Sexism and the Law

I'm exiled, living in England, and I'm going to devour everything English I can, not with a view to becoming more English than the English, but with a view to learning. What can I bring home with me for future South Africa? It was wonderful. I suppose it's another example of turning a negative into a positive, finding a way of developing a dilemma that you come out on top. And the energy of the dilemma is a positive energy, because you get something productive out of it.

So now teaching at Southampton, I can now absorb so much through my teaching, through lettering, through meeting with colleagues, through attending their seminars, through sitting in on some other classes. I find myself more and more embraced by the theme of sexism, and it was hitting me quite powerfully. In South Africa, the issue of racism was overwhelming, and the struggle against racism was totally dominant, and the theme of rights for women would crop up. My mother, single woman, looking after the two kids, independent woman, she had strong women friends who were trade unionists, and I grew up in a world of strong women, and that turned out to be very helpful for me. But now in England, the issue of masculinity and sexism is becoming quite a big issue in public life.

The whole question of patriarchy is being raised, and I find myself immensely fascinated by and attracted to the suffragettes, and I'm almost wondering, Why am I so drawn to them? And then I realise that they were literally putting their bodies on the line. They didn't have guns, they didn't have money, they didn't have power. All they had was their bodies and their minds and determination. So, they would go on hunger strike and protest through the suffering of their body. One woman, Emily Davidson, threw herself in front of the king's horse at the Derby, and she was killed. I read about this young girl who is invited to be a debutant at a ball organised by the Queen of England, and she curtsies and says, ‘Votes for women, Your Majesty.’ And I'm thinking of the courage of that young girl, and I'm seeing the disputes in the ranks of the feminists, with the more polite people saying, Don't go for hunger strikes. Don't break the law. Be nice and persuade.

And in fact, it was one of those groups that had the library and the books that I'm now reading. And I pick up one of the books, and it's by Sylvia Pankhurst, and she'd been friendly with Olive Schreiner, who'd become one of my heroes. The daughter of a German missionary in the Karoo, she wrote The Story of an African Farm, a beautiful book that's virtually unknown in South Africa today, but she went to live in England and it took London my storm. She wrote it under a man's name, Ralph Iron, and then only came out as a woman.

I'm reading Silva Pankhurst autobiography, and I see there's a star on one of the pages, and a footnote. It's obviously been added at a late stage of printing and the star refers to a case which Pankhurst’s father Richard Pankhurst had taken in Manchester in the 1880s claiming the rights of women to vote, and the suffrage law, electoral law, said every person who owns property of so many pounds is written proper should have the right to vote. And two women went to the local registrar and said, ‘We are persons. We own property. We would like to vote.’ And the registrar said, 'Fine, I would love you to do so, but you are women, and you can't. Women have never had the vote and can't have the vote.' So, they went to the High Court in Manchester and the High Court said that women were not persons. I shake my head. I read it, re-read it again, and again. And the asterisk in the footnote says, now 40 years later, for the first time, the Privy Council of the House of Lords had held that women are persons, reversing 40 years of legal decisions saying women are not persons. I'm stunned. I've never heard of that. I'd heard of class bias by British judges, how they had penalised men for going on strike and calling these combinations against the property interests of the owners and how much of the common laws it was called made by the judges was based on masters and servants’ propositions. I never heard about these persons cases, so I decided to follow them up, and I went to the Manchester voting case. And then I discovered the case of Sophia Blake in Edinburgh. She'd applied to be admitted to the medical school, and they'd said, Yes, you can. And she got the medical school, and she was allowed there on the basis that anatomy lessons, she would sit next to a curtain so she wouldn't be together with the men, but she would see the same body that’s been dissected. But the men were so enraged that they organised a protest demonstration. They even brought sheep in with them, and the University Council buckled and said, Sorry, woman can't attend anymore. And it went to the top Scottish court, and I think twenty-five judges sat, and they divided thirteen to twelve against the women. And what was so fascinating was the arguments used by the thirteen, and the arguments were always to say excluding women should not be indicated as a sign of disrespect. On the contrary, it's because we respect them so much that we are protecting them from the roughness and the hurly burly of that kind of life. The statements were like unimaginable and not like medieval times. You know, this was now in the 1880s so it was less than a hundred years before.

And then I see Bertha Cave gets a degree at Oxford with top honours. She applies to practice as a barrister, and it isn't even a statute where the word person now can be said to be person means historically, male person. It's up to the lawyers themselves. They're not bound by what the judges said. And they say, sorry, you’re out. A woman applies to stand as a candidate for a city council, and she's refused. And the comment is at the time when Queen Victoria was the queen of the country - a woman can hold the highest office in the land, but not the lowest office. And then I see in Australia, the same decisions, in Canada, similar decisions, in South Africa, similar decisions.

And the only judge in the whole of the British Empire who said women are persons was a Judge Maasdorp in the Cape and even Justice Ennis, who belonged to a family surrounded by feminists, even there, he said, If the intention of the lawyers refusing to allow women to become registered as lawyers is based more on protecting their own employment and work and source of income, or it's based on the reasons they give, I'm bound by the precedent established elsewhere.

1926 a case comes on appeal from Canada to the Privy Council, which is a section of the House of Lords, the top Court in England, which heard appeals from the Empire and from the Commonwealth, and the Labour Government has come into power, they've appointed a Lord Sankey as head of the Court, and now he's head of the Privy Council, and he said, Of course, women are persons, it's so obvious. And she had noted that.

So, I decided this story needs to be told. And I decided this is my contribution, my thank you to English public life. If my thank you to Mozambique was the book on the murals of Maputo, my thank you to English public life is the book ‘Sexism and the Law’. It was the first book of that kind, certainly in the English language. You can't take pleasure in exposing ugliness, but there's a kind of pleasure that you're bringing it to light.

Then, the question was getting the book published, and University of California Press said, Sexism and the Law in England is an interesting theme, but it wouldn't have great attraction for Americans. Could you get an American version? And I had a friend from she's from a National Lawyers Guild, a very left-wing group of American lawyers who took up civil rights cases, anti-Vietnam War cases, war resisters, rights of immigrants and so on. She put me on to Joan Hoff-Wilson who produced her half. I came to the US. I met her for the first time. She was at Radcliffe, at Harvard. We hit it off very quickly. We did a preface together, and it was then published in England and the US by good publishers in each.