THE WOMEN OF 1838

Octavia Hill

Listening to Gillian Darley and others on In Our Time this morning I was struck by the life of Octavia Hill and her zeal for ‘reform’. It also struck me that she was born in 1838, the same year as Victoria Claflin Woodhull (see previous blog for 2^nd April Emancipation and Equality).. Also born that year were Alice Cunningham Fletcher, Margaret Ethridge Knight and the Grand Duchess Alexandra Petrovna of Russia. There was a certain tenacity about these women, and all were interested in ‘reform’, in improving the health and social conditions of the common man. They did so against tremendous odds.

So far as Octavia Hill was concerned,  although her ideas fell clearly into the tory camp, she nonetheless accomplished what she had set out to do. Parliament and many concerned reformers had been attempting to improve the housing of the working classes since the early 1830s. From Hill's point of view these had all failed the poorest members of the working class, the unskilled labourers. She found that their landlords routinely ignored their obligations towards their tenants, and that the tenants were too ignorant and oppressed to better themselves. She tried to find new homes for her charges, but there was a severe shortage of available property, and Hill decided that her only solution was to become a landlord herself. She set about finding backers and properties, and, after being improved they were let to those on intermittent and low incomes. A return of five per cent on capital was obtained; any excess over the five per cent was reinvested within the properties for the benefit of the tenants. Rent arrears were not tolerated, and bad debts were minimal. As Hill said, "Extreme punctuality, and diligence in collecting rents, and a strict determination that they shall be paid regularly, have accomplished this." In consequence of her prudent management, Hill was able to attract new backers, and by 1874 she had 15 housing schemes with around 3,000 tenants. Hill's system was based on closely managing not only the buildings but the tenants; she insisted, "you cannot deal with the people and their houses separately." She maintained close personal contact with all her tenants, and was strongly opposed to impersonal bureaucratic organisations and to governmental intervention in housing. In her view, "municipal socialism and subsidized housing" led to indiscriminate demolition, re-housing schemes, and the destruction of communities. More Margaret Thatcher than Ken Livingstone. Indeed, later in Hill's life, the Bishop of London, Frederick Temple encountered her at a meeting of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and wrote, "She spoke for half an hour … I never had such a beating in all my life.”

Alice Fletcher

Alice Fletcher was born in Havana, Cuba on 15^th March 1838. She was an American ethnologist who studied and documented American Indian culture. She was president of the Anthropological Society of Washington and of the American Folklore Society, and vice-president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Her father, a graduate of Dartmouth and a promising young attorney in New York, suffered from ill health and ventured to Cuba in a failed search for a climate more amenable to his well-being. After her father passed away, Fletcher’s mother, whom she recalled as a "highly educated lady of Boston," moved the family back to the East Coast so that her daughter might attend the "best schools" available.

After finishing school, Fletcher taught in private institutions and was active in women’s advancement clubs. When financial difficulties forced her to find a means of supporting herself, she set out on the popular lecture circuit where she pursued her interests in the history of human life. In her lectures, Fletcher argued that the ancient history of man was best uncovered by archaeology and ethnography.

Seemingly in parallel with Octavia Hill, working through the Women's National Indian Association, she introduced a system of making small loans to Indians, wherewith they might buy land and houses. Later she helped write, lobbied for and helped administer the Dawes Act of 1887 which broke up reservations and substituted individual ownership of land parcels.

Fletcher and Chief Joseph at the Nez Percé Lapwai Reservation in Idaho

Fletcher lived at the Omaha Reservation as an employee of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to allot private property to the inhabitants of the reservation, and she carried out similar work at the Winnebago and Nez  Percé reservations throughout the 1880s.

Education was high upon Fletcher’s agenda for aiding Native Americans in gaining the characteristics and accoutrements of civilization. From 1881, Fletcher was avidly involved in the interests of the Carlisle Indian School, an institution in Pennsylvania developed for Native American children. At Carlisle, the children learned English and arithmetic and developed skills that would allow them to become productive American citizens. Again, a rather conservative view in the light of her own research, but well meaning all the same.

As to Margaret Ethridge Knight, born 14^th February 1838, she was an American inventor. She has been called "the most famous 19th-century woman inventor" She was born in York, Maine to James Knight and Hannah Teal. James Knight died when Margaret was a little girl. Knight went to school until she was twelve and worked as a cotton mill worker from ages twelve through 56.

In 1868, while living in Springfield, Massachusetts, Knight invented a machine that folded and glued paper to form the flat bottomed brown paper bags familiar to shoppers today. Many of her other inventions included a numbering machine, window frame and sash, and several devices relating to rotary engines. Perhaps not a reformer on the scale of the others but where would we be without the paper bag.

Alexandra Petrovna was born on 2 June 1838, in St Petersburg as Duchess Alexandra Frederika Wilhelmina of Oldenburg.  She was the eldest of the eight children of Duke Peter Georgievich of Oldenburgand his wife Princess Theresa of Nassau-Weilburg. Alexandra belonged to a German family but grew up in Russia, where her family was closely related to the Romanov dynasty. Alexandra was plain and unsophisticated. She liked simplicity and preferred to dress modestly, avoiding public life. She dedicated her time to religion and to her consuming interest in medicine. She was also a gifted painter. She had married Grad Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich of Russia. Her marriage was far from happy and after the breakup of her marriage she retired from court life and became a nun; however, her husband took her ideas seriously and financed a hospital in the city where Alexandra’s theories could be developed and put into practice and poor patients received care without charge. Sometimes she nursed them herself. Eventually, she founded a training institute for nurses in St Petersburg.

This would have been, no doubt during the Crimean War (1853-18560) when that other great reformer Florence Nightingale made her reputation. Clearly that useless carnage had a lot to answer for.

Of all of them my preferred lady is Victoria Woodhull. She was born Victoria California Claflin in Homer, Licking County, Ohio. Her father, Reuben Buckman Claflin was a con man, arsonist, snake oil salesman and occasional fraudulent doctor. Her brothers, Hebern and Maldon, were printers. Victoria was closely associated during most of her life with her sister Tennessee Celeste Claflin, who was seven years younger than she. The family belonged to an impoverished branch of the Massachusetts-based Scottish American Claflin family, and were distant cousins to the philanthropist Governor William Claflin.

When she was just 14, Victoria met 28-year-old Canning Woodhull (Channing, in some records), a doctor from a town outside of Rochester, New York. Woodhull practiced medicine in Ohio at a time when formal medical education and licensing were not required in that state. He met Victoria around June or July 1853 when her family consulted him to treat her for a chronic illness. Victoria married Canning Woodhull, the two filing a marriage certificate in Cleveland on November 23, 1853, when she was 15 years, two months of age. She soon learned that her new husband was an alcoholic and a womanizer, and that she would often be required to work outside the home to support the family. She and Canning had two children, Byron and Zulu (later Zula) Maude. According to one account, Byron was born with an intellectual disability in 1854, a condition Victoria believed was caused by her husband's alcoholism. Another story says his disability resulted from a fall from a window. In 1872 she started a relationship with the anarchist Benjamin Tucker, lasting for 3 years.

Woodhull's support of free love probably originated at the time of her first marriage. Women who married in the United States during the 19th century were bound into the unions, whether loveless or not, with few options to escape. Divorce, where possible, was scandalous, and women who divorced were stigmatized and often ostracized by society. Victoria Woodhull concluded women should have the choice to leave unbearable marriages, and she railed against the hypocrisy of tacitly tolerating married men who had mistresses and engaged in other sexual dalliances. Victoria believed in monogamous relationships, although she did state she had the right also to love someone else "exclusively" if she desired. She said: 

"To woman, by nature, belongs the right of sexual determination. When the instinct is aroused in her, then and then only should commerce follow. When woman rises from sexual slavery to sexual freedom, into the ownership and control of her sexual organs, and man is obliged to respect this freedom, then will this instinct become pure and holy; then will woman be raised from the iniquity and morbidness in which she now wallows for existence, and the intensity and glory of her creative functions be increased a hundred-fold."

She was some lady. Victoria Woodhull struck out for change and many of the reforms and ideals espoused by her for the common working class against the corrupt rich business elite, though extremely controversial in her time,  have been implemented and are now taken for granted. With a snake oil salesman for a father and coming from Licking County, how more down to earth can you get. She should have been President and no doubt had she been about today, she would have been.