Woman in a Bubble

On International Women's Day, this Guardian blog about a new book The Trouble with Women by cartoonist Jacky Fleming is highly appropriate. 

What Charles Darwin had to say about women is pretty disturbing but only to be expected given the male attitudes of the time but which, sadly enough, haven't changed much in some cultures and societies.

Love the cover with the woman stuck in the bubble!

Find it at amazon.co.uk and amazon.com

Not your "Sara Dane" - real women from the Edges of Empire

From Goodreads

Original 1955 cover

There are certain myths attached to Australia’s stories of convict women that have been perpetuated in a fair bit of romantic literature. These often feature the innocent and impoverished or orphaned young woman - usually English or Irish - and sexy and beautiful too! - who steals something small, a handkerchief, a loaf of bread to feed a starving child. Although she is sentenced to hang, by stroke of luck she is reprieved at the last minute and transported beyond the seas, usually to New South Wales or the more dreaded Van Diemen’s Land. In spite of all that she endures and the challenges she faces, our heroine succeeds in some way, either through an advantageous marriage or sheer grit and determination to better herself. She manages to put her shameful past behind her and becomes one of the founding mothers of the nation. 

The famous novel Sara Dane by Catherine Gaskin, which was inspired by the real story of Mary Reibey [see note below] started this trend back in the mid 1950s and, with variations, has been the basis of many a romantic “convict novel” ever since. 

The historical reality is that beauty was in short supply among convicts and not many of them were totally innocent, the majority being career criminals with a history of offending and re-offending. Sadly, any of those who may have been comparatively naïve or innocent before their sentences were often dragged down into the mire by forced association with these hardened individuals and the brutal treatment they received at the hands of those in authority.

There are many records still in existence in various archives of countries that used to be part of the British Empire detailing the circumstances, trials and sentences of a group of women who came under British laws and jurisdictions and these form the basis of From the Edges of Empire: Convict Women from Beyond the British Isles, edited by Lucy Frost and Colette McAlpine for the Convict Women’s Press.

Available from Convict Womens Press

This absorbing compilation throws new light on some of the amazing 200 or so women who don’t fit the accepted image of convicts all being of British heritage. Although only a tiny fraction of the 25,000 women who were transported were tried and sentenced in countries other than the British Isles, very few them were described “of colour” with others simply being described as “foreign” - which could mean anything including race or colour - but more often that simply she could not speak English. Some were slaves with no rights or no-one to defend them, some were just girls, some had aristocratic or influential connections in Europe yet still fell foul of British law. Their crimes were of passion or hate or necessity. Some were victims of men and a cruel system, others were manipulative and immoral by nature. Fascinating, and even disturbing reading in places, several of these women could be subjects of novels in their own right. 

It is somewhat ironic that having a convict in the family tree was something Australians used to try and hide but now has turned into a badge of honour and pride, although modern people do tend to rose-tint the facts about their ancestors and give them attributes that are more wishful thinking than fact. It’s fine to have a clever or pretty “Sara Dane” in your family tree, but please don’t let her be ugly or diseased or an imbecile, a prostitute, a poisoner or creepy child abuser; nor should she be a “person of colour”. Some Australians with a convict background may assume their dark colouring comes from an Aboriginal connection but won’t know they are in fact descended from black slaves from the West Indies or mixed race individuals from India, Mauritius, or the Cape of Good Hope. 

If these women survived the tough system, once they served their sentences and were no longer under the eagle eye of jurisprudence or in the paper records, many simply disappeared into the general population, probably taking new names or camouflaging their pasts. One particularly shocking story related in the book involved a Scots missionary woman in India who was suspected of incest with her brother and who was transported for whipping to death her seven year old niece. In later years, she moved frequently through the southern part of Australia, perhaps deliberately hiding her trail. If her descendants alive today know nothing of her story, it may be better that they never do, as some convict crimes still border on the unspeakable and can never be equated with the romantic stolen handkerchief version.

Another woman who appears in the list of foreign-born female convicts in this book is the con woman and serial bigamist, Hannah Mary Anson, who sometimes gave her birthplace as Madras, India. After her final release in 1854, it is assumed she went on to reinvent a different life for herself and it may well be that she is another convict with living descendants today who know nothing of her at all. Her story appeared earlier in this blog and can be read here (1) and here (2).

One contributor From the Edges of Empire, Kay Buttfield, in writing about women sent from South Africa, gives this apt closing to one of the chapters:

"The lives of these people, like all the convict lives whose stories are narrated, come to us through the records - some more detailed than others - but all allow a moment to contemplate these people. In the gathering of these threads of lives we will never know all the answers. However their lives gain a little dignity when we can tease out their stories and our history of the British Empire becomes the richer for knowing them."

(And not to forget the men of different heritage - another exceptional book from another Tasmanian author is Black Founders by Cassandra Pybus.) 

Note:  The real Mary Reibey was hardly the glamorous Sara Dane of book covers but she is worth reading about.  Most Australians will probably look at her image every day and never give her a second thought - she features on the $20 bill - and is about due for rediscovery by a new generation of enterprising women.

"Florence Nightingale of the brush"

Some of the most famous and impressive 19th Century battle scenes ever painted were done by a woman, Elizabeth Southerden Thompson, better known simply as Lady Butler.

Born in Switzerland in 1846 she and her multi-talented sister, the poet and suffragette, Alice Meynell, received an extraordinarily enlightened education for any woman of the time. Their father, Thomas James Thompson, was a man of “independent means and artistic leanings” who decided to tutor his daughters himself rather than entrusting them to a governess.

National Portrait Gallery London

Elizabeth spent much of her childhood in Italy where she first began to paint, later continuing formal art studies both in Florence and London. But it was in France where she found her true metier when she encountered the new style of battle scenes being pioneered by French painters.

The Roll Call, first shown in 1874, became one of the most famous and popular paintings of the era and people queued for hours to see it when it went on tour around the country. It has been much copied for everything from calling cards to the lids of chocolate boxes and jigsaw puzzles. The fact this very masculine subject was painted by a pretty young woman who couldn’t possibly know what the battlefield was really like somehow added to its appeal. Several of her subsequent paintings went on to equal acclaim.

The Roll Call, Royal Collection

 

28th Regiment at Quatre-Bras, National Gallery of Victoria

In 1879, by a margin of a couple of votes, Elizabeth lost her opportunity of becoming the first-ever female associate of the Royal Academy and she made no further attempts to pursue what should have been her rightful accreditation.

Scotland for Ever! Leeds Art Gallery

Although she painted what is perhaps her best known work Scotland for Ever! after her marriage to Sir William Francis Butler, giving birth to a total of six children and globe-trotting with a military husband created obstacles to her output. It also didn’t help that Elizabeth’s approach to the glorification of war and battle altered with time. Her husband was an Irish Catholic and together they started to take a more critical view of the British Empire and what it stood for. Her painting Evicted is a strong indictment on the treatment of the Irish people at the time of the Famine.

Evicted, University College Dublin

Inevitably, she was increasingly ignored by the establishment and left behind with changing tastes in art. By the time of World War I, battles bore little resemblance to the old-fashioned glorified reflections of “Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die” * ideals for which she had become famous. Although she continued to paint interpretations of WW1, they never reached the fame of her earlier works.

Yet when one looks carefully at her sketches and smaller studies of the men she portrayed, her sympathy with the fears and stoicism of the fighting man remains the same, no matter the era or type of conflict.

Man of Kent (The Buffs - Royal East Kent Regiment)

 

Remnants of an Army, Tate Britain

Study of a wounded Guardsman, National Army Museum

Lady Butler also wrote a number of books, including her own Autobiography, Sketch Book and Diary and Letters from the Holy Land, all of which include lesser-known paintings and sketches from her world travels and they are free to read or browse online.

Lady Butler at her easel, Dover Castle 1898

Her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Biography concludes with: 

"Lady Butler has a dual claim to fame. She pioneered a new, more realistic depiction of warfare in British painting, one which was to prove immensely influential at the end of the nineteenth century. And she briefly enjoyed critical and popular success of such magnitude that, for a while, it seemed a new era for women artists in Britain was about to dawn."

It is interesting to discover there was more enlightenment and willingness to accept a woman artist in the 1870s than in subsequent years. Although two women had been instrumental in the founding of the Royal Academy in 1768 (Angelica Kaufman and Mary Moser) it wasn’t until 1922 that Annie Swynnerton was admitted as an associate, with Dame Laura Knight receiving full membership in 1936.

Sir William received Bansha Castle in County Tipperary as a grace-and-favour house after he retired from the Boer War, even though he had often upset his superiors over their handling over that War and was even accused of being a Boer sympathiser. (While his wife remains comparatively famous, there is much about Sir William’s own illustrious Empire career that is now forgotten, not least his involvement in Canada in the establishment of the North-West Mounted Police, now known as the Mounties.) 

After Sir William died, his wife lived on at Bansha until she was driven out by the IRA in 1922, leaving many paintings and other possessions behind. It is said one of those paintings called The Camel Corp has a bullet hole in it. Whether apocryphal or not, it reflects a certain irony.

Lady Butler spent her later years at Gormanstan Castle, County Meath. She died on 2 October 1933.

Last page in Lady Butler's Autobiography

* From “Charge of the Light Brigade”, Alfred , Lord Tennyson.

Champion of women in India

The disenfranchised women of Saudi Arabia have finally been given the right to vote and even stand for election, although only a modest few seem to have been brave enough to do so and it will be interesting to see whether this changes in the future.

One woman who devoted much of her life to helping women in a similar society where purdah was entrenched was Cornelia Sorabji. Although hallowed within academia in both India and Britain, she is little known to the general public and nor is she that easy to categorise. Due in part to her Christian heritage and her English connections, she admitted she never felt wholly Indian yet she was definitely not British either. She did a great deal to help secluded women assert their rights in regard to property, but she was not a feminist. She had little time for the politics of men like Gandhi and supported the British Raj in spite of its failings.

Cornelia's nephew, Professor Richard Sorabji, has written a book about her. Another biography is Cornelia Sorabji: India's Pioneering Woman Lawyer by Suparna Gooptu of the University of Calcutta, also see An Indian Portia by Kusoom Vadgama.

As long ago as the 1880s, Cornelia was making her mark. This article appeared in The Sydney Mail of 12 May 1888 and even allowing for the usual patronising and racially superior attitudes of the age it carries a tone of admiration:

Miss Cornelia Sorabji

Women all over the world are bestirring themselves to assert their sometimes questionable, but in many cases perfectly justifiable, claims to a status in culture, equal to that of men.Their fitness and right of doing so cannot be doubted any longer, considering the successes they have achieved at the universities of Great Britain, India, the United States and on the Continent. Miss Cornelia Sorabji is a case in point. She is the daughter of the Rev. Sorabji, a Parsee honorary missionary of the Church Missionary Society in Poona, and of Mrs. Sorabji, who visited England in 1886 to plead the case of female education in India, and was the first and only lady to enter the Deccan College at Poona in 1884. Her position, among upwards of 300 men, who, with the exception of two Englishmen and a few Parsees, were all Hindoos, was at first a most difficult one, but, with the goal of her ambition ever in view she went bravely on, winning golden opinions from principals and professors alike.Among her own sex her example has already borne fruit, two Parsee ladies and one Jewess having sought for admission into the colleges in Bombay and Poona. In Miss Sorabji’s case no concessions were made. She studied Latin in common with the men (though French has since been allowed to lady students). She was “top of her year” in the previous examination, has held a scholarship each year of her course, was “Hughlings Scholar” in 1885, having passed head of the University in English, “Havelock prizeman” the end of the same year, being top of the Deccan College in English, has taken honours each time, and in the final B.A. examination of the Bombay University, held in November, 1887, she was one of the four in the entire Presidency and the only student from her own college who succeeded in gaining first-class honours. Now that Miss Sorabji has thus succeeded, in spite of the unfriendly criticisms among her own countrymen and women upon her unprecedent career, her brave, high-souled behaviour cannot fail to raise the character and ability of women in the estimation of the Parsee and Hindoo community. 

From The Sydney Mail, 12 May 1888 (TROVE)

Here is another from a few years later that demonstrates the petty obstacles Cornelia would have faced (The Ballarat Star, 22 January 1902):

An Indian Portia

The Benchers of Lincoln’s Inn have made a notable departure in granting permission to an Indian lady, Miss Cornelia Sorabji, to frequent their library and use the books therein. The lady to whom this exceptional privilege has been extended is a very remarkable personage. She came to England from India a few years ago to study law, and resided at Somerville College, Oxford, where she passed the examination for B.C.L. [Bachelor Civil Law] and obtained a certificate equal in merit to that degree, which women cannot take in Oxford. She subsequently returned to India and in Bombay obtained the university degree of LL.B [Bachelor of Laws] and practised in the neighbouring courts and also in the High Court there as an advocate where she was admitted by order to defend prisoners in certain cases. She is now in England for the purposes of further study. 

In 1909, she was awarded the gold  Kaisar-i-Hind Medal for her work in helping widows and other women in estate matters through the Bengal Court of Wards. (She is not shown in the Wikipedia listing for medal beneficiaries, although several reports of her receiving the award can be found in the newspapers of the day.)

Aside from her involvement in the law, Cornelia wrote extensively on many subjects to do with India and its culture, including short stories and even plays. She also wrote her memoirs, but apparently they are discreet and do not go into her private life in any way.

Cornelia's style and dignity evident in this cover of The Queen publication
copyright UC Press

Photograph 1930
copyright National Portrait Gallery, London

Cornelia's bust at Lincoln's Inn
From Wikipedia.
Photo by James Frankling Gresham Lectures

First woman jockey to win Melbourne Cup

History made today in Australia, 3 November 2015! 

First woman jockey to win the Melbourne Cup on an outsider.

Michelle Payne

ABC

 

Clare Hollingworth

There is a Facebook and Twitter campaign currently afoot to draw attention to this great woman journalist, Clare Hollingworth, who has reached the amazing age of 104 and was firsthand witness to some of the great events of the 20th Century..

Although The Daily Mail is a notoriously tacky newspaper it surprisingly does often run important historical stories such as this, and is also available to read without having an online subscription.

You can also read about Clare in several other UK newspapers such as, The Daily Express,  The Telegraph and The Guardian.

Carrie Jacobs-Bond

At one time or another all of us have contributed to those popular culture compilations or lists which ask you to vote for your favourite book, performer, travel destination, food ... whatever … with songs being one of the most enduring and often most controversial.

But if you browse various lists of the best songs of past 100 years or the 20th century, they are really lop-sided and make it look as if popular music germinated in the 1950s and only really got going in the 1960s onwards. The people who create these lists totally ignore the fact that popular music goes back much further than the mid-20th Century, to long before any sorts of mass media recording devices had even been invented.

The first woman composer to sell more than a million copies of her sheet music was Carrie Jacobs-Bond.

Carrie at the piano. From GazetteXtra

Born Carrie Jacobs in Janesville, Wisconsin, in 1862, Carrie’s early life was filled with music but also financial anxieties. It is said by the age of four she could already pick out tunes on the piano and was playing classic pieces by ear by the age of nine with her ambition to be a professional song writer. After her father lost all the family’s wealth, aged 18 she married an E J  Smith and her only child, son Fred Jacobs Smith, born soon afterwards. Six years later she was divorced and in 1889 married a Dr Frank Lewis Bond.

A child's verse collection

Carrie wanted to continue her music career, but traditionalist Frank believed a wife’s place was in the home. However, she did manage to get sell some children’s songs, but it was only after Frank died after a fall on ice in 1895, that Carrie came into her own, although it took a great deal of courage and determination for her to finally fulfill her dream.  Always struggling with her own poor health as well as lack of funds, she was forced to support her son on her own. Using borrowed money, she moved to Chicago. There she barely survived sub-letting rooms and selling painted china. From the parlorsongs.com biography:-

“Even during these trying times, Carrie was a generous and giving person for she would often give up one of her rooms for homeless who would come by looking for food or shelter or to shovel snow” ...“During this period she was forced to slowly sell off all of her possessions till she and her young son had virtually nothing, except for her beloved piano.”

Slowly but surely, Carrie’s songs came to the notice of friends and neighbours, among them professional singers who were to help in creating demand for her work. One singer, Jessie Bartlett Davis, helped Carrie to publish a collection of these songs in 1901 called Seven Songs as Unpretentious as the Wild Rose.

The collection included two that would become her most famous, I Love You Truly and Just a Wearying for You. By 1908, Carrie’s fame had spread and she sang for President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House.

After enduring scorn from many men in the music industry, Carrie decided to set up business for herself and, in partnership with her son, established her own sheet music publishing house. She wrote not only the music, but the lyrics and designed the cover pages that usually featured wild roses. 

Carrie’s most successful song A Perfect Day [also The End of a Perfect Day] was published in 1910. She said the lyrics were inspired by a sunset seen from Mt. Rubidoux near Riverside, California, where she had moved for health reasons, and the accompanying music came to her some months later during a moonlit drive across the Mojave Desert. In the next decade, this song sold over 5 million copies in 60 different arrangements, with numerous phonograph and piano roll recordings by 1925. As the book Notable American Women notes:

“Not only did ‘A Perfect Day’ crown and epitomize [her] career as author and composer, but it appeared at the right psychological moment, combining as it did the pathos and optimism of the era that came to an end with the Great War.” 

Special edition issued at the end of WW1, with patriotic lyrics

In the decades that followed, Carrie’s sentimental style of music drifted out of favour with the decline of parlour room pianos and the rise of radio, jazz, crooners and generally more sophisticated audiences.

Tragedy was to mar Carrie’s life again in 1932 when her son Fred, who was suffering a bout of depression following an illness, went to a cabin at Lake Arrowhead and killed himself. It is said when he was found, two candles were burning and A Perfect Day was playing on the gramophone.

Carrie and Fred. GazetteXtra

One can’t begin to imagine the grief Carrie suffered, yet she managed to continue with her life and writing music and we can only echo the tribute to her at parlorsongs.com

“Carrie Jacobs-Bond is one of America’s greatest songwriters. She fought against all odds: infirmity, gender bias, poverty, and alone showed that faith and belief in yourself can overcome all.”

Carrie wrote songs that came from the heart, many of them with easy melodies well within the scope of the average pianist. Sure they were sentimental, but they were in keeping with a far less cynical age than ours. She touched millions of hearts and what better epitaph can anyone have?

I Love You Truly was sung at countless weddings during the 20th Century, and one of its recent outings was in the soundtrack of the film The King’s Speech. Likewise, up-tempo versions of A Perfect Day have also been sung at weddings or other celebrations and the slower more reflective version has featured at many a funeral farewell.

One of my own father’s favourite songs was Just A Wearying for You. My romantic side likes to think that he may well have danced with my mother to this foxtrot version when they first met one another in the mid-1930s.

Just A Wearying for You

 A Perfect Day by Judith Durham of the Seekers and

an earlier more sombre Nelson Eddy version

The Maguire Sisters with I Love You Truly.

Carrie Jacobs-Bond. 1862-1946