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Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
1827 – 1891
The eldest child of Benjamin Leigh Smith and Anne Longden, Barbara Leigh Smith was from a long line of socially active, wealthy Dissenters. One of the foremost items on the Dissenters' agenda was religious freedom -- the right to practice their religion without interference and the right to participate in all aspects of society regardless of their religious orientation. In the 18th century, religious Dissenters faced numerous political disabilities, they could not vote, hold office, or attend the most prestigious universities. From the beginning, then, religious Dissenters were among the leaders in reform movements. The social activism of the Unitarians, a religion founded in the 1790s, was so pronounced that in 1825 an article in the Christian Remembrancer stated: "The Unitarians are a political rather than a religious sect – radicals to a man."
Benjamin Smith's father, William Smith, a late 18th c. and early 19th c. liberal Whig MP, was one of the founders of Unitarianism. William Smith supported a number of reform cause: peace, the abolition of all religious tests in civil matters, and the abolition of the slave trade. William Smith was an early supporter of Wilberforce, the great early British abolitionist.
Benjamin Smith followed in his father's footsteps. Educated at Trinity, he went to work in a distillery and grew wealthy in his own right. He became a MP in 1838 and held the seat until 1847. A life-long bachelor, at age forty he began a "notorious cohabitation" with Anne Longden, a milliner's apprentice, which would last until Anne's death. Longden bore Smith five children before she died in 1854. Although he never explained why he did not marry Longden, Smith was a devoted father to all of his children. His decision not to marry Longden would taint his children with the label of illegitimate in a sexually repressed era, a label that would play an important role in creating Smith Bodichon's character in her adult life.
Unconventional, to say the least, by 19th century standards, Barbara's father had definite ideas about how to raise children – and he was sufficiently wealthy that he could raise his children as he saw fit without too much of a scandal. Among other things, Smith had a carriage custom built like an omnibus so that all of his children and their servants could accompany him on trips to the country at the same time . Barbara and her siblings were kept out of established schools and provided with tutors. No corporal punishment was permitted. There was little structure to the school – rather the children were encouraged to pursue their interests and provided with an enriched environment in which songs, dance, rhythm, rhyme, and games were part of the educational process. In the 1810s, Smith had opened an experimental school for poor children using his innovative methods, and when his children were old enough to attend school, that is where they went to school, helping their tutor, James Buchanan, reach the younger students.
Although Barbara would eventually drift away from Unitarianism toward the conventional Church of England, the spirit of her up-bringing -- a distaste for rigid convention, a questioning mind, a staunch advocacy of social reform, a rational search for the truth, and a quest for justice -- remained with her for life.
In 1848 when Leigh Smith came of age, her father settled a £300 annual allowance on her, an amount that was raised to £1000 by his death in 1860. This allowance enabled her to live quite independently, much too independently for a young woman in the minds of many of her contemporaries. So at age 21, in the Revolutionary year of 1848, Leigh Smith found herself educated, albeit unconventionally, and wealthy with an independent, progressive, socially responsible outlook on life and looking for something to do with her time and energy.
In 1849, public education in Britain for women was still quite new: Queen's College had been formed only in 1848. In 1948, Barbara's aunt, Julia Smith, enrolled her in the new college for women, Bedford College, concentrating her studies on art.
In 1850 Leigh Smith and her life-long friend Bessie Rayner Parkes, also from a family of Unitarians, traveled through Belgium, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, painting and drawing as they pleased, and, in defiance of convention, chaperoning one another and refusing to wear a confining corset. On this trip, possibly for the first time in her life, Barbara saw signs of political and intellectual despotism, which awakened her politically.
On her return from Europe, Leigh Smith launched into her first activist cause: opening a school for poor children, a school which was modeled along the lines of her own education. Children of both sexes and all religions learned together: religion was not taught at the school, but secular stories or Christian parables intended to teach morals filled the gap .
History does not record why Leigh Smith took an interest in married women's property rights. Perhaps she came to the age when friends who had made early marriages were beginning to regret their choice in mates and came to learn the limits women faced to ameliorate the worst abuses against them. Perhaps she examined the lives of other women who were much less fortunate than she. Perhaps Barbara, in contemplating marriage to a beau, began to consider what the legal meaning of being a wife was in 19th century England. For whatever reason, Leigh Smith became interested in the reform of laws regarding married women, especially those concerning the property of married women. With the assistance of Mathew Davenport Hill, a family friend, in 1854 she wrote a brief pamphlet which clearly and concisely stated the most important laws regarding women. The pamphlet, A Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws of England Concerning Women, sold for a few pence and created a sensation; second and a third editions were published in 1856 and 1859. Where earlier writers had failed to arouse public interest in the question either because their works were either too long, dry, or boring or because they were considered polemics, Leigh Smith's simple statement of the facts of women's legal disabilities did arouse public interest in the question.
Here is an excerpt of the pamphlet. Notice the clarity of the writing and the complete lack of legal jargon which obscures the meaning of the words. Notice that Bodichon does not quote statutes or add footnotes to demonstrate case law in support of her contentions. She just states the bottom line.
Married women no legal existence.
A man and wife are one person in law; the wife loses all her rights as a single woman, and her existence is entirely absorbed in that of her husband. He is civilly responsible for her acts; she lives under his protection or cover, and her condition is called coverture.
A husband has a right to the person of his wife.
A woman's body belongs to her husband; she is in his custody, and he can enforce his right by a writ of habeas corpus.
Her personal property becomes his.
What was her personal property before marriage, such as money in hand, money at the bank, jewels, household goods, clothes, &c., becomes absolutely her husband's, and he may assign or dispose of them at his pleasure whether he and his wife live together or not.
He takes her chattels real.
A wife's chattels real (i.e., estates held during a term of years, or the next presentation to a church living, &c.) become her husband's by his doing some act to appropriate them; but, if the wife survives, she resumes her property.
Equity.
Equity is defined to be a correction or qualification of the law, generally made in the part wherein it faileth, or is too severe. In other words, the correction of that wherein the law, by reason of its universality, is deficient. While the Common Law gives the whole of a wife's personal property to her husband, the Courts of Equity, when he proceeds therein to recover property in right of his wife, oblige him to make a settlement of some portion of it upon her, if she be unprovided for and virtuous.
If her property be under 200£, or 10£ a-year, a Court of Equity will not interpose.
Her right to support.
Neither the Courts of Common Law nor Equity have any direct power to oblige a man to support his wife,--the Ecclesiastical Courts (i.e. Courts held by the Queen's authority as governor of the Church, for matters which chiefly concern religion) and a Magistrate's court at the instance of her parish alone can do this.
His power over her real property.
A husband has a freehold estate in his wife's lands during the joint existence of himself and his wife, that is to say, he has absolute possession of them as long as they both live. If the wife dies without children, the property goes to his heir, but if she has borne a child, her husband holds possession until his death.
A married woman's earnings not her own but her husband's.
Money earned by a married woman belongs absolutely to her husband; that and all sources of income, excepting those mentioned above, are included in the term personal property.
In Brief Summary Bodichon quotes American jurist, legal theorist, and New York Supreme Court Justice Elisha Powell Hurlbut's Essays Upon Human Rights and Their Political Guarantees (1846), an indictment of American marriage laws which were derived from English common law. During the fall of 1855 and the winter of 1856 Bodichon formed a committee to campaign for changes in married women's property rights, the first British campaign orchestrated by a group of middle- and upper-class women to strive changes in British laws about women. Until this time, individual women had acted alone to influence legislation that affected them personally or groups of working-class women had campaigned for woman's rights. For the first time, a group of middle-class women, women who were educated, who had access to "the right people," and who had the time, energy, money, and other resources to devote to the cause, came together to campaign on their own behalf in order to influence British law that effected them collectively as women. The women circulated petitions, getting the signatures of the "correct people," thereby influencing the opinions of the movers and shakers of British government and culture; they published articles in journals on the topic; they beseeched Ministers of Parliament for their support; in short, they campaigned in earnest. A Married Women's Property Rights bill was submitted to Parliament, read, modified, debated, and modified again. In 1857 the Married Women's Property Rights Bill, scorned, ridiculed, lambasted, and lampooned, and occasionally supported and praised, in the press and in Commons alike, went down in defeat. A Divorce and Matrimonial Act was passed in 1857, however, which made divorce easier and cheaper to obtain, ameliorated the worst aspects of English jurisprudence regarding women and was, in part, Parliament's attempt to pacify woman's rights activists.
A lasting affect of the quest for a Married Women's Property Rights Act was that middle-class British women had been aroused to work on their own behalf and an informal nucleus of supporters both in London and the provinces had been identified and brought into contact with one another to work together to change the law. As word of the activities on women's behalf spread, sympathetic women were drawn to the London nucleus of the nascent women's movement.
Attempts by earlier British women to change the condition of women suffered from various disabilities. As mentioned earlier, some women worked alone to right a personal wrong and did not desire to or attempt to change the condition of large numbers of women. Other women involved in social reform movements, such as Chartists, abolitionists, and temperance activists, had campaigned primarily for a cause other than women's rights and added women's rights to their agenda, not as their primary issue, but as a secondary issues that had to be tackled to enable them to more efficiently campaign for their chosen cause. In other cases where the issue of woman's rights was the primary focus of the group, the women were on the fringe of society and lacked that always important informal access to the rich and powerful, the people of influence who change the laws. In still other cases, the women lacked money to publish and distribute materials or to finance the other basic activities of an organization. In yet other cases, women just lacked the time and energy to devote to changing the laws – they were too busy dealing with the demands of life, being a wife, mother, and possibly a paid laborer in the era before labor saving electric appliances, indoor plumbing including hot and cold running water, central heat, and factory preserved and fast foods.
Bodichon was the right person at the right place at the right time to jump-start the women's movement: she had money to finance a reform organization, she had connections in many of the leading reform circles which enabled her to draw social activists into her organization, she knew the people whose public espousal of the cause was invaluable, she was educated enabling her to communicate with the "right people" using ideas they would support, and she had the time, energy, and will to tackle women's rights issues. Yet, Bodichon, despite her wealth, was not completely accepted in the highest social circles because of her illegitimate birth. As a consequence, in the years to come, she would often play a behind-the-scenes role and leave the public roles to other, more socially accepted, women.
Stressed from the over work in the Married Woman's Property Rights campaign, in the fall of 1856 Barbara's family took her to Algeria for rest and recuperation. There she met Eugene Bodichon, a French physician some 17 years her senior and an anti-slavery activist. The couple was engaged in April 1857 and married in a Unitarian Chapel the following July. In addition to being a social liberal and activist, perhaps most importantly in Barbara's eyes, Eugene Bodichon was willing to spend six months of the year in England so that Barbara could maintain her reforminst activities in her native land and spend the other six months of the year in Algeria a more conventional family.
During her 1858 honeymoon trip to US, she met influential feminists and gathered information about the institution of slavery. On returning to England, Bodichon published a scathing attack of slavery and critiqued earlier writers on the subject for their inaccurate portrayal of slavery.
In 1858 Bodichon took up a new cause: expanding employment opportunities for women. In that year she established the English Women's Journal, an organ for discussing women and both manual or intellectual industrial employment, the best method of expanding employment opportunities for women, and the reform of laws pertaining to the sexes. The Journal, which lasted until 1864, was the method by which woman's rights activists both in London and in the provinces exchanged information. The tone was moderate, not radical, since Bodichon was hoping to use the Journal to attract support for the movement. The offices of the Journal at Langham Place became the focus of a new feminist movement, and in July 1859 the Society for the Promotion for the Employment of Women was established. The Society tackled a number of employment related problems: opening bookkeeping to women, encouraging immigration to Australia, and opening professions to women. Even after the Journal ceased publication, the Society remained active. So many campaigns were begun that the movement began to split apart and new splinter organizations were formed: some women to work on establishing colleges for women, others to work on legal reform, still others to work on improving the conditions of working-class women. So began the great organization building campaigns for the Britain feminist movement during the third quarter of the 19th century.
By the 1860s, the nascent British woman's movement was out-growing its toehold among the "proper sort of people" and the woman's movement was thriving. Within a generation, woman's rights activism would become down-right acceptable, certainly, no longer radical and revolutionary. As noted earlier in this series, in 1866 Barbara Bodichon contacted Helen Taylor for advice on submitting a woman suffrage petition to Parliament via the services of Taylor's step-father MP John Stuart Mill. After an encouraging reply, Bodichon once again used her network of contacts in the woman's rights movement, this time to collect 1500 signatures on a woman suffrage petition in about a fortnight. As with her earlier campaigns, Bodichon enlisted a critical mass of women in the project while it was still in its "rotten egg" stage – the period when advocates are liable to have rotten eggs and worse thrown at them -- , then bowed out to work on a new reform activity. Among Bodichon's other contributions to the suffrage movement were two pamphlets which she authored Objections to the Enfranchisement of Women Considered (1866) and Reasons For and Against the Enfranchisement of Women (1869).
By the 1870s, Bodichon was working on creating a college for women with Emily Davies. Bodichon stayed with this project longer than with the other projects, perhaps because she was no longer in good health and had to work at a slower pace. Finally, in 1877, Bodichon, now fifty years old suffered a stroke. Although she remained interested in a number of woman's rights issues, she would never again be able to pore the vast amount of time and energy into her projects as before and she went into retirement.
Footnotes:
Books by Bodichon:
A Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws of England Concerning Women [London: Holyoake, 1854]
Women and Work [London: Bosworth and Harrison, 1857]
Objections to the Enfranchisement of Women Considered [London: J. Bale, 1866]
Reasons For an Against the Enfranchisement of Women [London: n.p., 1869]
References:
Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement 1830 – 1860 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000]
Shiela R. Herstein, A Mid-Victorian Feminist: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985]
Audrey Oldfield, Woman Suffrage in Australia: A Gift or a Struggle? [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992]
On Line Resources:
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827 – 1891)
Barbara Leigh-Smith [Bodichon], A Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women, Together with a Few Observations Theron, (London,1854), pp. 3-11. (excerpts)
A. P. W. Robson, "The founding of the National Society for Women's Suffrage", Canadian Journal of History, 8 (1973), pp. 1-22.
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last updated February 2003