Struggle and Suffrage in Chelmsford: Women's Lives and the Fight for Equality

By Stephen Wynn

An in-depth history of the fight for women’s rights over a century in one English city.
 
Struggle and Suffrage in Chelmsford is a comprehensive account of what life was like for women in Chelmsford, England from 1850-1950. It takes the reader on an in-depth and interesting journey, starting from when a woman, as far as both the law of the land and certain elements of society had decided, was worthless with little or no rights. With the birth of women’s suffrage movements gaining recognition on a national level during the latter years of the nineteenth century, the book looks at how this affected the lives of women throughout Chelmsford.
 
The story continues in to the twentieth century and the years of the years of the First World War, which was without question a major turning point in women’s suffrage. The book explores what women achieved throughout the war, in the jobs they undertook and the voluntary work they carried out. It was a time that provided women with freedom and power the likes of which they’d never known before. Attitudes towards divorce and how they changed over time are also discussed—from being a religious stigma around the time of the First World War, to being a life choice in the much more promiscuous times of the Second World War, by which time latex male contraceptives had been available for about twenty years. An informative and fascinating read, Struggle and Suffrage in Chelmsford provides a compelling and moving account of the lives of the town’s women throughout this turbulent era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526716088

Stephen Wynn

Stephen is a retired police officer having served with Essex Police as a constable for thirty years between 1983 and 2013. He is married to Tanya and has two sons, Luke and Ross, and a daughter, Aimee. His sons served five tours of Afghanistan between 2008 and 2013 and both were injured. This led to the publication of his first book, Two Sons in a Warzone – Afghanistan: The True Story of a Father’s Conflict, published in October 2010. Both Stephen’s grandfathers served in and survived the First World War, one with the Royal Irish Rifles, the other in the Mercantile Marine, whilst his father was a member of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps during the Second World War.When not writing Stephen can be found walking his three German Shepherd dogs with his wife Tanya, at some unearthly time of the morning, when most normal people are still fast asleep.

Book preview

Introduction

The Chelmsford of 2017 has city status, an honour bestowed on upon it on 14 March 2012. Before that it was the county town of Essex and had been since around 1218. Chelmsford officially came in to being as a town in 1199 when a Royal Charter was granted for the holding of a market. The town had been known as Celmeresford since the time of the Domesday Book in 1066, and this was only changed to Chelmsford in 1189.

Archaeological finds in the area have provided evidence for sites dating back to Neolithic times, as well as the late Bronze Age, and the town was also home to the Romans in about AD 60. The building of a fort suggests that the town, then called Caesaromagus, meaning the market place of Caesar, was a place of some importance. Indeed, it was situated at about the halfway point of the Roman road (today’s A12) which ran from Londinium (London) to Camulodonum (Colchester).

After the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was put down in London by King Richard ll, who at the time was only 14 years of age, he and his entourage moved to Chelmsford for a week or so in July 1381, which in effect made the town the nation’s capital.

Over the years the town kept its royal connections. In 1517, on the site where today’s New Hall School stands, King Henry Vlll acquired the estate and called it Beaulieu, and for many years it was home to his daughter, Mary Tudor. In later years it came in to the possession of Queen Elizabeth l and Oliver Cromwell.

During the Second World War numerous bombing raids by the German Luftwaffe saw a number of townspeople killed, many of them women.

This book considers the lives of the women of Chelmsford during the period 1850–1950. This particular period saw hugeadvancements for women, although they didn’t stop there, with things gradually improving through to today. In the main it will look at their achievements and how many of them broke away from the stereotypical, yet also traditional, roles of mother, homemaker and housewife, to become breadwinners and achievers in their own right.

What did women’s lives look like in 1850? For women of the lower classes, the best that could be hoped for in life was possibly marriage, as with it came a degree of security, although that is not to say that life for them was easy. For those who didn’t acquire such status, all they had to look forward to was uncertainty, poverty, destitution, starvation and possibly even prostitution, the latter just as a means of survival.

Education wasn’t widespread in 1850. In fact, literacy amongst the lower classes was still not seen as important, even into the early years of the twentieth century. After all, why teach a woman who was either going to spend her life in service, or as a wife and mother, to read and write?

The book will look at the working roles that were available to women and the wages they could expect to earn for their endeavours. For those who worked, which in most cases meant the young and those who weren’t married, there was a limited number of roles available. Domestic service; working as a cook or servant; in a factory, where conditions were often harsh, hours were long and laborious and the pay wasn’t anything to shout about. For others their working life might have been spent behind the bar of an inn, serving drunks and down and outs.

For women from the better classes of society who didn’t marry, their expectations were somewhat higher. A teacher in a primary school, maybe, a nurse, private nanny, a shop assistant. All of which would have certainly come with better working environments than those from lower classes had to endure.

By 1950, the world was an entirely different place. Life had changed drastically for women, with their expectations about life and what they wanted from it, much greater than they had been 100 years earlier. The First World War had seen a massive change for women throughout society in general, and twenty-seven years later there would be more change and upheaval in the aftermath of the Second World War.

CHAPTER ONE

Women’s Health

The Contagious Diseases Act 1864 was brought in to deal with the growing number of cases of members of the armed forces contracting venereal diseases through their contact with prostitutes. Official figures show that by 1864, one out of every three cases of a soldier reporting sick was related to a venereal disease from a prostitute. The problems were much worse in and around garrison towns where there were large numbers of young soldiers with time on their hands and money to spend, especially on Friday and Saturday nights. The problem became so bad that the original Act required further amendments in 1866 and 1869.

The original 1864 Act allowed police to arrest women they suspected of working as prostitutes, but only in certain towns that had naval ports or were established Army garrison towns. By 1869 however, the number of specified towns had risen to eighteen. Once arrested, the women were then subjected to compulsory examinations, to see if they were infected with any form of venereal disease. If they were, they could be confined in what was called a lock hospital, which was simply a medical facility that specialised in the treatment of venereal diseases. There they would remain until their treatment was complete and they were free of the disease. The original Act of 1864 allowed for women to be detained for up to three months, but by 1869, lessons had been learnt, and the period of time a woman could be detained had been increased to a year. A problem with these lock hospitals, or rather the voluntary ones, was that there wasn’t enough of them. In 1882, it was estimated that there were 402 beds for female patients, but only 232 of these were available for use at any given time. The only other option for women who believed they may have contracted a venereal disease was to take themselves off to their local workhouse infirmary.

A good analogy would be to compare, say, the proven health risks associated with smoking compared with the costs to the NHS of treating related illnesses. The government still won’t ban smoking because of the large sum of money it receives in the way of tax from the sales of tobacco related items.

Prostitutes were seen as a necessary evil, soldiers were often unmarried and acts of homosexuality constituted a criminal offence. Both senior military personnel and members of the medical world saw the detaining of prostitutes in lock hospitals as an effective means of helping prevent the spread of venereal diseases.

One of the main stumbling blocks, as far as reformists and other individuals who possessed a balanced and, let’s say, a more forward thinking approach to such matters, questioned why there was no provision in the Act for the examination of prostitutes’ clients who, common sense suggested, were just as guilty of the spreading of venereal diseases as the prostitutes themselves. This very point became a major bone of contention in the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts.

In some ways, the debate just highlighted the inequality between the two sexes and became the touch paper which ignited the flame for women organising themselves and to begin actively campaigning for their rights.

Josephine Elizabeth Butler was a feminist and a social reformer and in 1869 she became involved in the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts, which was finally achieved in 1886. According to an article on Wikipedia, in one of her public letters on the matter she included a personal account by a prostitute on her dealings with men. What the woman said was profound:

It is men, only men, from the first to the last that we have to do with! To please a man I did wrong at first, then I was flung about from man to man. Men Police lay hands upon us. By men we are examined, handled, doctored. In the hospital it is a man again who makes prayer and reads the bible for us. We are had up before the magistrates who are men, and we never get out of the hands of men till we die.

Victorian England was awash with large numbers of prostitutes, possibly a reflection of the utter destitution and feelings of helplessness these women found themselves in. The majority of prostitutes were from the working classes, women who had little in the way of an education in their formative years, and prostitution was simply the best way they had of earning a living, despite the inherent dangers that went with the job. Most of the jobs that would have been available to them would have meant working extremely long hours for a very poor wage. Complain, and the likelihood would have been the sack.

One of the main problems of dealing with the spreading of venereal diseases by prostitutes, was nobody really knew just how many there were. There were estimations made by different organisations, but how much value they had was questionable. Even the police could only go on the number of prostitutes they arrested for the figures which they produced. For every one that was arrested, there might be three, four, five, or more that never came to their attention, and there in part lay the problem.

An example of just how difficult life was shown on Tuesday 6 May 1913 when the body of 44-year-old Mary Winifed Brett, born in Chelmsford in 1869, and a single woman who lived at 52 Lower Street, Chelmsford, was found in the River Wid. An inquest into her death heard from Father Shepherd, the priest at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Chelmsford, who knew the deceased quite well. He had seen her the previous afternoon outside Oaklands on London Road. He got off his bicycle and enquired how she was as, besides being a nice person, he knew that she had recently been suffering with her nerves and had previously suffered a breakdown,which she was still recovering from. She appeared quite cheerful, and told Father Shepherd that she was feeling much better within herself and hoped that she would soon be better. Her demeanour seemed positive and he didn’t notice anything odd or unusual about her manner.

Sergeant Smith, stationed at Widford Police station, told the inquest that at 5.45 pm on the evening of Monday, 5 May 1913 he had searched the bank of the River Wid which, he added, was in full flood. After a short search he discovered a lady’s hat, gloves and other articles. The following morning, having received information that Mary Winifred Brett was missing and had been since the previous morning, he decided to drag the river close to the spot where he had found the items the previous afternoon. About 500 yards away from where the items had been discovered, and in about 4 feet of water, Sergeant Smith and a constable discovered a woman’s body, which was later confirmed to be that of Mary Winifred Brett. A Mr Cedric Richards, who was a lodger at the deceased’s house, identified her body.

The jury at the inquest further heard from Dr T.H. Waller, who had been treating Mary Winifred for between three and four months, who provided evidence that she had been suffering from nervous debility. However, she had never displayed any suicidal tendencies when he had seen her. The coroner asked ‘In cases of this sort, these tendencies suddenly develop, do they not?’ Dr Waller replied ‘Oh yes. The deceased was always depressed and generally miserable, but never talked enough to suggest that she was contemplating suicide.’

In summing up, the coroner