The Sabbatical Report - Feathers

 My research during the next six months is for a book I am writing with a working title of "Feathers". The word is significant because all of the women I am writing about had feathered nests, in other words, enough money to allow them to pursue the things that interested them. These were women who lived in the late 19th and early 20th century whose families allowed and encouraged their intellectual work. They worked alongside men, sometimes husbands but often not,  and ultimately their names were associated with some of the greatest minds of the 20th Century, such as Einstein, Wittgenstein, Malinowski, and lesser known but important reforming intellectuals such as Cornford and Popper.

Court Leys, Oxford, the home of Brenda Seligman whose independent wealth  funded some of the earliest anthropological work in Papua-New Guinea and Australia. She grew iris here and entertained Malinowski.

 Doing this kind of research straightens out my thinking, because like most people I have absorbed Downton Abbey as a kind of arbiter of all things early 20th Century England. Few people lived like that, and although my research subjects had lovely homes and a few servants, they were middle class people without aspirations relating to money and class. Some of them had inherited enough from the Salaman ostrich feather fortune (feathers again!) to never need to worry about work, but they chose to work very hard and made significant contributions to their communities and the academies. None of them lived the lives of the rich and famous. The Salamans were smart with money, and knowing ostrich feathers might go the way of Dutch tulips, they had a huge property investment portfolio in London, which kept about 40 descendants in groceries for more than 50 years.



It is this judicious use of wealth that interests me. I am also interested in how people's values, ethics and morality shapes their contribution to society. Most of my subjects are Jewish women, many of them belonged to the Jewish suffragette movement, and an equal number were Christian women and suffragists. The feminist collaboration across a religious divide actually strengthened the women's commitment to justice, perhaps because the worst expression of misogyny are found in patriarchal religions. Religion is the most powerful hegemony for the oppression and marginalization of women, and only dissent on the fringes of institutionalized religion really gives women any voice. Religious oppression is as real today as it was 200 years ago - in fact, perhaps more so. Many Christian and Jewish men were active feminists at the fin de siecle, whereas few would accept that label today.

Feminism and evangelical Christianity are regarded as incompatible in the 21st Century - but in the 19th there was no such conflict. The great reforming women of the fin de sicle, (that moment where the ideas and attitudes of one century merge into the next epoch) were both ardent feminists and crusading Christians. The most remarkable of them was Christabel Pankhurst, daughter of Emmaline and the leading militant suffragist of her time. After WW1 she became a gospel preacher in the USA. There was no compromise in this for Christabel, because she had campaigned against male promiscuity and profligacy that infected women and impoverished their homes; and she had developed insights into the future of Palestine and Germany and beliefs about biblical prophecy which were remarkably accurate. The courage of the early suffragists and the appalling violence and injustice they suffered is not well understood, not even in the movie. Emmaline Pankhurst wrote her own history of the movement - Suffragette, my own story - which you can get as a talking book from audible.com.au 
Emmaline gives a good history of the campaign for votes for women, going right back to the 1860's when people who paid more than 10 pounds in rates were given a vote...if they were male persons. Many women were ratepayers, and to exclude them from the privileges but not the responsibilities, the word "male person"  was inserted in the legislation in place of "man" which was deemed to include women.

Christabel had a law degree, but as she was female she could not be admitted to the bar in England, so she got all her legal experience by defending the suffragettes in court.  In the book by Tim Larsen that discusses her Christian ministry, the meaning of the word fundamentalist  - a word that has pejorative intend in the 21st century - is examined quite closely.  Today, Christabel would be ejected by the fundamentalists, and the evangelicals.

 


The militancy of  evangelical women like Mrs Fawcett and Mrs Chant was focused on social justice, particularly for women and children. Sometimes their moralistic stance was both misguided and hilarious by our standards, for example, ballet dancers in tights were anathema - the worst of all the fallen women - but generally they embraced causes that men had stubbornly ignored, such as prison conditions, venereal disease and the employment of small children.
  
Research can become elastic, especially when you are working in archives. I constantly stumble over new names and places that seem to demand to be explained and defined. Choosing what to ignore is both painful and perilous. It is so difficult to trace the early lives of those born before about 1835, and unless there are personal papers and diaries, it's hard to get close to the subjects. Much of what I learn will probably not make the book, so I have to use it in other ways such as discrete journal articles, and fiction, notably my Morning Lane Series which is hopefully getting closer to publication.

One of my colleagues was asked where his research subject went to school - and he did not know -  although he had already written an entire book about the man. He did not think it was important. So I rarely begin writing about anyone until I have a grasp on their education. Discovering the educational roots of my women has been the most fruitful, and dodgy business. The intellectual development of women was a first fruit of the suffragist/feminists movements, but generally females had little formal education.