trial at the Old Bailey, ‘even a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’) The English belief that France is a phantasmagoria of endless copulation is rooted far back. ‘The French have the reputation for knowing more about love and of making it better than any other race on earth’, said Laurence Sterne,6 two centuries ago, and the belief persists. In the summer of 1997, the People published a four page pull-out, Forbidden French Sex Secrets, containing ‘exclusive extracts’ from a suppressed report edited by a Mademoiselle Énorme Poitrine. (The ‘enormous chest’ reveals the thing as an English invention: as the airbrushed parade of Page Three girls in the cheap newspapers proved every day, English men are obsessed by breasts.) Apart from such useful advice as ‘a woman on her knees will be unable to stimulate her own clitoris without taking one hand off the floor and falling over’ it provided an opportunity for plenty of photos of models in stockings and suspenders. And French knickers.
This obsession with foreign sexuality conceals a dirty little secret at the heart of relations between the sexes in ‘respectable society’. The nineteenth-century institutions that were supposed to turn out ‘ideal’ English men and women invested the sexes with entirely different expectations of life, ensured they were educated apart from one another, and, even within marriage, obliged them to lead separate and unequal lives until they died. The clubland hero – a solid, unimaginative, pipe-smoking individual who invariably ordered plum duff for his pudding – was always ill at ease in the company of women because he had been brought up in one all-male institution after another. When there was such a profound chasm between the sexes, the hierarchy that existed in public life was bound to continue in the most intimate of relationships.
The sheer hypocrisy of many Englishmen, pretending morality while debauching themselves, takes some believing. The Industrial Revolution created big cities which allowed them to get away with things that would have been impossible in tighter, more ordered communities, and as early as 1793 it was reckoned that there were 50,000 prostitutes in London alone. Forty years later, another investigator listed the backgrounds from which they came:
milliners, dress-makers, straw bonnet makers, furriers, hat-binders, silk-winders, tambour-workers, shoebinders, slop-women or those who work for cheap tailors, those in pastry-cook, fancy and cigar shops, bazaars, servants to a great extent, frequenters of theatres, fairs, dancing-rooms which, with almost all places of public amusement in large towns and cities, are licentious. It is impossible to estimate the number of those addicted to secret prostitution in the different ranks of society.7
Often the streetwalkers were dressed by the madam of their brothel, who sent a spy to follow them as they solicited, in case they tried to abscond with the clothes.
By 1859, the police knew of 2,828 brothels in London, a figure the Lancet reckoned to be half the true total, calculating that there were about 80,000 prostitutes on the streets. The trade was centred on Haymarket, where many shops displayed the notice ‘beds to let’. When Fyodor Dostoevsky walked down Haymarket at dusk, he found it colonized by armies of streetwalkers, the old and the young, the attractive (Dostoevsky thought ‘there are no women in the world as beautiful as the English’) and the ugly.
The streets can hardly accommodate the dense, seething crowd [he wrote]. The mob has not enough room on the pavements and swamps the whole street. All this mass of humanity craves for booty and hurls itself at the first comer with shameless cynicism. Glistening, expensive clothes and semi-rags and sharp differences in age – they are all there … In the Haymarket I noticed mothers who brought their little daughters to make them ply that same trade. Little girls, aged about twelve, seize you by the arm and beg you to come with them. I remember once among the crowd of people in the street I saw a girl, not older than six, all in rags, dirty, barefoot and hollow-cheeked; she had been severely beaten, and her body, which showed through the rags, was covered in bruises … what struck me most was the look of such distress, such hopeless despair on her face that to see that tiny bit of humanity already bearing the imprint of all that evil and despair was somehow unnatural and terribly painful. I went back and gave her sixpence. She took the small silver coin, gave me a wild look of frightened surprise, and suddenly ran off as fast as her legs could carry her, as if afraid that I should take the money away from her.8
It is a haunting picture. Defenders of Victorian London – then the greatest city on earth – might point out that Dostoevsky’s was a flying visit, so perhaps his account is elaboration heaped on the tiniest basis of fact. But Hippolyte Taine, a French professor of philosophy, recorded similar scenes when visiting London in the 1860s.
Above all [he wrote], I recall Haymarket and the Strand at evening, where you cannot walk a hundred yards without knocking into twenty streetwalkers; some of them ask you for a glass of gin, others say ‘it’s for my rent, mister’. The impression is not one of debauchery but of abject, miserable poverty. One is sickened and wounded by this deplorable procession in those monumental streets. It seemed as if I were watching a march-past of dead women. Here is a festering sore, the real sore on the body of English society.9
In other European countries, the courtesan might acquire respectability; there was an accepted place for the grande horizontale. But in Victorian England it was all unbelievably squalid, partly because of the pretence that the trade did not exist, and partly because it represented in its starkest form the commercial nature of the relationship between men and women. The prostitute would never be accepted because she had no existence beyond the reality given to her by her client’s wallet. Taine thought that ‘what remains, then is nothing but an expression of lust, simple and coarse’.10
The thing was so blatant that it is astonishing the English could turn a blind eye. But, unless someone like the campaigning journalist W. T. Stead of the Pall Mall Gazette forced it upon their attention, the English preferred to ignore these tasteless facts. In the 1880s, Stead bought a thirteen-year-old girl called Eliza Armstrong and spirited her away to safety in Paris, proving the existence of a trade to satisfy the English appetite for deflowering virgins. The conclusion that ‘London, or rather those who carry on the White Slave Traffic, provides the largest market in the world for the sale of human flesh’ played a big part in getting the age of consent raised to sixteen in 1885. Newspaper accounts from before World War One tell tales built on the theme that although it was accepted that men had appetites, English women were all roses, pure and incorruptible. The great danger was not at home, but, inevitably, from foreign white-slave traders. Typical was the News of the World’s GIRLS SOLD TO INFAMY. LONDON AS CENTRE OF HIDEOUS TRAFFIC, an account provided by a police Assistant Commissioner of the hiring of stage-struck girls by foreign impresarios who took them abroad and sold them into degradation.
But the real degradation was not in France, it was at home. The scale of the industry has declined since the days of such exposés. But the tatty, sordid nature of English prostitution, the cards in a thousand telephone boxes, the dimly glowing Soho doorbell above a scrawled sign ‘MODEL – WALK UP’, the frozen children on Birmingham street corners, the kerb-crawlers in their company cars, show how little the spirit has changed. It remains a coarse, cynical transaction between the relatively powerful and the relatively powerless, with dirt, disease and danger its daily concomitants. The contrast is with other European cultures, where the trade is legal, brothels are above-board, registered and regulated. But to introduce such a system in England would be to acknowledge that the trade exists.
On 7 April 1832, Joseph Thompson, a Cumberland farmer, went to market in Carlisle. It was a journey he made regularly, the only difference being that this time he was not planning to buy or sell cattle. He was getting rid of his wife.
The couple had been married for three years, but it had not worked and they had agreed to separate. Thompson held to the popular belief that all legal bonds would be severed if his wife was fairly disposed of at public auction. At twelve noon he sat her on a big oak chair in the marketplace, and, according to the Annual Register began his sales pitch in the following unpromising way.
Gentlemen, I have to offer to your notice my wife, Mary Anne Thompson, otherwise Williams, whom I mean to sell to the highest, fairest bidder. Gentlemen, it is her wish as well as mine to part forever. She has been to me only a born serpent. I took her for my comfort and the good of my home; but she became my tormentor, my domestic curse, a night invasion and a daily devil. Gentlemen, I speak truth from my heart when I say – may God deliver us from troublesome wives and frolicsome women! Avoid them as you would a mad dog, a roaring lion, a loaded pistol, cholera morbus, Mount Etna, or any other pestilential thing in nature.
In the unlikely event that this awesome advertisement had not deterred potential bidders, he went on to list Anne’s better points:
She can read novels and milk cows; she can laugh and weep with the same ease that you could take a glass of ale when thirsty. She can make butter and scold the maid; she can sing Moore’s melodies, and plait her frills and caps; she cannot make rum, gin or whisky, but she is a good judge of the quality from long experience in tasting them. I therefore offer her, with all her imperfections, for the sum of fifty shillings.
This calculatedly frank appraisal did not, apparently, have them waving their arms in the air with bids, and after an hour Thompson settled for an offer from a man called Henry Mears, of twenty shillings. Thompson asked him to throw in his Newfoundland dog, and so the deal was struck. ‘They parted in perfect good temper – Mears and the woman going one way, Thompson and the dog another.’11
Unless Joseph Thompson was a farmer of quite astonishing eloquence, the story had obviously been embellished. It was clearly unusual – why else would the Annual Register have bothered with the details? But it was not unprecedented. The custom of men selling their wives seems to have begun with the Anglo-Saxons, and even then to have baffled other peoples. As late as 1884, men were still at it: in December that year, a reporter for All The Year Round listed twenty cases, complete with names and dates. Prices paid varied from twenty-five guineas and half a pint of beer, to one penny and dinner. The best-known story of wife-selling, Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, the maudlin tale of how Michael Henchard gets drunk and disposes of wife and child to a sailor, was published in 1886.
Buying and selling wives provides one of the starkest examples of the relative status of men and women in some areas of English society. The practice owed much of its popularity to the belief that it was a lot simpler and cheaper than going through a divorce. And, providing the sale was properly witnessed, buying a man’s wife from him was considered as legally valid as a conventional marriage ceremony; in some places, the purchaser even had to pay tax on his wife, as on any cattle he bought. The practice was an embodiment of the medieval belief that women were by definition inferior to men: as the law-givers explained it, if God had intended women to be equal or superior to men, he would have created Eve not from one of Adam’s ribs but from his head. Violence against women, whether in ducking stools for objectionable wives (the last recorded instance of a ducking was in Leominster as late as 1809) or in the whippings seen in medieval manuscripts and misericords, followed naturally.
There was nothing unique to the English in the oppression of women. It was the consequence of things – the importance of combat, laws of inheritance, unequal distribution of wealth, expectations about child-rearing and domestic life – that were common to much of Europe. Resourceful women could find ways around the barriers erected by male society, as the number of women controlling large estates in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century testifies. Even as far back as the sixteenth century, some accounts of visits to England compare the position of wealthy women very favourably with other European cultures. Emanuel Van Meteren, who first visited England in 1575, noted that
women are entirely in the power of their husbands … yet they are not kept as strictly as in Spain or elsewhere. Nor are they shut up, but they have free management of the house or housekeeping. They are well dressed, fond of taking it easy, and commonly leave the care of household matters and drudgery to their servants. In all banquets and feasts they are shown the highest honour; they are placed at the upper end of the table, where they are the first served … This is why England is called the Hell of Horses, the Purgatory of Servants, and the Paradise of Married Women.12
The problem was sex. As in most male-dominated societies, the victims of uncontrolled sexual desire were women. But it was the men who made the rules. If men were sexually incontinent, it was the fault of women. Statuary of the Seven Deadly Sins showed Lust as a woman, which was presumably why the received wisdom became that the only good woman was a chaste woman. Women who were sexually self-confident were likely to be trouble. The evidence that such women lived exists mainly by default, in the fact that so many in authority thought it necessary to declaim against them. In 1620, James I ordered the Bishop of London to tell his clergy to preach against ‘the insolency of our women and their wearing of broad-rimmed hats, their hair cut short or shorn’, which shows that some at least were prepared to ignore the usual rules. And here, at least, there was no chasm between royalist and parliamentarian: during the Commonwealth, which followed the execution of James’s son, King Charles I, the Puritans kept up the assault upon women. After the Restoration the theme continued, with people like Bishop Jeremy Taylor preaching that chastity was ‘the life of the angels, the enamel of the soul’.
The occasional enlightened male, like the philosopher John Stuart Mill, might protest, when marrying the widow with whom he had been intimate for years, that the laws were offensive. But his was a voice crying in the wilderness. Only in 1870 did Parliament recognize the right of women to control their own finances in the first Married Women’s Property Act. It was not that Victorian England, which had refined the ideal Englishman, had no place for women. It had all too clear an idea of a woman’s place.
When Victorian scholars began to compile the definitive roll-call of the people who had made the nation great, the twenty-two volumes of the Dictionary of National Biography, it turned out to be an overwhelmingly masculine compendium. Of the 28,000 people listed from the beginnings of British history to 1900, only 1,000 were women. Its editor, Sidney Lee, remarked that ‘Women will not, I regret, have much claim on the attention of the national biographer for a very long time to come.’13 There are two possible explanations. Either women genuinely played a very minor part indeed in the nation’s history. Or the editors were purblind to their achievements. Certainly, the original Dictionary belongs to the heyday of British imperial power, of a piece with other celebrations of Anglo-Saxon achievement, from the Great Exhibition of 1851, through the Royal Albert Hall, the Tate and National Portrait galleries, the National Trust, the Oxford English Dictionary, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum and Science Museum in London, to the great eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the Cambridge History of English Literature. Public life was a male world.
In the hundred years following publication of the first twenty-two volumes, the Dictionary produced supplements giving obituaries of the movers and shakers who had died recently. These point to a slow increase in the prominence of women through the twentieth century. They accounted for 3.5 per cent of the entries in the original publication. In the supplement reporting the lives of illuminati who died between 1986 and 1990, one in ten of the entries were women. By then, Oxford University Press had decided to revise the entire project for the Millennium. In the politically correct 1990s, it was a high priority to increase reporting of the role of women in the nation’s history. After five years of research, the editors had discovered an additional 2,000 women who had been influential in the nation’s history. It tripled the number of women singled out for recognition. But it was still a tiny fraction of the whole.
The original Dictionary had been blind to the achievements of women because it did not look for them in the right places. At a time when women were excluded from most areas of public life, you would be unlikely to find distinguished female politicians. The army and navy were officered by men and the exclusively male clergy had a stranglehold on teaching posts at the great universities. If women were to find an outlet for their abilities it would have to be in education, voluntary work, missionary activity, as hostesses or, in a small number of cases, as writers and artists, although even there a number found it wiser to publish under male noms de plume.
There were always women who proved more than capable of breaking through. Victorian society was, after all, presided over by a queen, and at the height of empire the mythmakers looked backwards to make comparison with another golden age in the reign of Elizabeth I. (Even Elizabeth, of course, inspired her troops gathered at Tilbury to resist Spanish invasion in 1588 by saying ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too’.) The country has never lacked redoubtable women, from Boadicea and Hilda, Abbess of Whitby, to Florence Nightingale and Margaret Thatcher. It was women who helped to keep English culture alive after the catastrophe of the Norman invasion by marriage to the invaders and by patronizing writers identified with the old tradition. In the days when the English economy was built upon the wool trade, spinsters – spinners of wool – had a trade at the heart of the economy. And there were always women who threw off the sexual straitjacket they were expected to wear – Lady Caroline Lamb, Claire Clairmont and Lady Oxford, three of Byron’s mistresses, are obvious examples.
Elizabeth Fry did more to better the lives of nineteenth-century prisoners than any man of her day. Octavia Hill’s tireless and very practical campaigns to improve the housing conditions of the Victorian poor were imitated across Europe. Henrietta Barnett, the wife of an East End vicar, invented Hampstead Garden Suburb, steering through an act of Parliament to make it possible, then buying the land and building upon it. It led Asquith to call her ‘the unofficial custodian of the children of the state’. We could go on. But the point about these women is that they were restricted to themes that could be seen as comparatively unthreatening extensions of their domestic lives. Florence Nightingale’s mission to the hospitals of the Crimea came after an appeal from The Times correspondent at the front, ‘Are none of the daughters of England, at this extreme hour of need, ready for such a work of mercy?’ You can bet your last Penny Black that had Miss Nightingale been married to a conventional Victorian male, she would have been obliged to stay at home.
In general, that was where English men have expected their women to be. Respectable Society, with all its inhibitions, may have been a Victorian invention, but there is plenty of evidence that the division of the world into male and female spheres began much earlier. Certainly, by Hanoverian days English males in smart society were more comfortable in the company of their own sex than with women. César de Saussure, a French visitor, was baffled by the English habit of driving women from the table after dinner, which he could explain only because they ‘generally prefer drinking and gambling to female company’.14 He, by contrast, found English women friendly, tender-hearted and passionate, since ‘They do not despise foreigners as the men do; they are not distant to them and sometimes will prefer them to their own countrymen.’ The French visitor Joseph Fiévée, who hated just about everything about the English, was particularly incensed by the Englishman’s rudeness towards women. He wrote in 1802 that
It’s because they want to get down to drinking that Englishmen get the women to withdraw after dinner. Often, at eleven o’clock at night, they’re still sat around the same table, while the women are yawning their heads off in some upstairs drawing-room. It’s not uncommon for the master of the house to which the wife has invited guests, to leave their company and go off to the tavern to drink, chat and play to his heart’s content with his friends.15
Men could get away with bad manners like that because of their assumption that women were incapable of holding worthwhile opinions on subjects outside the home. It implied a clear hierarchy: they left the table because the men were going to talk about matters that were above their heads, like politics, business or war. As Lord Chesterfield put it, ‘women, especially, are to be talked to as below men and above children’.
There are two possible explanations of the fact that men talked in such terms. Either they really believed that women were second-class beings; or, uneasily aware of the injustice of denying women a full role in society, and aware too that it could not last, they were casting around for justifications. The stronger the challenge, the more vociferous the evangelism about how the family was the cornerstone of the safe and ordered society, and the wife and mother was the heart of the family. ‘There can be no question but that the home is the woman’s primary sphere of action’, goes one early nineteenth-century sermon.16 Elizabeth Sandford advised that ‘There is something unfeminine in independence. It is contrary to Nature, and therefore it offends. A really sensible woman feels her dependence; she does what she can, but she is conscious of inferiority’.17 We are talking here about the middle class, which came of age in Victorian England as the most important social group in the country. There grew up among the propagandists a view that working women were the mark of a ‘barbarous society’. It followed that if a man was to maintain his position, the woman of the house could not be seen to go out to work. (One consequence of the need to preserve the appearance of prosperity on one income was that the husband and father figure was obliged to work longer and longer hours to earn the means to keep the family afloat, becoming in the process the distant, cold figure of caricature.)
It was because the assumption that men and women occupied quite separate worlds was so deeply ingrained that the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867, which extended the franchise among men, did nothing at all to give the vote to women. The mind of man ran along practical, educated lines; the mind of woman was a mass of intuitions. It followed that the term ‘educated woman’ was an oxymoron: learning could necessarily be acquired only by displacing the instinctive reasoning that was the essence of womanhood. And at a practical level, if you taught women Latin and Greek, you clogged up valuable brain space that should have been occupied with the finer points of cooking and sewing and dealing with tradesmen. Punch had this portrait of the ideal little woman.
She looks attentively after the holes in her father’s gloves. She is a clever adept at preparing gruel, white-wine whey, tapioca, chicken broth, beef tea, and the thousand little household delicacies of the sick room … She does not invent excuses for not reading to her father of an evening, nor does she skip any of the speeches … She knows nothing of crotchets [iconoclastic opinions], or ‘Woman’s Mission’. She studies housekeeping, is perfect in the common rules of arithmetic … She checks the weekly bills, and does not blush if she is seen in a butcher’s shop on a Saturday.18
If men were producers and women merely consumers, if the home was a retreat from the world, the Angel in the House was invested with a scent of sanctity. By the middle of the nineteenth century, women were being seen as a mechanism for purifying industrial society. The Quarterly Review suggested the country ‘make use of the engine God has placed in our hands … Pour into the corrupted stream the pure, healthy, disinfectant of English womanhood’.19 Feminist interpretations of history have, not surprisingly, railed against the straitjacket into which women were forced by the idealized idea of womanhood that was imposed upon them. Mrs Rochester, who haunts Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, is their metaphor. ‘The madwoman in the attic’ is the vehicle through which ‘the female author enacts her own raging desires to escape male houses and male texts’.20 Well, perhaps.
But it proved an astonishingly durable idea of femininity. The Celia Johnson character of Brief Encounter would certainly have recognized and respected it. In the 1930s Jan Struther’s accounts of the simple joys of home life were hugely popular in The Times as ‘Mrs Miniver’ described the doings of her two boys and one girl, professional husband, nanny, parlourmaid, cook, and second home in Kent, a world troubled only by things like leaking pipes, sick pets and husbands who fell asleep under the newspaper after dinner. When Mrs Miniver was translated to the screen by Greer Garson, complete with Nazi plots and a husband doing his bit at Dunkirk, she was held to embody the pluck of the Englishwoman in wartime. Churchill is said, improbably, to have believed that the film did more for the war effort than a flotilla of battleships.21
Any improvement in the status of women in England owes nothing much to the English upper classes, who so proudly boasted of being defenders of all that was best about their culture. If, as apologists for the heritage industry like to claim, the country house was the supreme cultural achievement of the English way of life, the role of the Englishwoman within it was clear enough. She was a maid or a cook. Or she administered the maids and cooks. When Hermann Muthesius was telling his German readers about the English house, he had to explain why they seemed to have so many more servants than was the case in his own country. Apart from the higher standards of physical comfort in English homes and the more specialized nature of English servants, there was the fact that ‘the lady of the house merely presides over the household, without taking any active part in it. The lady of an English house never sets foot in the kitchen and the cook would not want her to do so. She sends for the servants when she is ready to give her orders’.22 Mrs Beeton’s bestseller, which first appeared in 1861 and was aimed at the rapidly growing middle class was, after all, called Household Management.
You can still find the grandchildren of Mrs Miniver. The antidote to the belief that England has really changed is to shop at Harvey Nichols during the working day, to lunch at Daphne’s or Bibendum or just to glance at the faces smiling out from the photographs in ‘Jennifer’s Diary’. The magazine picture captions give the game away: once a woman has married, she not only loses her family name, the baptismal name goes, too. So, among the faces enjoying themselves at charity balls, elaborate bashes to celebrate daughters’ 21sts, fashionable weddings and good-cause lunches, are Mrs Hugo Ford, Mrs Stephen Reeve-Tucker, Mrs David Hallam-Peel, and Lady Charles Spencer-Churchill. In one photograph, the then serving cabinet minister and Privy Councillor Virginia Bottomley becomes ‘Mrs Peter Bottomley’. Doubtless, in this world, Margaret Thatcher, the most famous female politician in history, was ‘Mrs Denis Thatcher’.
Perhaps they are no longer chattels, but all those healthy, well-fed faces belong to a world which Celia Johnson’s character would also recognize at once. In the milieu from which the late Princess Diana came it is still scarcely considered worth educating women. She, a perfectly intelligent woman, after all, emerged from school with scarcely more than a certificate for the best-kept hamster. There is something about this attitude to education that is highly revealing. In 1930, the French writer Émile Cammaerts attempted to distil his twenty years’ experience of life in England. He had noticed that English schools and colleges ‘have played a far larger part in English life than any prominent educational institution has done in the life of other countries … they have succeeded in preserving and developing a certain type of character and a certain ideal of service, without which England would never have become what she is today’.23 Cammaerts was an Anglophile and a more radical critique would interpret ‘the ideal of service’ which produced the Breed in much more jaundiced terms. Where the overall philosophy of education is concerned, it had serious implications for women. It made a firm connection between mind and body – mens sana in corpore sano – and its ideal was overwhelmingly masculine. In 1872, W. Turley explicitly linked maleness to the idea of national success. Writing in the journal the Dark Blue he thundered that ‘a nation of effeminate enfeebled bookworms scarcely forms the most effective bulwark of the nation’s liberties’.24
Women who dared to believe in education were either mocked or patronized, or both. The original ‘Bluestockings‘ may have enjoyed the company of men such as Dr Johnson or Edmund Burke, but Sidney Smith advised them they should not flaunt their learning (‘if the stocking be blue, the petticoat must be long’). Reading of these eighteenth-century pioneers is like watching a scattered flotilla of sailing boats on a stormy sea, desperately signalling to one another for comfort against the elements. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote from Italy to a friend that ‘to say truth, there is no part of the world where our sex is treated with so much contempt as in England’. Small wonder that while so many men were enthusiastically promoting themselves and their country as embodying the highest levels of civilization, many women, like Mary Wollstonecraft, that great enthusiast for the French Revolution, saw themselves not so much as English as part of a wider humanity.
The average middle- or upper-class Englishman had no such qualms. After all, the culture was a masculine culture. But Englishmen were determined to keep education to themselves. John Ruskin, whose idealization of women was so heartfelt that he is said to have been incapable of consummating his marriage because of the horrific discovery that his wife had pubic hair, thought that a woman only needed to know enough to ‘sympathize in her husband’s pleasure’.25 In any case, women had smaller skulls than men, which meant smaller brains. And because they possessed only a finite amount of energy, the physical demands of menstruation, growing breasts and childbearing necessarily meant that there was less effort available for mental activity. There were even those who argued that since menstruation could be so incapacitating, education could tip women over into sterility. All in all, they would be well advised to steer clear of learning. Apart from anything else, educated women would take jobs away from men, which would force more of them to leave for the colonies, and so create more spinsters: ergo, women who had hopes of marriage should not demand better schooling.
It takes some believing, but it was not until 1869 that Emily Davies founded Girton as a Cambridge college for women, and when, in 1896, the university came to vote on whether women should be allowed to face examinations for degrees, The Times printed train timetables, to enable London-based graduates to travel to Cambridge to vote against the proposition. The university did not allow women full membership until 1948. Like the more generalized prejudice against ‘intellectuals’, this discrimination against women was worse in England than elsewhere: of the pioneers of women’s right to practise medicine, Sophia Jex-Blake was only able to qualify by studying in Edinburgh, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson got her MD in Paris, Elizabeth Blackwell in the United States.
One remark is enough to sum it up. The institutions were made by and for men, even down to childhood. When the Girl Guides were set up as a counterpart to the Boy Scouts, a serial in their magazine, ‘The Castlestone House Company’, caught the tone perfectly. It is 1918 and the schoolgirls are talking about forming a Guide company. The sexual aspiration is explicit: ‘ “I envy you awfully. Being a Guide is all very well, and quite nice, but nothing like being torpedoed and catching spies and all that.” ’ Then one of them remarks sighingly of the Guides’ uniform, ‘ “Look at all the pockets,” murmured Elsie, admiringly, “it’s as good as being a boy.” ’26
In this environment, was it any wonder that the spiritual daughters of Mary Wollstonecraft became angry? In 1938, Virginia Woolf examined the idea of patriotism in Three Guineas, and decided that, as a woman, she had little reason to be grateful to ‘her’ country. Imagining a conversation between a brother and sister on the eve of mobilization, she decided that
She will find that she has no good reason to ask her brother to fight on her behalf to protect ‘our’ country. ‘ “Our country”,’ she will say, ‘throughout the greater part of its history has treated me as a slave, it has denied me education or any share in its possessions. “Our” country still ceases to be mine if I marry a foreigner. “Our” country denies me the means of protecting myself, forces me to pay others a very large sum annually to protect me, and is so little able, even so, to protect me that Air Raid precautions are written on the wall. Therefore, if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or “our” country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share; but not to gratify my instincts, or to protect myself or my country. For,’ the outsider will say, ‘in fact, as a woman, I have no country.’27
The strict hierarchical division between the sexes was the consequence of the invention of the Ideal Englishman. As he would be honourable, decent, stoical and brave, so she would be stoical, motherly, submissive and chaste. It is astonishing how quickly the Respectable Society took root. Attitudes to the seventeenth-century writer Aphra Behn are a telling example. Behn, lauded by Virginia Woolf as the first woman to make a living from her pen, produced a series of plays and poems about bad marriages and their miserable consequences. She had to contend throughout her career with accusations (from male critics) of being obsessed with carnality – accusations they would never have levelled at a man: her works are mild compared to some of those of her contemporary, John Rochester. But the real challenge to Aphra Behn came after her death. In 1826, Sir Walter Scott sent a copy of her novel Oroonoko, the story of an African slave, to his great-aunt. The next time Scott saw his aunt, she returned the book, with the advice that he burn it. It was, she said, salacious. Even she recognized there was something curious about her actions. ‘Is it not very odd,’ she remarked, ‘that I, an old woman of eighty and upwards, sitting alone, feel myself ashamed to read a book which, sixty years ago, I have heard read aloud for the amusement of large circles, consisting of the first and most creditable society in London?’ Scott commented that ‘This was, of course, owing to the gradual improvements of the national taste and decency.’28
Almost as quickly as Respectable Society took hold, it has crumbled away. Dr Acton, who had advised Victorian England that masturbation created ‘peevish valetudinarians’, recommended married couples not to have intercourse more than once every week or ten days. He remarked that ‘The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind … As a general rule, a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband’s embraces, but principally to gratify him; and, were it not for the desire of maternity, would far rather be relieved from his attentions’.29 It is evidence of the hunger for more honest information that in 1918, only twenty years after the last edition of Dr Acton’s book, Marie Stopes produced the first above-board sex manual, Married Love. Between March and December that year it went through five editions. By the mid-1920s it had sold half a million copies.
During the First World War, Women’s Patrols had stalked the streets, on the lookout for fornicating soldiers and their girls. By the 1930s there was so much frottage going on in public parks that a visiting French schoolmistress was horrified. Odette Keun concluded that it was because Englishwomen were ‘definitely sex-hungry’ that the average Englishman was such a dull lover: he never needed to woo her into bed. ‘English lovemaking is not an amusement but a function … My real objection to the English male is that he will not give enough time, trouble or attention to the sexual act, and thereby makes it as flat, stale and deadly as a slab of one of his own cold suet puddings.’30 (She has a point here – unlike the French, the English have never really considered seduction as an art form.)
As the twentieth century wore on, Respectable Society tumbled, such that all that is left are occasional caryatids, like the draped female figures that once supported the pediments of a long-gone Roman temple. The speed of change has been remarkable. Hippolyte Taine believed English married women were nearly always faithful, and it was only in 1918 that the number of divorces passed 1,000 a year, most of them between members of the comparatively small upper and upper-middle classes. Now, the country has the highest divorce rate in the European Union.31 By the late 1990s, one quarter of unmarried women between 18 and 49 were cohabiting with men. The British had the highest rate of single-parent families in Europe. No one bats an eyelid that a pornographer, Paul Raymond, has become one of the country’s richest men, rubbing shoulders with dukes and earls.
None of these trends is unique to England; family breakdowns, the growth of relationships unlicensed by the state, the tolerance of pornography are common to all western societies. Some of the reasons for the change are clear enough. Two massive wars, the second of which included the deliberate targeting of civilians, speeded the breakdown of hierarchical distinctions between men and women. The contribution of women to the war effort, in munitions factories, on the land and in the services made it increasingly hard to assert old-fashioned Mrs Miniver-like verities about the role of the Angel in the Home. The growing opportunities for female education, the advance of feminism and the assertion of equal rights for women all made it impossible for men to hang on to a belief in the old, masculine idea of Englishness. And the contraceptive pill released women from the fear of constant pregnancy.
Of course, the old stereotypes can give everyone a good laugh. It is a lot more fun to make things up than to try to figure out what’s going on around you, which accounts for the phenomenal success of Bill Bryson’s amiable ‘non-fiction’ about Britain. Visiting the country for the first time in 1973, he was struck by the contrast between British women’s magazines and those back home in the American Midwest:
The articles in mother’s and sister’s magazines were always about sex and personal gratification. They had titles like ‘Eat Your Way to Multiple Orgasms’, ‘Office Sex – How to Get It’, ‘Tahiti: The Hot New Place for Sex’ and ‘Those Shrinking Rainforests – Are They Any Good for Sex?’ The British magazines addressed more modest aspirations. They had titles like ‘Knit Your Own Twinset’, ‘Money-Saving Button Offer’, ‘Make This Super Knitted Soapsaver’ and ‘Summer’s Here – It’s Time for Mayonnaise!’32
If it was true then, it is long gone. The best-selling women’s magazines are obsessed with sex, sexual problems, sexual health and sexual ethics.
The fact that the old model for the relationship between men and women has broken down so much more comprehensively in England than in many other parts of Europe argues that there was something specific to the English formula that didn’t work in the late twentieth century. Perhaps the reason is that once the English had seen that the Empire, for which the models were invented, had failed, they found the prototypes irrelevant. Just as the Breed and the amateur were no longer serviceable as paragons for men, so the old archetypes that men had sought to impose on women were equally redundant. As the authority of the nation collapsed in the outside world, so, at home, did the authority of those who might have been expected to uphold the old moral certainties. It is noticeable that the two most public moralizers of the century, Cosmo Lang, the great Archbishop of Canterbury, and John Reith, the founder of the BBC, were not English, but Scots. What has emerged in place of the stiff upper lip of Trevor Howard and the trembling lower lip of Celia Johnson is the most effervescent youth culture in the world.
Alongside the exuberant music and fashion, the English have, it is said, the highest rate of teenage sexual activity in the industrialized world. The percentage of unmarried women who are sexually active by the age of nineteen is 86 per cent. In the United States, which has the second-highest rate, the figure is 75 per cent.33 Fewer than 1 per cent of brides are virgins. The England which has emerged from the ruins of empire is one in which advancement is by ability rather than conformity or connections and one in which, although there is still a long road to travel, women have increasing parity with men in public life.