Barbara Bodichon was a key figure in the early women’s suffrage movement, organising one of the first women’s suffrage committees and coordinating the first mass petition to go before parliament on the question of enfranchising women.
Bodichon was born in East Sussex in 1827 as the illegitimate daughter of Benjamin Leigh-Smith and Anne Longden, a seventeen year-old milliner. The Leigh-Smiths were a well-known radical Unitarian family. The family home was a frequent meeting place for fellow radicals and political refugees. By the 1850s she became involved with the campaign to amend or repeal laws that limited women’s rights. This came in the wake of the passing of The Interpretation Act 1850, which had stated that the masculine ‘he’ referred to in Acts included women. This was initially viewed as providing women with the same rights as men, but it was later declared that this did not apply to voting rights.
Bodichon’s activity gained the support of other women engaged in campaigning for women’s rights, such as Caroline Norton. Norton was a prominent campaigner on issues connected to the legal status of married women, motivated by her own unhappy experiences of marriage. Bodichon supported Norton by providing evidence for a House of Commons Committee investigating the legal status of women. In 1854, her thoughts on this issue were published in A Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women, Together with a Few Observations Thereon. In 1857, The Matrimonial Causes Act was passed, reforming the law on divorce. It established a model of marriage based on contract rather than sacrament and widened the availability of divorce beyond those who could afford it. Whilst the Act achieved much, it still had its critics and Bodichon was one. In that same year, she published Women and Work where she argued that a married women’s dependence on her husband was still degrading. She also believed that divorce was still easier for men than women and there remained much to be achieved. However, one significant advancement was achieved: the protection of divorced women’s property. Between 1857 and 1878 the Act was amended a total of thirteen times.
By this point, Bodichon’s published work placed her within London’s feminist community. In 1858 Barbara, along with her friends, Matilda Mary Hays and Bessie Rayner Parkes, founded the Englishwoman’s Journal (later replaced by the Englishwoman’s Review in 1866). The journal was used to discuss female employment and equality issues concerning, in particular, manual or intellectual industrial employment, the expansion of employment opportunities and the reform of gender based laws.
From these humble beginnings, Bodichon used the journal’s offices as a meeting place for like-minded women – this group would later become known as the Langham Place Group. Members of this group included women such as Elizabeth Garret, Helen Taylor, and Jessie Boucherett. Among the group’s activities was the establishment of the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women whose work sought to increase women’s employment opportunities by providing apprenticeships and technical training. These meetings later moved to Elizabeth Garret’s home in Kensington, and with this move, the name of the group changed too, becoming known as The Kensington Society.
Initially, the group was small – containing only eleven female members – nine of whom were unmarried. On the 21 November 1865, following the prompting of Bodichon and Helen Taylor, the society discussed the topic of parliamentary reform. Bodichon then established the first women’s suffrage committee to coordinate a petition that would call for the extension of the vote. The petition, containing the signatures of 1,500 women, was taken to Westminster by Emily Davies and Elizabeth Garrett and, so the story goes, was smuggled into Parliament under an apple cart, where it was collected by the MP John Stuart Mill. Mill presented the petition to Parliament on 7th June 1866, before speaking on it on 17th June. He declared that the petition marked the first instance of women demonstrating their desire to receive the vote, using the fact that this petition was both organised and exclusively signed by women. The following year Mill managed to initiate the first parliamentary debate on votes for women. During the passage of the Second Reform Bill, he sought to replace the word ‘man’ with ‘person’ – effectively giving women the same political rights. But his attempt ultimately failed.
Bodichon continued to press on with the campaign for the vote. The Kensington Society formed the National Society for Women’s Suffrage (NSWS), campaigning through speeches and articles. Notable members included Millicent Fawcett, Lydia Becker and Jessie Boucherett. John Stuart Mill became president of the society. The activities of NSWS inspired others in cities such as Manchester and Birmingham to form their own societies, which in 1897 then combined to create the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS).
Bodichon’s work inspired many women across the country. This, together with the peaceful demonstrations of suffragists and later militant actions, imprisonment and even the death of suffragettes, increased the pressure on government to recognise the injustices of the legal and political systems in the UK.
Barbara Bodichon died in Hastings in 1891 leaving a substantial sum to Girton College, Cambridge, but like so many of her colleagues who struggled and suffered to give modern women (almost) equal rights, she is, today, often overlooked.
By John Croxford, Hamilton Dempsey and Bill Stevenson, U3A Shared Learning Project researchers for the Citizens Project.
