The woman who bridged Wollstonecraft and first-wave feminism
TRAILBLAZER Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon: The first feminist to change our world
JANE ROBINSON 416pp. Doubleday. £25.
IN 1945 “BARBIE” WAS ELECTED to parliament, at the sixth attempt. Barbara Bodichon Ayrton Gould, Labour MP for Hendon North, had taken part in the women’s suffrage movement with her mother, Phoebe Sarah Hertha Ayrton. In Trailblazer Jane Robinson makes clear that it was Ayrton Gould’s namesake, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827–91), who enabled and inspired Hertha’s studies at Girton, the Cambridge college she co-founded with Emily Davies in the late 1860s. Bodichon was in effect the catalyst for Hertha’s pioneering scientific work on the improvement of the electric arc and on sand ripples, and her invention of the antigas fan used in the First World War trenches. Nearly 100 years later Bodichon’s legacy was still traceable in the House of Commons.
We have encountered Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon in Robinson’s earlier works, including the formidably researched and vivacious Bluestockings (2009), on the first women to enter university life, and Hearts and Minds (2018), which focused on the peaceable suffragists who marched in brown to distinguish themselves from the purple, white and green of the militants. Bodichon had the temerity to study anatomical drawing at Bedford College (she later sold paintings at the Royal Academy) and took John Stuart Mill to task on his failure to consider the potential contribution of women to the body politic in his Principles of Political Economy (1848). As well as writing pamphlets on the law as it related to women, she loudly and successfully backed Mill’s election campaign in 1865 as Liberal candidate for Westminster. Robinson points out that the Kensington Society, of which Bodichon was a key member alongside Mill’s stepdaughter Helen Taylor, was the first debating society formed by and for women. The English Woman’s Journal, which Bodichon set up with Bessie Rayner Parkes and Max Hays, reviewed favourably another project of hers – a guidebook on Algiers which she wrote with her husband, Dr Eugène Bodichon.
Robinson makes the case that because her subject’s interests were so wide-ranging, she did not achieve fame for being an innovator in a specific field. Given Bodichon’s extensive presence in the author’s other works, some duplication of material is inevitable, although Trailblazer retells, in some places verbatim, the quotidian experiences of a chilblained Girton student in Bluestockings, Bessie Macleod, who studied there in the 1880s, grappling with early morning Latin prose and late-night shifts at the fire brigade, entirely run by college students.
A charmingly hand-drawn spider diagram shows how astonishingly well connected Bodichon was: around her name (represented by a sunflower, which was h
