Ladies Who Punch: Fifty Trailblazing Women Whose Stories You Should Know

By Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Throughout history, plucky, indomitable, daring, fearless women and girls have done what they felt they had to and, intentionally or otherwise, upended the social order and common values. This collection remembers ladies who punched their way through life in the past, whilst also recognising today's amazing rebels.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biteback Publishing
• Release date: Sep 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785906282

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes on politics, multiracial societies, faith and human rights for various newspapers including the i and the Evening Standard and appears regularly on TV and radio.

Book preview

PART ONE

REMEMBER THEM

‘I do not wish [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.’

Mary Wollstonecraft 

CHAPTER 1

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT (1759–1797)

THE ORIGINAL REBEL-LIBBER

Wollstonecraft was a writer, a freethinker and an early crusader for the rights of women.

Mary Wollstonecraft is the mother of Western feminism. The British lioness gets pride of place in that history. Through each passing epoch, their ideas and deeds provide renewal and fresh impetus for new generations. However, lasting influence is not assured. Too many women of substance fade into obscurity or, just as problematically, are idolised, their stories and characters simplified and compacted.

Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Andrea Dworkin, Audre Lorde and other names are ritually venerated. But formulaic memorialisation can reduce them to platitudes and banalities. Wollstonecraft, an original thinker, was misrepresented and misunderstood in her lifetime and since then, like a blue plaque, she has been fixed in her time and place. Liberate her from sanctification, so she can liberate us. In the course of writing this book, revisiting her many lives and lamentable death was deeply moving; her insightful works resonated anew.

Mary was born in Spitalfields, London, the second of seven children. Claire Tomalin’s biography provides the most intimate and graphic account of Wollstonecraft’s early years. Her father, Edward John, was ‘sporadically affectionate, occasionally violent, not to be relied on for anything, least of all for loving attention’.¹ He was a wife beater and adamantly opposed to female education. Her mother, Elizabeth, was besotted with her firstborn son, Ned, and uninterested in Mary. All too soon another son was born and died. Other pregnancies followed. Mary was pushed further away.

Edward John was feckless and careless. He moved the family all around the country to escape creditors and ‘start again’. This happened at least seven times. Over those years, Mary handed over to her profligate father the small inheritance she was given by her maternal grandparents in exchange for a bit more personal independence. Mary’s paternal grandfather, Edward Wollstonecraft, born in 1688, was a wealthy silk merchant. At some point Mary learnt that only Ned, the oldest boy, would inherit their grandfather’s fortune and that the rest of the grandchildren – three girls and two boys – were to get nothing at all.

Little wonder, then, that the bright young girl felt rootless and perpetually sinned against. Both would serve her well later on. As Tomalin notes, ‘A sense of grievance may have been her most important endowment.’ That made her fervent and unbending.

As she grew older, Mary became properly independent. She promised herself she would never be like her mother, that she would blaze through life on her own terms. And she did, at a time when the best of men were patronising and the worst rude, rough and cruelly dominant. Back then, women were expected to look gorgeous, wear agonising corsets, abide by sexual mores. By the age of fifteen, Mary had become a rebel, a questioner. Why was Ned the Favoured One? Why was Ned rich? Why did he torment her? She would get infatuated with female friends and emote unrestrainedly. She stayed alone in her room, to think and be. She was a handful. Some of her personal pain and furies were vented in Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, a radical feminist novel published posthumously. By then, she had published her greatest treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792. The book brought her fame and infamy and is her priceless bequest to modern women.*

In primary school in Uganda, my old homeland, we used to sing a nursery rhyme about a soldier who courted a young beauty. Upon discovering she had no fortune, he says, ‘Then I can’t marry you, my pretty maid.’ She retorts, ‘Nobody asked you, Sir.’ My teacher, Mrs Milner, a fiery feminist, loved the rhyme. When I was a teenager, she gave me A Vindication and it remains one of my indispensable guidebooks on sexism.

Here are a few choice statements from the book: ‘I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.’ And: ‘My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.’ And:

men endeavour to sink us still lower, merely to render us alluring objects for a moment; and women, intoxicated by the adoration which men, under the influence of their senses, pay them, do not seek to obtain a durable interest in their hearts, or to become the friends of the fellow creatures who find amusement in their society.

And: ‘It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.’ Furthermore, according to her biographer, Claire Tomalin, Wollstonecraft strongly believed that ‘total financial dependence by one sex on the other robbed both of dignity’. The feminist philosopher also coined the phrase ‘marriage is legal prostitution’. She was a radical influencer who juddered the status quo and changed the rules of the gender game.

Jane Austen’s Emma and Dorothea in Middlemarch by George Eliot – and indeed Eliot herself – are embodiments of Wollstonecraft’s assertive femininity; Millicent Fawcett paid the writer homage; so too did Virginia Woolf. Caitlin Moran, the lively and persuasive contemporary feminist, adulates her because she ‘was so ballsy…’²

For Wollstonecraft, freedom was her faith, her life. Her crusade was embedded in wider revolutionary politics. She was among the first British women to condemn slavery and the slave trade. She had lovers, among them Gilbert Imlay, an American she met in Paris during the French revolutionary period when there were massive uprisings against the monarchy and aristocracy.† He excited her and gave her sexual pleasure but was a rake. She had an illegitimate child by Imlay and was heartbroken when he rejected her. There were two attempted suicides. Mary was in a bad way but not broken. She was too interested in the bigger life, in politics and justice, to weep for ever for love. Back in England she found kindred spirits. One day, she was animatedly talking to Thomas Paine, whose book Rights of Man inspired American and French in-surgents, when she noticed a chap waiting to get a word in. It was journalist and philosopher William Godwin. They were to become intellectual and political comrades and impassioned lovers. Mary got pregnant, and they married in March 1797. People were shocked and horrified, of course.

That August, their baby Mary was born, but there were complications and the mother died. Little Mary’s life was also to be colourful and painful. She fell in love with the much older married poet Percy Shelley, eloped, scandalised society and at times suffered for her choices. Her lover was not faithful. Three of her babies died, as did her husband, and she raised her only surviving child, a son, alone. In 1816, she wrote Frankenstein. Like her mother, Mary Shelley achieved immortality through the written word. Like her mother, she was strong and wilful and talented and thoroughly modern.

Mary Wollstonecraft still walks among us, carrying her wisdom like a lantern to help us through the darkest moments.

Think of Love Island. Think of the misogynist squads of enraged men who invade social media and public spaces. Think of how women are faring in the formal and informal economies. We are losing some hard-won rights. Globally, girls and women are still seen as second class within families, communities and entire nations. In everything, from the way they are parented, to their physical needs, education, inheritance and guaranteed liberties, males are overvalued and females are beaten down. In Britain, the sixth richest country on earth, thousands of young girls can’t afford sanitary protection and women of all classes endure domestic violence.

Wollstonecraft is the lodestone of unfinished feminism. Mothers and daughters – maybe sons too – should, together, read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It is a vital record, a shoutout, it is fuel for the will needed to confront and end the inequality that began when Eve was burdened with blame and shame by a male god.

Notes

1 Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Penguin, 2012), p. 14.

2 ‘An Interview with Caitlin Moran’, The Hairpin, 7 August 2012.

* Her other books should not be underestimated – they shook the nation when they were published.

† She became disillusioned with the French Revolution after witnessing the way women were treated by the liberators.

CHAPTER 2

ELIZABETH HEYRICK (1769–1831) AND LUCY TOWNSEND (1781–1847)

FIERY ABOLITIONISTS

Heyrick and Townsend were leading figures in the female movements against slavery.

Countless British heroines have vanished in the fogs of yore as truthful, unbiased histories continue to be contested or sidelined. The male gaze, the male interpretation, the male account still has cachet and weight. Too much cachet and too much weight.

Elizabeth Heyrick and Lucy Townsend were leading female abolitionists. They mobilised moral outrage, changed public opinion and stood up for the rights of the enslaved. It’s as if they never were. Mr William Wilberforce and his band of bros get all the credit. It was them who did it, we’re told. Sexist myths have more authority than facts. Always.

Wilberforce was a vocal chauvinist: ‘For ladies to meet, to publish, to go from house to house, stirring up petitions – these appear to me proceedings ill-suited to the female character as delineated in Scripture.’¹ This flawed legislator didn’t merely ruminate about Biblically sanctioned misogyny; he actively kept women out of meetings and campaigns.

Smarter men understood the movement needed active female engagement. One of them was George Stephens:

Ladies’ associations did everything … they circulated publications, they procured the money to publish, they talked, coaxed and lectured, they got up public meetings and filled our halls and platforms … in a word, they formed the cement of the whole anti-slavery building – without their aid we never should have kept standing.²

He was talking about Ann Yearsley, a milkmaid whose profound poems on the inhumanity of the slave trade turned the hearts of many; Sarah, daughter of Josiah, the rich and famous Wedgwood pottery maker; and thousands of other activists of all classes in long skirts and bonnets.

By 1820, anti-slavery societies were springing up across the UK. They were all male. Women providing financial support were taken for granted and ignored. Townsend, feeling frustrated and thwarted, wrote to the renowned abolitionist Thomas Clarkson and asked what she, as a woman, could do to end the evil. He advised her to set up a women’s anti-slavery society. Clarkson, liberal and progressive, had long believed women deserved a full education and a role in public life.

On 8 April 1825, Lucy Townsend organised a meeting in her home and the Female Society for Birmingham was born. All that pent-up energy and fury was put to good use. The society initiated sugar boycotts, lobbied shoppers and shops, produced pamphlets and soon gained members and subscriptions. Their petitions gathered phenomenal support. Female abolitionists were no longer merely dutiful back-room helpers. They were seen and they were heard. The model was replicated internationally.

In the 1780s, Josiah Wedgwood created a seal with a kneeling slave asking, ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’ In the 1820s new seals featured motifs of a female slave asking, ‘Am I not a Woman and a Sister?’³ The images were stamped on the national conscience.

In 1824, Heyrick published a pamphlet arguing for ‘immediate not gradual Abolition’. Her moral grit and clarity of thinking scythed through the excuses made by the pro-slave lobby and their apologists:

The perpetuation of slavery in our West India colonies is not an abstract question, to be settled between the government and the planters; it is one in which we are all implicated, we are all guilty of supporting and perpetuating slavery. The West Indian planter and the people of this country stand in the same moral relation to each other as the thief and receiver of stolen goods.⁴

Gradualist Wilberforce was so incensed by this effrontery he instructed his male cabal not to speak at women’s anti-slavery societies. In 1830, the Birmingham abolitionists decided that their annual £50 donation to the national Anti-Slavery Society would be paid only when the words ‘gradual abolition’ were excised from its aims. The society gave in to this demand.*

A year later, ex-slave Mary Prince published her harrowing autobiography. It galvanised female readers and activists like Townsend and Heyrick. Feminised messaging took off. Emotionally charged tracts, poems and speeches, even workbags embroidered with heartfelt slogans, highlighted the sufferings of female slaves who were forced to work and sexually exploited.

According to historian Clare Midgley, in 1833, ‘The female framers of the largest anti-slavery petition ever presented to the British Parliament explained that their campaign was motivated by a painful and indignant sense of the injuries offered to their own sex.’⁵ The Birmingham society wanted to ‘awaken (at least in the bosom of English women) a deep and lasting compassion, not only for the bodily sufferings of Female Slaves, but also for their moral degradation’.⁶

The tactics worked. We can apply modern tests to judge whether they were ‘matronising’, too tame, too white and middle class, too do-gooding, insufficiently inclusive. Yes, through our eyes, these charges would be answerable. However, back then, British women – whether aristocrats or paupers – were still second-class beings. They took to the moral high ground, agitated against Britain’s slave traders, owners and backers, chose to defend dehumanised and commodified strangers from a distant place. By the 1840s, female anti-slavery societies outnumbered male societies. Without them, the enslaved would have had to wait much longer for liberty, or died before they could know how that felt.

In the end, however, men grabbed (and still keep) the glory. And that injustice is captured in a vast painting which hangs in the National Gallery, by the Victorian artist Benjamin Robert Haydon. He was commissioned to depict the scale and seriousness of an 1840 world anti-slavery convention held in the Freemasons Hall in London. Over 400 delegates were invited. There were rows and angry scenes between sides and egos. And also, predictably, hostile chauvinism. The convention was an inglorious display of the macho culture at the heart of the abolitionist movement. Women were refused permission to speak. In among the hundred attendees painted by Haydon is a tiny bunch of Victorian ladies, small, barely there. One wonders what Townsend and Heyrick felt when they saw the grand and artistically mediocre picture.

You could look at it another way, argues Midgley:

Haydon’s group portrait is exceptional in that it does record the existence of women campaigners. Most other memorials did not. There are no public monuments to women activists to complement those to William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and other male leaders of the movement … In the written memoirs of these men, women tend to appear as helpful and inspirational wives, mothers and daughters rather than as activists in their own right.⁷

This imbalance continues today. The story of abolition is still dominated and validated by gentlemen scholars. In 2013, I was invited to chair a history conference in the Midlands. One of the topics was ‘Slavery and Abolition in the British context’. All four panellists were misters. I declined, and not very politely. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même