Rejoice in Your Legs

In​ 1863 extracts from the journal of the Hon. Impulsia Gushington were published under the title Lispings from Low Latitudes. Impulsia had joined the fad for Egyptian travel and enjoyed an English lady’s usual adventures with camels, pyramids and cunning Orientals. Finally, she fell for the charms of a French aristocrat, Monsieur de Rataplan, and a sequel was promised that would detail the adventures of the lovestruck pair. It never materialised, for reasons best known to the author, Helen Blackwood, Lady Dufferin. One of Jane Robinson’s many speculations in this biography is that Dufferin’s satirical target was Barbara Leigh Smith, who had travelled to Algeria in 1856 and engaged herself to an eccentric French doctor of noble lineage, Eugène Bodichon. There’s no evidence for this, and Bodichon, née Smith, was by no means the only wealthy Englishwoman to find love in the East in the 1850s (Jane Digby, for example, became the wife of a Syrian sheikh in 1853, after three marriages to European aristocrats). But it might be true.

Robinson suggests that Bodichon is little known and seeks to bring her alive for a modern audience. To anyone who has taught 19th-century British history in recent decades, this is an odd claim. Bodichon’s position as a pioneer of the women’s rights movement is unassailable. She helped to found Girton, Cambridge’s first women’s college; she bankrolled the English Woman’s Journal; she campaigned for women to keep their property on marriage. Since the LRB was founded, two biographies have appeared and been reviewed in its pages. Pam Hirsch’s will, deservedly, remain the standard account. But Robinson’s is a treatment for our times. It is a love letter to Bodichon. Robinson’s enthusiastic authorial presence regularly demolishes the literary equivalent of the fourth wall. Her Bodichon is an inspirational force of nature. Robinson also moves beyond the established view of the women’s movement as a valiant underdog battle against a crushing male hegemony. Here, male criticism is mostly reduced to a comic turn by the Saturday Review, a waspish vehicle for young fogies on the make. Robinson is just as interested in the displeasure that Bodichon provoked in other women – Dufferin, Elizabeth Gaskell, her censorious Aunt Patty and others. Bodichon’s crime was her indifference to the conventions that so many other women relied on to secure their respectability.

The subtitle does the book no favours. Robinson understands well enough that Bodichon was not the first feminist to change our world. Forty years of academic research have established that the women’s rights movement was a collaborative venture securely based in a radical Dissenting milieu. Bodichon’s gender was obviously fundamental to her views and motivations, but so too was her network of highly politicised Unitarian families, for whom advanced views and behavioural codes were second nature. Her greatest friend, Bessie Parkes, and her drawing teacher, Eliza Fox, were both daughters of famous Unitarian public men. Robinson admits her surprise on discovering that ‘libertarianism was accommodated so readily’ in an era she had previously seen as ‘stiflingly straitlaced and intolerant’.

Unitarians thought mainstream theology ploddingly irrational. They could find no evidence that Christ was divine, or that he had been sent to earth to redeem humanity from innate sin. It was more plausible that God loved his creations and wished them to develop their perfection by following Christ’s human example. Individual character was not determined by a sense of sin or the guidance of priests, but by environment. A rational education and loving surroundings would best develop each person’s moral sense and potential. Reason – a God-given faculty – would create truthful works of history, philosophy and art, and lead to scientific and technological discoveries that would boost national wealth and prosperity. This wealth should be invested in further improvements. Most dynamic British commercial towns had a cultured, influential Unitarian elite.

In principle, women could benefit from a rational education as much as men, and perform socially useful work. Yet in practice, many Unitarian families accepted the dominant patriarchalism of wider society, along with the idea that a woman should be content in a domestic role. The teaching given to the daughters of Unitarian families was often poor. Nonetheless, nearly all of the women who did receive a stimulating education in the early 19th century were Unitarians, and many subsequently worked to share their good fortune with others. Bodichon’s father, Benjamin Leigh Smith, was the main supporter of the Westminster Infants’ School, a progressive institution founded on the Owenite and Pestalozzian principles of activity, co-operation and all-round development, which he established in Vincent Square in 1826 under the guidance of the educationalist James Buchanan, and where his daughter was enrolled. Buchanan’s childlike imagination and simplicity instilled in Bodichon and many other pupils an awareness of the natural world and the beauty of music and art. In 1849, aged 22, she began attending the Ladies’ College in Bedford Square, the forerunner of Bedford College, founded by Elizabeth Reid, a family friend and fellow Unitarian.

Bodichon adopted the same principles for the educational institutions she set up for both sexes. She took over the Westminster Infants’ School from her father and, after Buchanan retired, re-established it in a new form at Portman Hall. Boys and girls of all religious affiliations studied and sang together. Influenced by the pioneering doctor Elizabeth Blackwell, a cousin of Bessie Parkes, Bodichon was a great believer in physical exercise as well as explorations into nature. Her main colleague at Portman Hall hoped that callisthenics and gymnastics would produce ‘stay-less, free-breathing, free-stepping girls’. Later in life, Bodichon opened a night school for local workmen near her house in Sussex; fifty of its students led her funeral procession.

Benjamin Leigh Smith encouraged all his children to develop their personalities, providing them with their own house in Hastings next door to his. There was acting, music and political discussion. Bodichon adored her father for his principles, ideas of social justice and endless generosity. Parkes remarked to her that ‘half your happiness lies in the tastes your father has promoted.’ In 1852, she was stunned to discover that he had a second family of three young children, but forgave him, encouraged by Parkes, who reassured her that he had ‘that immortal something about him, which so many men are apparently without’. This was not his first offence in the eyes of society; the Smith children were themselves illegitimate, since Benjamin had never married their mother, a miller’s daughter who died in 1834. Bodichon’s own rejection of convention was ingrained but also, in the circumstances, unavoidable.

The Smiths were a family of significance. Bodichon’s grandfather William inherited a great wholesale grocery business, and in the 1780s and 1790s bought himself social and political status. The family home in Clapham was exchanged for a magnificent town house by Hyde Park and two hundred acres in Essex. He acquired Old Masters from impoverished French nobles; his daughters practised their drawing with the aid of three Rembrandts. He spent his way into Parliament and stayed for 45 years, perfecting the image of a high-minded humanitarian reformer. He was intimate with the leaders of the Whig opposition, a keen promoter of the abolition of slavery and the main advocate for the removal of the civil disabilities imposed on Dissenters (achieved with the Toleration Acts of 1812 and 1813 and the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828). This stance against the stupidity and intolerance of conventional opinion showed his enlightenment but required great patience. Slavery wasn’t abolished until he was 77. Though he mooted the abolition of religious tests at the universities in the early 1800s, it wasn’t achieved until 1871, long after his death. By contrast, Bodichon’s successful campaign for the reform of married women’s property laws took a mere 28 years.

William’s image as a gentleman of great virtue cost him dearly. From 1819, crises crowded in on the neglected family businesses, forcing him to sell his property and paintings. Benjamin was determined not to make the same mistake. He followed his father into politics, becoming MP for the Dissenting stronghold of Norwich and joining the Council of the Anti-Corn Law League, but his main focus was earning enough money to secure the family’s landed status. He bought a townhouse in Blandford Square and hoovered up Sussex manors and farms. The two Hastings houses complemented five other properties in the county. When he took his young family to America in 1829, they travelled on a state-of-the-art steam packet offering remarkable quantities of fine food. Back in Britain, their family excursions involved a custom-built omnibus with silver plating, silk curtains and pillows and a double sofa; it cost £215.

Bodichon followed her father in this as in most things. He made her financially independent on her 21st birthday in 1848. Her investments gave her an annual income of £300; by 1860 this had tripled. She bought and sold stocks and shares, and sank the surpluses in more property, while spending the money she earned herself on causes of her choice. Her father bequeathed her the house in Blandford Square. She was one of the most generous women philanthropists of the century, yet still left £28,600, worth over £2 million today. It is hardly surprising that her main political concern, beyond education, was to protect women’s property rights on marriage. This was not because her own property was in danger. Wealthy families like hers were used to drawing up special trust deeds to protect family wealth from grasping male suitors, and when she married in 1857, her father effected this. Her argument was that the law was classist, and also outdated, given that so many educated women now worked and could be trusted to manage their finances prudently. It made material considerations too important in marriage and forced some impoverished women onto the streets. Parkes, Fox, Reid and other friends joined the Married Women’s Property Committee which she established in December 1855. They soon got the support of the Law Amendment Society, which was concerned with removing the gap between an equity-based legal system accessible only to the rich and an anachronistic common law that everyone else had to endure.

The issue of married women’s property connected female Unitarian reformers with a wider movement for rational, evidence-based legislative reform that found a firm footing from 1857 with the creation of the Social Science Association. From 1858 the English Woman’s Journal, funded largely by Bodichon and often working with the SSA, advocated reforms to improve women’s opportunities, through education, specialist training and emigration. The journal was edited from a women’s club in Langham Place, but folded in 1864, victim of a series of tensions which Bodichon found stifling. One of them related to the issue of co-operation with male reformers, something that women from political families like hers saw as natural. In 1866 politics was suddenly dominated by debates about extending the suffrage; the opportunity to make the case for including women was irresistible, but a parliamentary motion to that effect was defeated. What to do next? Helen Taylor refused to allow men to join the council of the London branch of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage. Bodichon resigned from it, thinking that this attitude would delay victory by at least ten years.

Her upbringing and wealth had released her from the need to rush into marriage, which she idealised as a genuine relationship of ‘two workers, a man and a woman equal in intellectual gifts and loving hearts’, invoking the example set by one couple she knew – probably the Quaker writers William and Mary Howitt. From 1853 she was friends with a second, unmarried couple of similar qualities: Marian Evans and G.H. Lewes. Both Bodichon and Evans found the other’s warmth, intensity and sincerity immensely sympathetic. On reading a review of Adam Bede in 1859, Bodichon intuited, brilliantly, that ‘George Eliot’ was Evans’s pseudonym. (George Eliot’s Romola was a tribute to her.) The example of Evans-Lewes made Bodichon willing to contemplate a ‘free union’ with Evans’s ex-partner John Chapman, the editor of the Westminster Review, which was nearly disastrous. In 1855, Chapman wrote a series of letters begging her to have sex with him and, if possible, marry him. Her father and brother discovered that he was in desperate need of her money. His embarrassing letters survive, and Robinson analyses them at length, using them to suggest that Bodichon may have had a horror of sex. Hirsch more plausibly argues that her concern was that the ‘master passion’ of sexual desire, which she clearly recognised in herself, might overcome her reason. Chapman was eventually dispatched, but his antics surely helped to trigger the married women’s property campaign.

Bodichon was taken by her brother to Algeria for the winter of 1856, partly to stimulate her painting career, but also in the hope that its warmth and colour might revive her spirits. Here she met Eugène, a rugged, brooding doctor who healed the poor, loved nature and wrote books about social conditions. He was also a republican who disdained his family’s wealth. On marriage, they agreed to divide their time between England and Algiers, where she bought a house with sweeping views over town and sea (now part of the American Embassy). Thereafter, she usually wintered in Algeria.

It’s difficult to gauge how keenly Bodichon entered into Algerian life. She showed guests the local schools and participated in some philanthropy, but this had limits. Buchanan had instilled in her a love of the Arabian Nights and particularly of the resourceful, resilient Princess Parizade. She had amused herself by posing as the Ottoman Sultana during a visit to Greenwich fair. On her honeymoon in America, she attended a fancy dress ball at the White House as an Arab maiden with golden coins in her hair. But though she adored the fictional stereotype of the Oriental princess, she disliked the condition of contemporary Algerian women. Her refined Unitarian instincts rebelled against the social and intellectual confinement of the harem and the cruelty of arranged marriages. Harriet Martineau and Florence Nightingale (Bodichon’s cousin) expressed similar instincts much more graphically in their travel writings. Another daughter of Unitarians, Lucie Duff-Gordon, wrote letters from Egypt in the 1860s that were more sympathetic to Arab culture, but Bodichon doesn’t seem to have shared her ethnographic interests. Her paintings overwhelmingly featured natural landscapes, absent of people. The liberty she valued most seems to have been her own and that of her sister Nannie, who set up house next door with her female partner, Isa Blythe, and £1000 a year. This was a life free from home conventions, even if Eugène, a loner and seemingly deficient in emotion, increasingly fell short as a soulmate.

Bodichon insisted that women should have the right to a career, for the sake of their souls, their families and society. Was she free to pursue the career she wished for? It would be hard to argue that she wasn’t. Her brother Ben dutifully trained for the bar to please their father, but soon abandoned it to become a country gentleman and serial polar explorer. (When he temporarily disappeared in the Arctic in 1881, the family spent £9000 on a rescue expedition.) It is difficult, similarly, to imagine Bodichon as a desk-bound professional; her enthusiasm was for nature and the skills needed to portray it. Her grandfather, trying to make up for the loss of his Rembrandts, took her as a child to Turner’s studio; art was her main subject at the Bedford Ladies’ College, and she fell in with Rossetti and other Pre-Raphaelites. She was selling her pictures by 1855; by the mid-1870s she was earning £400 to £500 a year from them. She was fascinated by the task of capturing the power and richness of the natural world, and, typically, drawn to its stranger manifestations. In 1858 she reproduced a Louisiana swamp in all its uncontrolled fecundity for the Illustrated London News. Parkes urged her, without success, to create some more conformist canvases for the market, which might then lead buyers to her more recondite offerings.

In​ 1875 Bodichon bought an isolated cottage at Zennor where she could paint Cornish clouds, skies and seas (she also bought a typewriter which she christened Tryphena). This was her fourth property, since in 1863 she had acquired from her brother three acres at Scalands in Sussex (extended to nine in 1879) on which she built a substantial house, with room for goats, pigs, dogs and bees, and woods in which Eugène could wander during his increasingly brief visits to England – either naked or in his Arab burnous, as he preferred. Here she could indulge her curiosity. She dissected wildlife and showed her guests how to vault a five-bar gate. She explored the locality with her niece Amy and Amy’s betrothed, the physician Norman Moore, whom Bodichon had first befriended by giving him a dried-up skate fish when he was five years old. Scalands was Bodichon’s escape from the rows in Langham Place and elsewhere in London, ‘long sojourns in stifling rooms with miserable people’. She could dodge boredom by moving from place to place, usually in style. Travelling through Spain to Algiers, in high-class hotels, she also carried a portable bath, just in case: ‘I have sworn a solemn oath not to be uncomfortable if I can help it.’

Bodichon’s greatest skill was as a facilitator. She conveyed energy, warmth and no-nonsense enthusiasm. These days she might be a successful head of any number of institutions. Indeed, she could have played that role at Girton (‘my palace’) if she had wanted; instead, she preferred periodic visits, showing instinctive understanding when discussing with the students their theatrical performances or peering down their microscopes. She and her partisans sometimes squabbled with Emily Davies regarding which of them had played the main role in founding the college, but their qualities complemented each other. As Bodichon recognised, the project would have foundered without Davies’s autocratic drive. Bodichon, however, was not just the greatest enthusiast for Girton but also its main donor: she gave £1000 initially, £5000 more in the 1880s and £10,000 in her will. Davies was desperate not to offend respectable society: hence the college beginning at Benslow, a leased house in distant Hitchin, and the reference to the Church of England in the articles of association, which limited opportunities for donations from Bodichon’s wealthy Unitarian circle. Bodichon, characteristically, wanted the college to be in central Cambridge and, once the site further out at Girton was bought, was appalled by the failure to create a proper garden.

It is the sense that Bodichon did more or less whatever she wanted that makes her such an appealing subject. Yet Robinson’s hurried informality and cavalier way with sources generate occasional bafflement. We are told that a man once walked 22 miles after work to attend her Sussex night school and that not all the students at Benslow House could cope with the trapeze. But the book succeeds as an essay on Being Barbara – as a hymn to her positivity and naturalness, her capacity to raise the spirits of others. Meeting her in 1853, Rossetti described her as ‘blessed with large rations of tin, fat, enthusiasm & golden hair, who thinks nothing of climbing up a mountain in breeches or wading through a stream in none, in the sacred name of pigment’. If she looked fat, it was because she hated stays, which diminished the ‘graceful and ample waist of nature’. She also rejected high heels: ‘You must have healthy feet for walking in the woods, and if you don’t walk in the woods you’ll fall sick.’ Her unchaperoned visit to Germany and Austria with Parkes in 1850 opened her eyes to the political and social repressiveness of those countries. The song she wrote for her father while there is as good an epitaph as any:

Oh! Isn’t it jolly
To cast away folly
And cut all one’s clothes a peg shorter
(A good many pegs)
And rejoice in one’s legs
Like a free-minded Albion’s daughter.