The great principle of english fair-play: Male champions, the english women's movement and the admission of women to the pharmaceutical society in 1879

Women's History Review

Volumn 7, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 381-410

  Jordan, Ellen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0012936818     PISSN: 09612025     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09612029800200178     Document Type: Review

References (98)

1. Louisa M Hubbard (1875) The Year Book of Women's Work, pp. 70-71 (London: Labour News);
2. Mercy Grogan (n.d., c.1881) How Women May Earn a Living, pp. 97-99 (London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin);
3. A Amy Bulley & Margaret Whitley (1894) Women's Work, p. 26 (London: Metheun);
4. M Mostyn Bird (1911) Woman at Work: a study of the different ways of earning a living open to women, p. 194 (London: Chapman & Hall).
5. Jo Manton (1965) Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, p. 301 (London: Methuen).
6. Although the physicians, surgeons and apothecaries had old established royal charters while the Pharmaceutical Society did not receive state recognition until 1852, chemists and druggists were sufficiently organised by the beginning of the nineteenth century to resist the medical profession's attempts to control or outlaw them. In 1802, for example, they were vocal in their opposition to the unsuccessful bill proposed by the Associated Apothecaries and Surgeon-Apothecaries of England and Wales to set up a body to certify general practitioners, and in 1815 succeeded in gaining exemption from all the penal provisions of the Apothecaries' Act of that year. Furthermore, the registration of pharmacists followed quickly on the heels of that of the medical profession. The Register of Chemists and Druggists was established in 1868, only 10 years after the Act of 1858 set up the Medical Register. (Jacob Bell & Theophilus Redwood [1880] Historical Sketch of the Progress of Pharmacy in Great Britain, pp. 47-57, 60-67 [London: Pharmaceutical Society];
7. S. W. F. Holloway [1991] The Royal Pharmaceutical Society, pp. 87-96 [London: The Pharmaceutical Press].)
8. Holloway, The Royal Pharmaceutical Society, pp. 261-265;
9. Manton, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, pp. 240-258.
10. Ivy Pinchbeck (1969 reprint edition) Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (London: Cass; first published 1930);
11. Jane Rendall (1990) Women in an Industrializing Society: England, 1750-1880 (Oxford: Blackwell);
12. Ray Strachey (1978 reprint edition) The Cause: a short history of the women's movement in Great Britain (London: Virago; first published 1928, London: G. Bell & Sons);
13. Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets & William Veeder (1983) The Woman Question: society and literature in Britain and America, 1837-1883 (New York: Garland);
14. Philippa Levine (1987) Victorian Feminism, 1850-1900 (London: Hutchinson).
15. Strachey, The Cause, p. 98.
16. Lee Holcombe (1973) Victorian Ladies at Work: middle class working women in England and Wales, 1850-1914, pp. 12, 104-107, 141-142 (Newton Abbot: David & Charles);
17. Philippa Levine (1990) Feminist Lives in Victorian England: private roles and public commitment, pp. 127-128 (Oxford: Blackwell).
18. Grogan, How Women May Earn a Living, p. 71.
19. Chemist and Druggist, 13, 15 August 1872, pp. 245-246.
20. Margaret Todd (1918) The Life of Sophia Jex-Blake (London: Macmillan);
21. Barbara Stephen (1927) Emily Davies and Girton College (London: Constable);
22. Hester Burton (1949) Barbara Bodichon, 1827-1891 (London: Murray);
23. E. Moberly Bell (1953) Storming the Citadel: the rise of the woman doctor (London: Constable);
24. Josephine Kamm (1971) Indicative Past: a hundred years of the Girls' Public Day School Trust (London: Unwin);
25. For example, when Emily Davies was working behind the scenes to have witnesses favourable to the cause of women's education called before the Schools Enquiry Commission of 1864-1866, she wrote: "It seems to me the most rational plan to examine schoolmistresses, who know the subject, but considering the Commissioners' native propensities, and also that the evidence of distinguished people has some chance of being read, it might answer our purposes best to get some men like Mark Pattison and Lord Wrottesley to testify. I don't think they know anything, but they might be primed." (quoted in Stephen, Emily Davies, p. 132).
26. Jane Rendall (1991) Uneven developments: women's history, feminist history, and gender history in Great Britain, in Karen Offen, Ruth Roach Pierson & Jane Rendall (Eds) Writing Women's History: international perspectives (London: Macmillan).
27. For example: Olive Banks (1986) Becoming a Feminist: the social origins of first wave'feminism (London: Wheatsheaf);
28. Barbara Caine (1992) Victorian Feminists (Oxford: Oxford University Press);
29. Sandra Stanley Holton (1986) Feminism and Democracy: women's suffrage and reform politics in Britain, 1900-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press);
30. Mary Lyndon Shanley (1990) Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England,1850-1895 (London: Taurus).
31. For example: Margaret Bryant (1979) The Unexpected Revolution: a study of the history of the education of women and girls in the nineteenth century (London: University of London Institute of Education);
32. Sara Delamont (1978) The contradictions in ladies' education, and The domestic ideology and women's education, in Sara Delamont & Lorna Duffin (Eds) The Nineteenth Century Woman: her cultural and physical world, pp. 134-187 (London: Croom Helm);
33. Ellen Jordan (1991) 'Making good wives and mothers'? The transformation of middle class girls' education in nineteenth century Britain, History of Education Quarterly, 31, pp. 439462;
34. Rita McWilliams-Tullberg (1975) Women at Cambridge: a men's university - though of a mixed type, (London: Victor Gollancz);
35. Joyce Senders Pederson (1989) The Reform of Girls' Secondary and Higher Education in Victorian England: a study of élites and educational change (New York: Garland);
36. June Purvis (1991) A History of Women's Education in England (Milton Keynes: Open University Press).
37. Levine, Feminist Lives, pp. 128-129, 152-153;
38. Christine Bolt (1993) The Women's Movements in the United States and Britain from the 1790s to the 1920s, pp. 113-114, 109 (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf).
39. Other recent works scarcely mention the movement's concern with work, for example, Caine, Victorian Feminists, Kathryn Gleadle (1995) The Early Feminists: radical unitarians and the emergence of the women's rights movement (London: Macmillan);
40. Sandra Stanley Holton (1996) Suffrage Days: stories from the women's suffrage movement (London: Routledge).
41. Shirley Roberts (1993) Sophia Jex-Blake: a woman pioneer in nineteenth-century medical reform, p. 4 (London: Routledge). Even this, the most recent biography of one of these medical pioneers, is cast as a 'freedom narrative', the author writing (p. 4): "The heroine of this story is Sophia Jex-Blake. Without her courage and tenacity women would probably have been debarred from the practice of medicine for several more decades".
42. Michele Barrett (1992) Words and things: materialism and method in contemporary feminist analysis, in Michelle Barrett & Anne Phillips (Eds) Destabilizing Theory, p. 202 (Cambridge: Polity Press).
43. Susan Kingsley Kent (1996) Mistrials and diatribulations: a reply to Joan Hoff, Women's History Review, 5, pp. 11-12;
44. Ava Baron (1991) Introduction, in Ava Baron (Ed.) Work Engendered: toward a new history of American labor, p. 31 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).
45. Valerie Walkerdine (1990) Schoolgirl Fictions, p. 14 (London: Verso);
46. Chris Weedon (1987) Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, pp. 108-109 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).
47. Barrett, 'Words and things', pp. 202-204;
48. Nancy Fraser & Linda Nicholson (1988) Social criticism without philosophy: an encounter between feminism and postmodernism, in Andrew Ross (Ed.) Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism, pp. 91-92 (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press).
49. This has already been done to a limited extent by S. W. F. Holloway, but the material allows for further, more detailed, exploration.
50. Pharmaceutical Journal and Transactions, 3 (24 May 1873), p. 936.
51. Randall Collins (1990) Changing conceptions in the sociology of the professions, in Rolf Torstendahl & Michael Burrage (Eds) The Formation of Professions, pp. 11-23 (London: Sage);
52. Eliot Freidson (1970) Professional Dominance: the social structure of medical care, pp. 83-87, 93-99 (New York: Aldine);
53. M Jeanne Peterson (1978) The Medical Profession in Mid-Victorian London, pp. 283-287 (Berkeley: University of California Press);
54. W. J. Reader (1966) Professional Men: the rise of the professional classes in nineteenth century England, pp. 25-72 (London: Weidenfeld &Nicolson);
55. Anne Witz (1992) Professions and Patriarchy, pp. 4045 (London: Routledge).
56. Mrs Bayle Bernard (1868) Pharmacy as an employment for women, Englishwoman's Review, I (First Series), pp. 348-353;
57. Reader, Professional Men, pp. 32-33.
58. Bernard, 'Pharmacy as an employment for women', p. 348.
59. Pharmaceutical Journal and Transactions, 3 (1 October 1862), pp. 141-143;
60. Collins, 'Changing conceptions', p. 16;
61. Witz, Professions and Patriarchy, pp. 4344.
62. The Public General Statutes, with a List of the Local and Private Acts, Passed in the Thirty-First and Thirty-Second Years of the Reign of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, 3 (1868) pp. 1002-1013 (London: HMSO);
63. The Public General Statutes, p. 1003.
64. Pharmaceutical Journal and Transactions, 3 (5 October 1872), pp. 268-269; (9 November 1872), pp. 366-367; (7 December 1872), pp. 456457.
65. Englishwoman's Review, N.S. 4 (January 1873), pp. 66-67.
66. Englishwoman's Review, N.S. 10 (July 1879), pp. 294.
67. Two of the women who took the examination in 1872, Alice Vickery and Alice Hart (still at that time Alice Rowland), had their certificates accepted by the Pharmaceutical Society in the same year "in lieu of the Preliminary Examination (Examination in Arts Candidates Entry Book: London Guildhall Library, Ms 10,981 Vol. 1; Pharmaceutical Journal and Transactions, 19 October 1872, p, 308; 30 November 1872), Both were, however, more interested in gaining medical qualifications than practising pharmacy.
68. Alice Hart gained certificates in botany and physiology from the School in 1875 and 1876, but then seems to have abandoned her studies. (Report of the London School of Medicine for Women, 30 Henrietta Street, Brunswick Square, W.C. [London, West Central] May 1878. London: 1878. Fawcett Library: 610.711421) She is described in the census of 1881 as "surgeon's wife".
69. Such champions arose in other unexpected places. Emily Davies, the campaigner for university education, wrote to her friend Barbara Bodichon on 19 February 1866: "Mr Charles is getting up our case for the London University in a most businesslike manner. He is a very able man, a barrister, & is likely I believe to take a high stand in his profession. What possesses him to take up our cause, nobody knows. His goodness is quite spontaneous & unaccounted for" (Emily Davies & Barbara Bodichon, The Papers of Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon: from Girton College, Cambridge [Harvester Microform: B305]).
70. Jessie Boucherett (1884) The industrial movement, in Theodore Stanton (Ed.) The Woman Question in Europe, pp. 97-100 (London: Sampson Low);
71. Englishwoman's Review, F.S. (April 1867), p. 131.
72. Englishwoman 's Review, N.S. 1 (April 1870), pp. 115-116;
73. Emily Faithfull (1871) Women's work, with special reference to industrial employment, Journal of the Society of Arts, pp. 378-383. By 1876 young women were working as dispensers in Elizabeth Garrett Anderson's New Hospital for Women, at the Hospital for Women and Children at Bethnal Green for which she was a consultant, and at the Eye Dispensary in Marylebone.
74. Englishwoman's Review, N.S. 7 (May 1876), p. 224).
75. Chemist and Druggist, 14 (14 June 1873), p. 199.
76. Pharmaceutical Journal and Transactions, Ibid. (22 February 1873), p. 679.
77. Sally Alexander (1984) Women, class and sexual differences in the 1830s and 1840s: some reflections on the writing of feminist history, History Workshop Journal, 17, pp. 123449;
78. Harold Benenson (1984) Victorian sexual ideology and Marx's theory of working class, International Labor and Working Class History, 28, pp. 1-23;
79. Cynthia Cockburn (1983) Brothers: male dominance and technological change (London: Pluto Press).
80. One of the major arguments used in the campaign for women doctors was that women would rather discuss their ailments with another woman (Anne Digby [1994] Making a Medical Living: doctors and patients in the English market for medicine, 1720-1911, p. 295 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press])
81. and by the 1890s women chemists were claiming that female customers found it "more comfortable" to discuss their requirements with another woman (Chemist and Druggist, 41 [30 July 1892], pp. 143-146). In the debates of the 1870s, however, only the possible embarrassment to men seems to have been raised.
82. The term 'domestic ideology' is used more frequently by British historians (Delamont, The domestic ideology and women's education', p. 164)
83. Davidoff L.,Hall C. (1987) Family Fortunes: Men And Women Of The English Middle Class 1750-1850 (chicago University Of Chicago 'The Cult Of True Womanhood' Is The More Usual Term In The Works Of Historians From The Usa For Example Helsinger et al The Woman Question.
84. Chemist and Druggist, 14 (18 May 1878), p. 13.
85. The significant passage (which had inspired Jessie Boucherett to found the Employment Society) ran: "The tale is plain enough - from whatever mouth it comes. So far from our countrywomen being all maintained, as a matter of course by us, The Breadwinners', three millions out of six adult Englishwomen work for subsistence; and two out of the three in independence. With this new condition of affairs, new duties and new views must be accepted" (Harriet Martineau [1859] Female industry, Edinburgh Review, 109, p. 336).
86. Davidoff & Hall, Family Fortunes, pp. 130-148;
87. Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, pp. 282-286.
88. Englishwoman's Review, N.S. 5 (October 1874), p. 273; 6 (May 1875), p. 223; 7 (April 1876), p. 170;
89. Pharmaceutical Journal and Transactions, 4 (2 May 1874) p. 881; 5 (24 April 1875) p. 851; 6 (18 December 1875) p. 493;
90. Margaret Buchanan & Anne Neve (1926) The late Mrs Cloarke-Keer, Pharmaceutical Journal and Pharmacist (18 September 1926) pp. 374-375.I have found the entries for the families of Rose Minshull and Isabella Clarke (but unfortunately not Louisa Stammwitz) in the 1881 census enumerators' books, and these reveal that they were typical of the group of women the Employment Society sought to help. Both were in their thirties, living with elderly parents and with unmarried younger sisters. In the 1881 census Rose Minshull was recorded as aged 34, living with a 70 year-old bristle merchant father and a 33 year-old dispenser sister.
91. According to a late undocumented source, Isabella Clarke's father had been a solicitor (E. J. Shellard [1996] Some outstanding women pharmacists of the late 19th century, unpublished manuscript, Museum of Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, p. 2), but by the time of the 1881 census she was aged 38, and living with a widowed mother of 73 and two unmarried sisters (aged 36 and 34), one of whom was a dispenser and the other an artist.
92. Bulley & Whitley, Women's Work, p. 26.
93. Pharmaceutical Journal and Transactions, 7 (8 July 1876), p. 31.
94. Pharmaceutical Journal and Transactions, Ibid., 8 (25 May 1878), pp. 924-926.
95. Chemist and Druggist, 22 (14 June 1879), p. 92.
96. Pharmaceutical Journal and Transactions, 10 (4 October 1879), pp. 265-267.
97. Lady-pharmacists, Chemist and Druggist, 41 (July 30, 1892), pp. 143-146;
98. Buchanan & Neve, 'The late Mrs Clarke-Keer', pp. 374-375.