Educationalist, artist and activist.

8 April 1827 – 11 June 1891

Education 

Attended local school together with her brothers but, as a woman, was denied a place at university.

1849 Studied painting at Ladies’ College, (Bedford College) under Francis Cary, Professor of Drawing.

Some Key Achievements and Interests

1850 Two paintings exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art, the first of several to be accepted in the next twenty years.

1850s Exhibited and sold paintings at Crystal Palace, the British Institution, the Royal Society of British Artists and other galleries in London, around England and the US.

1850s Joined the Folio Club and with Anna Mary Howitt, Bessie Rayner Parkes and Christina Rossetti, set up the Portfolio Club (which met at her house) to exhibit and discuss women’s art work. She modelled for Howitt.

1854 Published A Brief Summary of the Most Important Laws of England concerning Women (in accordance with English Common Law, husband had absolute control over wife’s property and earnings; she was unable to dispose of her possessions without his consent; the legal custody of her children belonged to him). This resulted in a report drafted to extend women’s property right. Laws Concerning Women 1854 – Pascal Theatre Company (pascal-theatre.com)

1854 Reopened Westminster School as Portman Hall, a progressive co-educational school.

1857 Published Women and Work, calling for equality of education and work opportunities for women. This became a platform for major feminist writing.

1858 Co-founded and financed The English Woman’s Journal with Bessie Rayner Parkes to raise employment and equality issues. Regularly writes articles for the Journal.

1859 Helped organise a petition to the Royal Academy demanding women be admitted to its schools. The Academicians did not respond positively to this but, when Laura Herford, was accepted having applied in the name of L Herford and being taken as a man, they capitulated.

1859 Co-founded the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women with Jessie Boucherett and Adelaide Ann Proctor to promote women’s training and apprenticeships.

1860s/70s Exhibited and sold work at several London galleries, the Royal Academy and the Society of Female Artists.

1866 Formed the first Women’s Suffrage Committee.

1866 Essay: Reasons for the Enfranchisement of Women set out her arguments for women’s suffrage though at this stage only in relation to giving the vote to female freeholders and householders.

‘Among all the reasons for giving women votes, the one which appears to me the strongest, is that of the influence it might be expected to have in increasing public spirit.’

1869 Co-founded Girton College, Cambridge’s first women’s college.

1870: The Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 was passed, something to which her work had contributed substantially.

Issues

Daughter of Benjamin Leigh Smith and Anne Longdon, a milliner’s apprentice and 30 years younger who died when Bodichon was seven.  Social criticism rife: The Smith children were Florence Nightingale’s illegitimate cousins and known as the ‘tabooed family’. This, however, freed her of expectations to be ‘respectable’.

Connection to Bloomsbury

Ladies’ College.

The Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (SPEW) occupied premises in Queen Square, Bloomsbury.

Female networks: numerous including

close family members: Dorothy Longden (Dolly), Julia Smith (Aunt Ju), Isabella (Bella) Leigh, Annie (Nannie) Leigh.

Artists including: Christina Rossetti, Gertrude Jekyll, Marianne North, close friend Eliza Bridell, Elizabeth (Lizzie) Siddal, Emily Osborn (who was commissioned by Girton College to paint Bodichon).

Society for Promoting the Training of Women (SPEW) networks: Adelaide Procter, Bessie Rayner Parkes, Emily Fathfull, Jessie Boucherett, Matilda (Max) Hayes etc.

Anna Jameson, Anna Mary Howitt, Elizabeth Blackwell, Caroline Dall (American contact), Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Garrett, Emily Davies, , close friend George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Helen Blackwell, Jane Crow, Jessie White Mario, Margaret Carpenter, Marianne North, Mary Ewart, Matilda Betham Edwards, Millicent Fawcett, Octavia Hill, Rebecca Moore.

Other women in the Langham Place Group.

Hertha Ayrton whose studies she supported and helped finance. (Hertha named her daughter Barbara Bodichon Ayrton.)

Writing/Publications include

1857 Women and Work

1866 pamphlet Objections to the Enfranchisement Considered

1866 Reasons for the Enfranchisement of Women

1869 A brief summary, in plain language, of the most important laws of England concerning women, together with a few observations thereon (1869)

1972 An American Diary, 1857–8

Art Work

1846 Ireland.

1850 View near Tremadoc exhibited at the Royal Academy.

1850 Dawn near Maentwrog exhibited at the Royal Acdemy.

1850-60 Paintings of Algiers including Algiers from Kubah.

Thunder Storm near Festiniog

Cornfield, Sussex.

The Sea, Hastings; for which she was awarded a silver medal at the Crystal Palace Exhibition.

1856 Ventnor.

Quotes

“I am one of the cracked people of the world and I like to herd with the cracked, such as … queer Americans, democrats, socialists, artists, poor devils or angels; and am never happy in an English genteel family life. I try to do it like other people, but I long always to be off on some wild adventure, or long to lecture on a tub at St. Giles, or go off to see the Mormons, or ride off into the interior on horseback alone and leave the world for a month…”  (letter to an aunt, 1857)

During her honeymoon, she wrote: “To believe in the transubstantiation or the divinity of the Virgin is not so perverting to the mind as to believe that women have no rights to full development of all their faculties and exercise of all their powers, to believe that men have rights over women, and as fathers to exercise those pretended rights over daughters, as husbands exercising those rights over wives.”

In Women and Work: “To think a woman is more feminine because she is frivolous, ignorant, weak, and sickly, is absurd; the larger-natured a woman is, the more decidedly feminine she will be; the stronger she is, the more strongly feminine. You do not call a lioness unfeminine, though she is different in size and strength from the domestic cat, or mouse.”

“If men think they should lose anything charming by not having ignorant, dependent women about them, they are quite wrong. The vivacity of women will not be injured by their serious work. None play so heartily as those who work heartily. The playfulness of women which makes them so sympathetic to children, is deep in their nature; and greater development of their whole natures will only increase this and all the natural gifts.”

……..

“Every human being should work; No one should owe bread to any but his or her parents… rational beings ask nothing from their parents save the means of gaining their own livelihood. Fathers have no right to cast the burden of the support of their daughters on other men. It lowers the dignity of women; and tends to prostitution, whether legal or in the streets. As long as fathers regard the sex of a child as a reason why should not be taught to gain its own bread, so long must women be degraded. Adult  women must not be supported by men, if they are to stand as dignified rational beings before God…”

[from Women and Work by Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon with an introduction by Catherine M Sedgwick New York 1859]

Further Reading:

Murphy, Gillian: “The 1866 women’s suffrage petition”, on the website of the London School of Economics. Retrieved 09:12, 14 March 2023, from https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/2016/06/07/the-1866-womens-suffrage-petition/

Wikipedia contributors. Barbara Bodichon. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopaedia. Retrieved 12:21, 16 March 2923, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Bodichon