(Elizabeth Rayner Parkes, married name Belloc)

Poet, journalist and women’s rights campaigner.

16 June 1829 – 23 March 1925

A tribute to Bessie Parkes Belloc by Debbie Parker Kinch

In May 1866, a profile of Bessie Rayner Parkes appeared in Portraits of Men of Eminence in Literature, Science and Art. As its title suggests, this magazine published photographic portraits of the great and the good of the day: the scientist Charles Darwin was another subject in the same month’s issue. Parkes was a rarity in being recognised as an honorary female ‘man of eminence’ by the publication: only six other women were featured in the magazine during its six-year run. While few people today have heard of Parkes, in the 1860s her name would have been recognisable to many as one of the most prominent campaigners for women’s rights in Britain. The pen portrait which accompanied Parkes’s photograph celebrated her work as the founding editor of the English Woman’s Journal (1858-64), the first feminist periodical in Britain, and as a regular speaker at meetings of the influential National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (NAPSS).

As a writer, editor and public speaker, Parkes worked steadfastly during the 1850s and ’60s to promote women’s rights to education and paid employment, so that they could be financially self-sufficient rather than being forced to rely on support from male relatives. In her first publication, Remarks on the Education of Girls (1854), she drew upon the principles instilled in her by her inspirational teachers at a Unitarian girls’ boarding school, where she had received an unusually thorough academic education compared for a girl of her generation. In Remarks Parkes rejected fashionable ideals of femininity as delicate and in need of male protection and set out a system of education for girls that would enable them to fulfil their full physical, intellectual and moral capabilities, living and working alongside men as equals.

Such ideas were regarded as dangerously radical by some sections of the press and ‘Miss Parkes and her friends’ became the frequent target of personalised attacks. They were derided as examples of the unwomanly ‘strongminded female’, a staple figure of ridicule in Punch cartoons and newspaper columns of the day which coloured public assumptions about the appearance and character of Parkes and her fellow campaigners. Indeed, when in 1859 Jessie Boucherett travelled to the offices of the English Woman’s Journal to offer her services to the women’s rights cause, she claimed that she had been shocked to find that the editor was a young and attractive woman. The Men of Eminence portrait was the first published image of Parkes; readers might have been surprised to see a photograph of a petite, demure woman, soberly dressed in a dark silk gown, far from the virago of popular imagination.

In many of her campaigning efforts, Parkes worked closely with her long-standing friend and fellow feminist activist Barbara Leigh Smith (later Bodichon). The friends shared a determination to fight to improve the condition of their sex and a passion for art: Smith was embarking on a career as a landscape artist while Parkes had ambitions to be a respected poet. Her enjoyment of female friendship and collaborative working remained central to Parkes. She took pleasure in working alongside Bodichon in campaigning work, beginning with organising a petition for married women’s property rights, which was presented to Parliament in March 1856, and comprised over 26,000 signatures of women from around Britain. Although initially unsuccessful, this petition brought together networks of women which formed the foundations of continued campaigning, leading to the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 and facilitating the establishment of societies focused on women’s rights, including suffrage, in the following decades.

Female networking was also central to the work of the English Woman’s Journal, which Parkes and Bodichon established in 1858. From the outset Parkes had envisaged the Journal as a focal point for the burgeoning women’s movement and, under her direction, the Journal’s office at 19 Langham Place in Westminster became the hub for a range of activities promoting women’s employment opportunities. Principal amongst these was the Society for the Promotion of Employment for Women (SPEW), founded by Jessie Boucherett and Parkes’s close friend, the poet Adelaide Proctor, which opened in Bloomsbury before moving to Langham Place. SPEW provided training for women in a number of trades, including book-keeping and typewriting, organised from its headquarters at Langham Place and supported enterprises such as the Victoria Press in Bloomsbury, which printed the English Women’s Journal.

Parkes’s principal role in such enterprises was to promote their work, both in the pages of the English Woman’s Journal and at meetings of NAPSS. She travelled across Britain and Ireland, signing up new subscribers to the Journal, helping establish branches of SPEW in Glasgow and Dublin and delivering speeches to audiences of influential figures in politics and social reform. This was at a time when few women would contemplate appearing in so public a fashion and Parkes was excited by the opportunity afforded to women by participating in such gatherings, debating on equal terms with men. By participating in such events, Parkes sought to demonstrate women’s capability to participate fully in the public sphere and contribute to the improvement of society.

Parkes took a pragmatic approach to her work and at times this put her at odds with her fellow campaigners. She enforced her editorial decision not to include discussions about divorce or female suffrage in the English Woman’s Journal. While she personally supported such reforms, she feared that the appearance of such radical ideas in the pages of the Journal would risk its reputation amongst the general public and threaten its financial viability. Barbara Bodichon had envisioned the Journal (which she financed) as a more radical enterprise than it proved to be under Parkes’s editorship and this created tensions within the Langham Place circle.

In addition, Parkes’s growing interest in (and eventual conversion to) Roman Catholicism created religious divisions between her and her fellow campaigners, leading her to be become increasingly frustrated in her work. In 1864 she established a new title, the Alexandra Magazine, to promote arguments about women’s rights to a wider readership and then, having acquired sole ownership of the Journal, she amalgamated the two titles. However, the Alexandra Magazine and Englishwoman’s Journal was not a success; in 1866 Jessie Boucherett took control and relaunched it as the Englishwoman’s Review, which ran until 1903.

Parkes was deeply disappointed at the failure of the Journal and its successors, which she had believed were so important both as a mouthpiece for the women’s rights movement and as a demonstration of what women could achieve when they worked together. She was also exhausted by years of being in the public eye and seeing her name traduced in sections of the press. She continued to support the women’s rights movement and in 1866 helped organise the first parliamentary petition calling for women’s suffrage. However, the following year she surprised her friends by marrying Louis Belloc, an unassuming French lawyer, six months after meeting him, and moving to live with his family in France. Bodichon was convinced Parkes would regret this decision to move away from her life of public activism in London and even wrote to Belloc’s mother before the wedding to urge her to get Parkes to reconsider.

Parkes was adamant that this change of path was right for her and she lived quietly and happily with her new family. Marrying at the age of thirty-eight, she had not expected to become a mother, but within three years she had a daughter, Marie, and a son, Hilaire. She maintained a close interest in the women’s movement, writing to Bodichon on one occasion that she had found baby Marie sucking on a pamphlet on women’s suffrage; she joked that she hoped Marie might have thereby absorbed the ideas contained in its pages. With the support of her husband and mother-in-law she also continued her literary career, writing articles for titles such as the Spectator and publishing poetry and essays.

In later life Parkes Belloc described this period as a beautiful ‘Arcadia’, but it was one which was short-lived. The Bellocs had to flee to England to escape the Franco-Prussian war and returned to France to find the family home had been ransacked by Prussian troops. The following year Parkes Belloc’s husband collapsed suddenly with heatstroke and died. She returned to London to raise her children and struggled to manage her household on her own after the death of her mother. She fell victim to a dishonest financial advisor and lost almost all her wealth. She eventually had to declare herself bankrupt.

If Parkes Belloc had ever imagined returning to the world of public campaigning, that came second to her focus on raising her children. She used her connections to secure Hilaire a place at Oxford University after which he began work as a writer and editor. She drew upon her networks of literary and journalistic contacts to help Hilaire and his sister Marie and she was proud to watch their success as authors with prolific outputs. It was only once both children had left home that she turned her attention back to her own ambitions. Her collection of essays and reflections, In a Walled Garden, appeared in 1895, twenty-five years after her last publication. In the years that followed she published four more titles, taking pleasure in surprising her children with her late-blossoming success.

Parkes Belloc lived for more than fifty years after she stepped back from frontline feminist activism. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that she was only a radical in her youth. She maintained close ties with the women’s movement throughout her life and was a feminist role model to her daughter, Marie Belloc Lowndes, who followed in her mother’s footsteps through her contributions to the suffragist campaigns of the early 1900s and her work as a founding member of the Society for Women Journalists. In both public and private, Bessie Parkes Belloc was steadfast in her commitment to improving the lives of her fellow women and she bore the scars incurred by standing up for her principles. She deserves to be better remembered today, as a woman of eminence and central to the establishment of the women’s movement in Britain.

Debbie Parker Kinch is a Staff Tutor and Lecturer in English at the Open University, UK. Her PhD thesis is a biography of Bessie Parkes Belloc and she is currently writing a book on the same topic.

MINI BIOGRAPHY

Education

1840 Attended progressive Unitarian boarding school at Leam, Warwickshire, aged eleven.

Some Key Achievements and Interests

1850s Conference speaker and writer for the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (NAPSS).

1855 With Millicent Fawcett and other like-minded women formed the Married Women’s Property Committee to collect signatures in support of the Married Women’s Property Bill which aimed to free married women from the state of coverture. In the event, the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857, only applied to separated wives.

1857 Became editor of Waverly Journal, a fortnightly ladies’ magazine, and moved the journal to London. The journal collapsed in 1858.

1858 Co-founded and edited (for a period) the English Woman’s Journal, a feminist periodical. Articles focussed on the advocation of women’s education and employment.

1859 Involved in the setting up of Society for Promoting the Training of Women (SPEW) and Committee member. SPEW was set up to open more occupations for women and to provide training for women to enable them to enter occupations previously closed to them.

Stood on a committee set up by the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (NAPSS) to consider and report on the subject of female employment.

1860 Set up The Victoria Printing Press buying a printer and being trained how to use it before training other women (including Emily Faithfull). The press, staffed by women, printed the English Woman’s Journal and Transactions of the NAPSS.

Campaigned very actively for women’s rights: In her in Essays on Women’s Work (1866), Parkes argued for improving women’s education. She pointed out that women were expected to be supported financially by first their fathers and then their husbands but the changing demographic conditions (shortage of men) had made this unrealistic. So, women needed to be given the means to support themselves.

“The number of females of a marriageable age, in Great Britain, will always exceed the number of males of the same age to the extent of about half a million.” …: “How are we to deal with the half million (or rather, upwards of half a million) young women who, by the very ordinance of Nature, must necessarily, in a monogamic society, be unable to obtain husbands? If we are to admit that the proposed doctrine that ‘married life is a woman’s profession’, and that all that can be said for those who do not get husbands is that ‘they have failed in business’ like any other insolvent tradesman, it is at all events a melancholy anomaly, which has no parallel in the commercial world, that 500,000 persons should be obliged to educate themselves for a profession in which it is known beforehand that, whatever their abilities, they cannot possibly succeed!”  (Statistics as to the Employment of the Female Population of Great Britain printed in The English Women’s Journal March 1860).

1864 Converted to Catholicism.

Continued to write and publish articles and essays.

Issues

Felt confined by her conventional background and upbringing. She tried to break free of these but was aware that, to gain an audience, she had sometimes to rein herself in.

Elizabeth Blackwell wrote of her first impression of Parkes: ‘She will not wear corsets, she won’t embroider, she reads every heretic book she can get hold of, talks of following a profession, and has been known to go to an evening party, without gloves!.. she is really a very noble girl, but chaotic and without definite aim.’ (Blackwell Papers, Library of Congress quoted in Hirsch, Pam, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon London 1998.)

Parkes’ father disapproved of her involvement in ‘trade’, sending letters to the English Woman’s Journal:

‘Do not make yourself a Slave, or fancy it is necessary to the life and success of a Monthly Periodical to be always behind the counter.  I think also, and so think others, that your sale of Tracts is a foolish and useless appendage to an office for the Journal…Advertise your Tracts, but why retail them?…’. (Parkes, “The Reviewer Reviewed,” EWJ, Vol. II, Iss. 11 (January 1859): 336-343. Quoted from Dissent, Discussion and Dissemination: the Strategies of The Kensington Society in the Mid-Victorian Women’s Movement; Currer, Rebekah Julia Fairgray 2020)

Suffered from fragile health, while also supporting her husband, Louis Belloc, who she had to care for.

Connection to Bloomsbury

SPEW office initially in Bloomsbury and different SPEW activities established in the area.

The Victoria Printing Press initially based in Coram’s Fields, Bloomsbury.

Networked with many women active in the area.

Female networks – extensive to include:

Adelaide Procter, Anna Mary Howitt, Anna Jameson, Barbara Bodichon, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Emily Davies, George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, Isa Craig, Louise Swanton Belloc.

Emily Faithfull who Parkes initially mentored and supported to set up the Victoria Press and where the English Woman’s Journal was originally printed.

Fellow SPEW committee members eg Jessie Boucherett, Matilda Hays.

Women in the Langham Place Group.

Writing/publications include:

Articles written for Waverley Journal and the English Woman’s Journal.

1852 Poems (London, John Chapman)

1854 Remarks on the Education of Girls, with Reference to the Social, Legal, and Industrial Position of Women in the Present Day (London, John Chapman)

1854 Summer Sketches and Other Poems (London: John Chapman)

1861 A Year’s Experience in Woman’s Work, Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (London, John W. Parker & Son)

1863 Ballads and Songs (London, Bell and Daldy)

1865 Essays on Woman’s Work (London, Alexander Strahan)

1866 Vignettes: Twelve Biographical Sketches, (London, Alexander Strahan)

 1895 In a Walled Garden, A Collection of Essays (London Ward and Bowney) (included reminiscences of Adelaide Procter)

1897 A Passing World (London Ward & Downey)

References

Dissent, Discussion and Dissemination: the Strategies of The Kensington Society in the Mid Victorian Women’s Move Currer, Rebekah Julia Fairgray 2020 Dissent, Discussion and Dissemination: the Strategies of The Kensington Society in the Mid-Victorian Women’s Movement – CORE

Further Reading

Wikipedia contributors. Bessie Rayner Parkes. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 12:12, 08 April 2023, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessie_Rayner_Parkes

Catalog description of personal papers of Bessie Rayner Parkes at Girton College Archive, Cambridge, accessed 12:32 08 April 2023, https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/21e068b1-689a-3441-9b0c-7d6c4ce04e41

Bessie Rayner Parkes and The Married Women’s Property Act – Gender and Legal History in Birmingham and the West Midlands (bham.ac.uk)

Debbie Parker Kinch (2020) ‘We who strive for the foundation of a principle’: feminism and suffrage in the biography of Bessie Parkes Belloc, Women’s History Review, 29:6, 916-939, DOI: 10.1080/09612025.2020.1745399

Seeking a ‘steadfast aim’: a cultural historical biography of Bessie Rayner Belloc (1829-1925): Parker Kinch, D. A. (Author). Jun 2021: Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis