Cherishing illusory notions – they talk about emancipation when all
they mean…is that women should…neglect her special functions in order to
undertake responsibilities foreign to her whole nature (1904, Cohen, P. Jews
and Feminism, The Westminster Review)
Speaking up most unnaturally
Research is a lot like knitting – you get so absorbed in the
colourful threads that are coming together that you hardly realise it has taken
on a life of its own.
At least, that’s how I knit and do research. The last jumper
I made for my son Gabe is now being unraveled and re knitted because it was
just too, too big. Many other people are far more disciplined. They learned to color within the lines, or make sure their swatches are accurate!
Please note that in the first two paragraphs I have managed
to refer to domestic matters, because I do not want to be regarded as unnatural
by Percy Cohen (quoted above). Here comes the emancipated female academic
talking about her research…
My current research for my book Feathers has diverged, as mentioned previously, into a paper on the
role of religion in the early suffragette movement. It will take me about a
month off course.
I’m still writing my
book, of course, and the first chapter is drafted and a couple of others well
underway – I tend to be very over confident about these things, and don’t take
into account the deep divergences of the project. Feathers,
in fact, is becoming deeper – it’s an accidental thing, but as I read my drafts
I find more unanswered questions.
The first chapter is about two family fortunes – the money
trail - and although I’ve got most of it
down, more detail will make it richer. Getting that extra detail requires work
online, in archives, tracking down probate, wills and the trail of who inherited
what, and how much was left when they died. Precisely how much money did Salaman men
inherit? Half a million pounds at the fin-
de- siecle – but another half a million property in London was managed by
the descendants and the portfolio expanded over the next 50 years. Did the girls get their money or did it get
absorbed into their marriage settlements and husbands’ bank accounts? There is plenty of evidence that the girls
worked hard in the business, and I am trying to ascertain whether Julia Davis,
who ran the feather dying business until 1924, was in fact one of the Salaman
women. The census records hint at it.
But here is the divergence. I will need to write a chapter
on the suffragettes because so many of the women in my story were part of the
Votes for Women movements - there were many
women’s rights organisations from 1860 to 1914 – including Establish Church,
Dissenter and Jewish groups. And as so many of the interesting suffragists are
not central to Feathers, they need a journal
article of their own as well.
Lady preachers who were suffragettes
Not only did Christabel Pankhurst become a stump preacher in
the USA, but lesser known suffragettes, both Jewish and Christian, began to
claim the right to speak within the church. One of my key Feathers characters Nina Salaman did “speak” in the synagogue - we
cannot say she preached as they found a convoluted way of justifying her
speaking. But when she died the liturgical format of her funeral oration was
given as though she was a Rabbinical scholar – don’t ask me to explain that
just yet! She was not demonised, cast into the witches chair or regarded as a harping harradine with a high-pitched voice. And she was not alone in winning respect and the right to speak.
We have now found a couple of unpublished theses on the
coupling of suffragism/feminism and religion, full of surprises. Church and suffragism were so entwined in the late 19th
early 20th century that it contradicts the deep prejudices against
women in evangelical churches, traditional Judaism and cults and religions of
every kind today.
Women, both Christian and Jewish, felt responsible for other
women who had no voice: women dying of venereal diseases brought home by their
husband, domestics who ended their days in the workhouse because they had never
earned enough to provide for their old age, women in prison whose children were
abandoned to orphanages and workhouses, prostitutes and pickpockets, all of
whom have their story to tell.
Oxford educated suffragist and preacher, Maude Royden, is among my new characters. She was a pacifist, but
throughout the Great War she ministered at The Temple, a dissenter
stronghold in London, as an assistant minister.
Her messages, and apparently the warm quality of her voice, gave comfort
to thousands of families whose sons died in the appalling mud and blood of the
trenches in France. By the time the
Second War began, she denounced her pacifism because she regarded Nazism as too
great an evil. Read more, here
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