Gardenias in January
You may wonder why I
am here? Why is my dress torn, my hair and face blackened. Well the truth is
that I escaped from a fire. I was addressing a crowd in a barn when my
opponents set fire to it. I was on the upper floor speaking to my supporters.
My enemies set fire to the ground floor but I managed to escape thankfully. The
barn didn’t, it went up in smoke, you could see the blaze for miles. They might
have thought they’d won that I was gone, but they were wrong, here I am and I
can still tell the tale.
It’s a story about
power and weakness, men, of course, have the power and they exercise it as they
can. Women do not have the power and so they are weaker not in themselves as I
can testify, but in the face of the law.
Do you know that a
woman if she is found in the street with a man, dare I say it, who is not her
husband, can be arrested, that’s right, arrested on the grounds that if she is
not with her husband she must be a prostitute.
They call it The
Contagious Diseases Act. The politicians
say that they passed the law to protect men.
As if men’s behaviour had nothing to do with it. It was to protect soldiers in garrison towns
at first. They thought that being men they needed sex, they needed to relieve
themselves and better with a woman than each other.
But they didn’t want
disease, venereal disease, to spread throughout the whole of the British Army, so
it was decided to make sure that the women were clean.
So if a woman was going
about her own business, walking down a street in Colchester or Newcastle upon
Tyne or Edinburgh. If she walking out
with a man who was not her husband. Then she could be stopped by a policeman
and arrested. She could be brought before a magistrate, also a man of course,
who could demand that she was examined or face prison.
If she was examined
by a Doctor, also a man whose poking and probing was highly intrusive, highly
personal, her modesty was swept away,
her dignity was lost as she was examined for signs of venereal disease. rape by
statute is what I call it.
If she was declared
clean the decision to release her was made by a man, if not she would be
forcibly held and remitted to the Bridewell, not to be treated you understand
but to be punished, by men.
You might by now be
asking how I a well raised gentlewoman from sweet Glendale in the shadow of the
Cheviot Hills, came to be travelling the land from North to South, East to West
in stagecoach and on carriage talking about this vile act and crusading as I
call it to remove it entirely from the statute book because as I have argued,
over and again it violates the constitutional rights of women as set out very
clearly in the Magna Carta.
Why you might ask
how the daughter of a gentleman and the wife of an Anglican Clergyman, both a
Canon of a Winchester Cathedral and Headmaster of Liverpool College came to be
speaking to senior clergy, politicians, schoolmasters, generals and whoever
would listen, but especially and most importantly to working men and women
whose own daughters were at risk from this vile act, about the morality of men.
I’m not saying that
there isn’t problem with prostitution but sex is not a commodity to be bought
and sold. And when a woman is forced to prostitute herself to feed her
children, it is not the morality of women that is the only issue here. It is also the morality of men as we have
argued in newspaper articles and speeches.
I am so glad and
grateful and so admiring of my gentle husband George who has supported me
throughout my campaign at the risk of the wrath of his lords and masters in the
Church of England and the abuse and scorn of his fellows including members of
parliament who have demanded that he quietens and controls me, his wife. They
wonder what drives me to campaign on behalf of other women less fortunate than
myself.
Let me explain George
was with me that awful day when our beloved Evangeline Mary died at our feet in
the hallway of our house in Cheltenham, a house which had been a delightful
family home until that terrible, terrible evening when we came home from the
theatre.
So delighted was Eva
to see her parents returning home after a pleasant evening that she ran forward
on the upper landing of the house, she must have tripped, maybe over her skirt
or her own dainty feet but as she came to the balustrade she toppled over and
fell to our feet her skull smashed on the marble floor, her blood spilt and my
tears spilt also mingling with her blood on the marble tiles of the hallway.
She lasted a few brief hours before dying in my arms.
After the death of
Evangeline Mary we could no longer remain in the house and before too long but
not soon enough, George was appointed as Principal of Liverpool College and we
were pleased to leave Cheltenham behind.
However the sad, sad
memory of our lovely daughter Eva came with us. We grieved in our hearts and in
our minds for the loss of such a lovely child and in time it seemed I needed to
find a way of assuaging my grief. So I went out to find a grief keener than
mine own in order for mine to become less.
What better place to
find grief in all its forms than the Bridewell. Liverpool Bridewell is an
imposing and grim place its hard exterior and meaner interior meant that for so
many, especially women who had been arrested for vagrancy and prostitution, it
was a place of final resort, beyond it lay nothing but death.
When I first visited
the prison the Governor was shocked and felt that I might bring a little mercy
and consolation to the women, but I needed more than mercy and consolation
myself and so I asked if I could sit with the women at their work if work it
can be called, slavery would be a more apt description of what these poor women
were forced into.
Oakum is a tarry
substance found in rope, once picked from the rope it is used to seal the hulls
of ships. The rope is delivered to the women in the work room of the Bridewell,
it is then untwisted, hard, difficult work, hard on fingers, hard on backs and
unhealthy, hands become twisted and torn and filthy and hard to clean. The rope
must be twisted until the Oakum is revealed and can then be pulled from the
rope, it appears as a tarry corkscrew like material and when it is ready it is
transported from the Bridewell to the shipyards where it is used to seal the
hulls of ships making them watertight and seaworthy.
Here as I worked at
this hard forced labour I began to hear the stories of the women with whom I
was incarcerated. How they had been arrested. How they had become pregnant and
lost a child. How they had been seduced by a wealthy man and then abandoned.
Yes it is a matter
of morality of course but it is also in our society an issue of class for
almost all of these tragic women were the daughters of working men, families
with little money whose daughters went into service and who were vulnerable to
their new masters whims, desires and advances.
I spent many dark
days in the Bridewell and the memory of little Eva accompanied me and helped me
as I came to terms with my grief and it was there that I met the woman who
changed my life and gave me the heart for my great crusade to bring this vile
law to an end and remove it entirely from the statute books.
Mary had been
reduced by men’s iniquity to prostitution, seduced by the master of the house
where she was in service and then having become pregnant thrown onto the
streets without help or support she was imprisoned in the Bridewell until she
became sick with consumption.
Having discussed her
sadness with my dear husband it became clear that she should be welcomed into
our house where she could rest and if not recover from her poor health at least
die in comfort, amongst friends in clean sheets.
When the carriage
carrying her from the Bridewell arrived at our door my dear husband descended
the steps to the pavement, opened the door of her carriage and took her hand as
though she were a great lady and welcome guest which of course she was.
Her last days were
long and painful but as her health declined she became as though wrapt in the
company of angels and spoke of her early days remembering her childhood with
great pleasure and so, began to face her end with quiet dignity.
She died in January 1863
and George agreed when I suggested that as a mark of our respect and love and
as a commitment to the campaign that must follow our earlier work of establishing
a safe non judgemental house which we called an industrial home where the women
we supported could re-establish their lives and move toward independence as
free actors. We decided to fill her casket with white gardenias which we did
whilst quietly weeping for Eva as we did so.
Once I embarked on my great crusade men’s opposition grew
ever more violent and misogynistic I cannot began to tell you what we suffered
as we went about the country speaking against this abuse of women and speaking
for an improvement in the morality of men.
I spent most of the year 1870
travelling up and down the country 3,700 miles, the horses were fairy worn out
I attended and spoke at almost a hundred meetings that year.
However badly the opposition
behaved I could always count on working-class family men, who shared my
outraged at the examination women their daughters, were forced to suffer it was
as I repeatedly said rape, by statute, by surgery by cold steel wielded by men.
There were many attempts to
dissuade me from following my heart and I was often in very real danger.
Of course the real opposition
remained in the background, silent and menacing. They just hired others, petty
hooligans and youths who for a few coppers would seek to disrupt our meetings.
I was no stranger to threats,
abuse, words I barely knew thrown at me along with sticks and stones to break
windows drown out my words even cow dung was thrown, I was no stranger to
abuse.
But I stayed with the campaign, George always
supporting me as he could, and we have made progress, indeed only recently a
great supporter of the act admitted to me that the manifesto
has shaken members of the House of Commons very badly; he went on to admit that
they thought they could manage any opposition in the House or in the country,
but we have made it very awkward for them, a revolt of the women is it seem a
new thing; and they are beginning to ask what are we to do with such an
opposition as this?"
And why am I before
you now like this, ragged and torn looking as though I have escaped from a
firework party that went badly out of control.
I came to Morpeth
only this evening and asked the Vicar if I could hold a rally in his Church or
Church Hall at first he seemed to agree but it seems that others carry more
influence than him either in the Church in indeed, in the town, and so he
withdrew his offer leaving me without a place to speak or anywhere to attract
the crowds we need.
I was saved by the good offices of a well respected working
man of the town who introduced me to a spacious barn just outside the town
where I could hold my rally in the upper floor, the lower floor being stocked
with hay or straw.
I began to speak, describing the effects of this vile act,
its impact on the lives of so many unfortunate women, its destruction of family
life, the distress and misery it causes and why it violates the constitutional
rights of men and women alike.
I was, as I always am, so impassioned as I spoke that I
neither saw or heard the commotion that arose until I began to see smoke rising
up through the floorboards into the chamber where I was speaking.
As so often it was not just those who seduce or rape young
women or those who seek to avail themselves of the services of those forced
into prostitution who sought to silence me, on this occasion it was the pimps,
who pander to the customers to provide sex acts for them for monies.
They had overcome the gentlemen guarding the entry doorway and
set fire to the ground floor which quickly took hold and spread, burning the
ladders leading up to the upper story and trapping both myself and the crowd
and condemning us to death. Fortunately there there present good working folk
who kept their heads about them and so many of the crowd myself included were
lowered through upper windows to the ground below and made our escape.
And so I survive again to tell my story, pursue my campaign
on behalf of young women who have no voice, no means to survive and fall foul
of men’s immorality.
I
am, and always have been uncompromising about this vile act since I picked
oakum in the Bridewell. The state
regulation of contagious diseases enslaves and disenfranchises women for the
benefit of men, who then make the laws that punish women whom they have
enslaved and disenfranchised.
This
must end and it must end now.
