Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon

English artist and social activist

• Born: April 8, 1827
• Birthplace: Whatlingen, Sussex, England
• Died: June 11, 1891
• Place of death: Scalands Gate, Hastings, East Sussex, England

Bodichon was a landscape artist who exhibited widely in England, but she is better known as a leader among early feminists in Great Britain. She lobbied to change British marriage laws and obtain suffrage for women and promoted higher education for women, helping to establish Girton College at Cambridge University.

Early Life

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (BAH-dih-kawn) was born Barbara Leigh Smith, the oldest daughter of a highly successful merchant and social iconoclast, Benjamin Smith, and his common-law wife Anne Longden. Annie had four other children by Smith before she died in 1834, but the couple never married, possibly because Smith did not agree with the legal restrictions placed on wives and children by formal marriage.

Barbara inherited her father’s reformist spirit. As a child she was educated in a fashion more common for male children and was given exceptional freedom in her home. When she turned twenty-one, her father gave her a bequest that provided an annual income of three hundred pounds, making her financially independent and allowing her to launch a career that would see her distinguish herself in both art and politics. In 1848, she began writing articles for various periodicals, and during the following year she enrolled at the newly formed Bedford College for Ladies, where she studied art under Francis Cory. Her work was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1850, and during the following year one of her paintings was included in the Society of British Artists exhibition. She would continue to exhibit in both venues over the next two decades.

At Bedford College Barbara also took courses in economics and law, preparing herself for leadership in a movement that influenced her own and future generations. In 1850, she traveled, unchaperoned, to Europe with her friend Bessie Raynor Parkes; it was the first of many times that she flaunted convention and generated mild scandal. Her visit in Munich with fellow women artists Anna Mary Howitt and Jane Benham led her to decide on her life’s work outside her artist’s studio: promoting women’s causes in a patriarchal society in which women were decidedly objects of legal as well as social discrimination.

Life’s Work

When Barbara set up residence in London during the early 1850’s, she began working with a number of women whose interests coincided with her own. Although not yet married and financially independent, Barbara believed that current laws making women legally subservient to their husbands were inherently immoral. Urged on by friends such as Parkes, Howitt, Benham, and her new friend Marian Evans—better known as novelist George Eliot—she began agitating for change in laws governing property. Her initial contribution to this cause was a pamphlet, A Brief Summary of the Most Important Laws of England Concerning Women . The 1854 publication caused a minor scandal, although most men and women in polite society dismissed it simply as the work of an unconventional bohemian. The Law Amendment Society, however, took Barbara’s views seriously enough to appoint a committee to look into the concerns that she raised.

The publication of her pamphlet brought Barbara into contact with her publisher John Chapman, editor of the Westminster Review, with whom she had a brief but dispiriting affair. In 1856, she traveled to Algeria to get away from Chapman, and there met Dr. Eugène Bodichon, whom she married the following year. The newly married couple then took a seven-month honeymoon to the United States, where Barbara met leading feminists in Boston, New York, and other cities. From 1858 until her husband’s death in 1885, Barbara divided her time between England and Algiers.

Before she left England in 1856, Barbara had been the catalyst in organizing a group to petition Parliament to change laws governing women’s rights—especially the rights of women to possess property in their own names and to earn independent livings. The informal committee that she organized in 1856 managed to collect seventy thousand signatures on a petition presented to Parliament the following year. In Parliament, the Married Women’s Property Bill passed two readings, but eventually failed to become law.

Bodichon expressed her lobbying efforts on behalf of working women in another pamphlet that she published in 1857: Women and Work . The following year she purchased The English Woman’s Journal, a periodical with a national circulation. She and others in her circle used that publication to promote women’s causes through much of the following decade.

During this period of significant political activity, Bodichon still found time to paint and to work on other projects. She continued exhibiting in London, with both the Royal Society and the Society of British Artists, and at the Dudley Gallery and the French Gallery. Her work was included in a traveling exhibition to New York in 1857, and paintings appeared in later years in Birmingham and Liverpool exhibitions. Her artistic circle included many of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister, Christina Georgina Rossetti, claimed her as a friend and spoke highly of her ability as a landscape painter. In 1858, Bodichon worked with her husband as editor of his book Algeria Considered as a Winter Residence for the English. Her own winter residences in Algeria over the next twenty years provided her inspiration for some of her best-known paintings.

Bodichon’s political activism was not slowed by her art. During the late 1850’s, she turned her attention to the issue of suffrage and for several years was active in groups committed to obtaining the vote for women. This activity brought her into contact with the philosopher John Stuart Mill and his wife, Harriet Taylor, who had also been pursuing feminist causes for more than a decade. In 1865, Bodichon helped to circulate another petition, this one demanding suffrage, and asked Mill, a member of Parliament, for assistance. Mill presented her petition to Parliament in 1866 but was not successful in seeing its proposal adopted.

Meanwhile, Bodichon contributed to the public debate on woman suffrage, first in 1866 with a pamphlet, Objections to the Enfranchisement of Women Considered , and three years later with a longer, more cogently argued defense of woman suffrage, Reasons for and Against the Enfranchisement of Women . It is a small irony of history that Bodichon’s spirited argument appeared during the same year as John Stuart Mill’s On the Subjection of Women , as the latter received much wider circulation and eventually proved more influential in keeping alive interest in many of the issues on which Bodichon and her circle were working.

Throughout her career, Bodichon never abandoned her interest in education for women. During the late 1860’s, she began a project that would eventually lead to the acceptance of women in England’s great universities. With her associate Emily Davies, Bodichon began drafting plans for a college for women that was to be located at either Oxford or Cambridge. Her proposed college was to have the same admissions standards, curricula, and examinations as those applied to men at the great English universities. Although Bodichon was not officially associated with the new college’s establishment because the notoriety she had gained while supporting women’s causes was considered a liability by Davies and others, she contributed one thousand pounds to the cause and allowed the college to use her London residence as a site for examining the first applicants. In 1873, Bodichon saw her dream come true when Girton College opened in Cambridge.

After Bodichon suffered a stroke in 1877, she continued to work but at a reduced pace. In 1885, a second stroke followed from which she never fully recovered. She died in 1891, bequeathing Girton College a legacy of ten thousand pounds.

Significance

Through her writing, political activism, and patronage, Bodichon advanced the cause of women’s equality on a number of fronts during her lifetime. Although it is true that her gradualist approach was repudiated by the feminists whose efforts resulted in woman suffrage after World War I, her identification and public statements on issues such as property rights, education, and voting set the agenda for feminists over the next half-century in England.

Bodichon’s encouragement of other feminists and her willingness to work with men such as John Stuart Mill broadened the reach of the feminist movement and ensured that issues she and her circle had brought to the forefront of public consciousness would not be forgotten when she retreated from the public eye near the end of her life. Similarly, although women were not officially admitted to Cambridge University until 1945, the presence of Girton College remained a visible symbol of what women could accomplish in higher education when afforded the opportunity to participate as equals to men.

Bibliography

Burton, Hester. Barbara Bodichon, 1827-1891. London: Murray, 1949. Full-length biography that assesses Bodichon’s career and helps place her in the culture that concurrently supported and resisted efforts to improve women’s status.

Herstein, Sheila R. A Mid-Victorian Feminist: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985. While covering the major events in Bodichon’s life, this biography concentrates on her contributions to the feminist movement and feminist thought.

Hirsch, Pam. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, 1827-1891: Feminist, Artist and Rebel. London: Chatto & Windus, 1998. Based not only on published accounts but also on many manuscripts and records, this study provides a measured assessment of Bodichon’s life, highlighting her accomplishments in many fields and noting her contributions to the women’s movement.

Levine, Philippa. Victorian Feminism, 1850-1900. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1987. Sketches Bodichon’s role in promoting feminist causes by placing her in relation to others with whom she worked to bring about equal treatment for women in England.

Orr, Clarissa Campbell. Women in the Victorian World. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1995. Includes an essay evaluating Bodichon’s work as a political activist; other essays suggest how leaders of the feminist movement influenced the advancement of women’s causes in Victorian England.