Do not stand speaking in the street

Lady Colin Campbell (in Cassell's Etiquette of Good Society, 1911) is a stickler. Undoubtedly, she is the 1911 equivalent of someone who writes to the BBC to complain about the bad spelling of modern youth. Undoubtedly, were she to belong to this century, she would frown upon many common habits - watching DVDs in bed, microwave meals, texting. But even bearing in mind that she may be stricter  than the average Mama, her set of rules about introductions is - well, below:

How to introduce someone in 1911
1. Ask the lady if she is happy to be introduced to the gentleman
2. Introduce the gentleman to the lady (not the other way around.) Now go away.
3. The lady and gentleman will converse.

On second meeting someone in 1911
1. It is the lady's role to recognise and acknowledge the gentleman - he may not either bow or shake hands until she has made the first movement. Nor must he ignore her.
2. If they meet on the street, the gentleman must then walk by the lady's side, because 'on no occasion is it permissible for a lady to stand for any time while talking in the street.'

It must have been really tricky timing saying goodbye to people. Did you just have to go round another block if you still had something left to say? And also - why? What wrong message were you sending out if you stood and chatted on a street corner? I dread to think.

Not much different, except gloves

I hoped, in flicking through Cassell's Etiquette of Good Society, edited and revised in 1911 by Lady Colin Campbell, to find the ways of a bygone world. But it was the similarities that came through first: complaints and tensions that I recognise:

On letter writing: 'Nowadays, when so much correspondence goes on daily, few letters are indited which are really worthy of commendation. The lives we live are so crowded with events...'

On bridesmaids' dresses: 'The bride has her ideas... and it is only right that her wishes should be mainly consulted, but let her consider others as well as herself...'

On language: 'barbarous mutilation of phrases' (Such as 'thanks' for 'thank you')

The exception? Gloves. Ladies must wear gloves at all times if in company. I only spot this fact because of the emphasis given to moments we could remove them - before the soup course at dinner, and to put on a wedding ring during a marriage service.

How often did they do it in 1911?

It's a scoop, there's no doubt about it. It's a statistic you'd struggle to find reliably today, let alone for 1911. And it means I can get the word 'sex' into my blog, which should up its popularity nicely. Here goes, in the words of the Medical Adviser of the Sunday Chronicle:

'the question as to the frequency of marital intercourse, which is one that is often asked, cannot be answered in a general way. Much depends on the robustness, age and general health of the parties interested: where these are satisfactory twice a week may be taken as a permissible average.'

Well, there's a fact of married life.

More than a million more

The Women's Enfranchisement Bill of May 1911 is an amendment of the same bill of 1910. It's plugged through Parliament again and again, with small alterations until eventually, in 1918, it goes through and women over 30 get the vote. The major difference between the 1911 version and the one before is that a slightly different group of women are under discussion: fewer 'ladies' and more working women, leading to a proposed proportion within the voting class of one woman for every seven men.

I warm to the proposer, George Kemp - 'I believe that at the present time the nation suffers a loss by the exclusion of capable women from the power to select Members of Parliament... we have no extra talent to throw away... we cannot afford to do without them.' But what actually catches my attention is a worry that's resonating through the House - the worry that eventually all women would end up voting. And the reason for this worry? In the words of Mr MacKinder - in the UK, '...you have more than a million more women than men.'

There are still over a million more women than men: the ratio is 95 to 100. The question about what is changed by having a large corpus of women voters is interesting - but it hasn't produced the sort of coup MacKinder is worried about. For me, however, this population statistic puts a new perspective on the whole story of women's liberation. 

As a woman, as a participant in that story, I feel, rhetorically, like one of a struggling minority. Women who are 'firsts' - first students, first MPs, first in Board Rooms - are lauded as parallels to similar 'firsts' amongst members of genuine minority groups, for example as defined by ethnicity.

Celebration of these achievements is great, but I wonder whether the fact we are a majority should change how we think about them. Rhetorically speaking, the injustice is certainly greater if we remember we are not just half, but more than half of the human race. And rhetoric always helps. But is there more?  For instance, can being one of a majority be a disadvantage?





Refs:
A Century of Change - Trends in UK Statistics since 1900
Hansard - Women's Enfranchisement Bill 1911
Office of National Statistics.

Discovering stars in 1911

I've been wondering for a while about the reason for this blog - not the obvious reason, that time travel has not been invented yet and somebody has to try to compensate, but the deeper one: why anyone would want to time travel in the first place.

And it struck me the other day that I'm looking for role models.  Obviously, the challenges facing women today aren't what they were in 1911. But as I've researched this blog it's become clear that things weren't as different back then as I had thought. I've also realised that it's not been a few charismatic, controversial leaders who have moved women's liberation forward: it has been a crowd of people taking each a small step, from the hundreds of women who persuaded reluctant fathers to send them to university to the thousands today pushing through to the highest ranks of the professions while working out how to balance that with family lives.

Many of those small steps have gone little remembered. Last week I found the story of Williamina P Fleming. Her obituary was published a hundred years ago this month. As Curator of Astronomical Photographs at Harvard she spent thirty years working with a catalogue of very early glass plate photographs of the night sky. She analysed images of over ten thousand stars, discovering ten entirely new ones. And she faced the question of what stepping into a male sphere does for your essential likeability as a woman. Annie Cannon, the author of Fleming's obituary in Science, (Vol 33(861), 987-88, June 1911), gives full credit to her discoveries and to her thorough, systematic approach to a library of 200,000 fragile glass plates. She then concludes that ...'of a large hearted, sympathetic nature, and keenly interested in all that pertains to life, [she] won friends easily, while her love of her home and an unusual skill in needlework prove that a life spent in the routine of science need not destroy the attractive human element of a woman's nature'

Williamina P Fleming was one of many who demonstrated, through living out her life,  that female and scientist were not mutually exclusive. We no longer use needlework to make that proof, and thanks to Fleming and hundreds more we don't have so many exclusions to eliminate.  But I think we are still facing that challenge on some fronts.

Bicycle use and abuse

I was cycling quietly home from work, as I do most days.  I stopped abruptly to have an eye-to-eye with a truck driver before he gave me right of way. Then I cycled on, pedal, pedal, pedal, until my peace was rudely interrupted:

"You should learn to cycle, girl," came a squawk somewhere behind my left shoulder. I stopped, wondering what was going on. The voice came from a woman leaning out of a car window. "I saw what happened, you didn't see that van. You should learn to cycle."

I didn't really have a good response (judging it unhelpful to observe that the truck, being elephant sized, white, and stationary in the middle of the road, was not something I'd have missed). I cycled on. The woman started her car and swerved out to overtake me, then stopped at a T-junction to lecture me some more. Eventually she got bored and drove off.

Determined to use my fury for something constructive I decided to look up cycling in 1911. Would I have been on the roads? OK, OK, not cycling to work from a shared flat, in jeans. But cycling? I strike lucky: the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1911 has more information than I knew there was to know about bicycles, and the picture is just like my bike, well, nearly. (Admittedly this is because as a cyclist I am a little behind the times.)

Then I found the story of Viscountess Harberton, told by Surrey History. Her 1911 obituary pictured her in something called Rational Dress. Rational Dress was a long divided skirt devised especially for cycling, resented noisily by certain readers of the Daily Mail - 'that disgusting dress called rationals'. In 1899, Viscountess Harburton was refused luncheon in the coffee-room of the Hautboy Hotel in Ockham because of her choice to wear it.

I cheer her mentally and wonder if my car-driving foe had such a good 1911 story behind her. To my regret, the answer is yes - I've discovered Dorothy Levitt. But that's a story for another day.

Bachelor's Buttons for the Bellenden Big Lunch

Our street is making a habit of the Big Lunch - an Eden Project inspired event that gets street parties happening across the UK at lunchtime one Sunday a year. Bellenden Road is great for it - there's food from all over the world (go Peckham!) and particularly, it stars amazing carved watermelons.

I'm going to add to the variety with food from the past. I have been wanting to make Bachelor's Buttons for a while now. The recipe doesn't sound particularly exciting, but their name does.

It's a lost joke from 1911. Not a raucous laugh-out-loud joke but a shared between-friends nudge. Why, I wonder, rubbing in butter (3oz) to flour and sugar (6oz, 3oz) do they have that name? Are they for feeding to bachelors seductively, or winking at them over with a cup of tea? Are they the sort of dry, dull fare bachelors make for themselves? I stir in baking powder (1/2 tsp) and an egg, and start to make 'walnut sized pieces' and roll them in sugar. They are particularly large buttons: was there a fashion amongst bachelors to ornament their jackets with outsize closing devices?

Got it. As I pop then in the oven (what is a 'moderate oven?' Oven precision has come on - I go for 180 degrees) the buttons in rows look lost. That, I am sure, is why they are Bachelor's Buttons - nobody to sew them on.

Though the enormous button theory is getting more entertaining - when I pull them out of the oven 20 minutes later they are a couple of inches across. And the sugar makes them good and sparkly. Could it be that the bachelors of 1911 were, just a bit, bling?

(Recipe credit: Unrivalled Cookery for the Middle Classes (1911) by Miss Tuxford. They're excellent, by the way - somewhere between shortbread and macaroon)