Writer and women’s rights activist.

November 1825 – 18 October 1905

Jessie Boucherett A Tribute by Michelle Tusan

Who was Jessie Boucherett?

Jessie Boucherett (1825-1905) was a writer, activist and supporter of women-run literary enterprises. A woman of independent means, she was the last survivor of an ancient landed Huguenot family seated at Willingham and inherited her family estate after the death of her elder sister Louisa in 1895. She was educated at a well-regarded school for ladies in Stratford upon Avon and described by her contemporaries as a strong ‘individualist’. Boucherett was a financial supporter of women writers, women’s journalism and the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (SPEW) until her death in 1905. According to her will, she left 500 pounds to the Englishwoman’s Review and an additional 200 pounds to its then editor, Antoinette McKenzie.  She left a total of £39,000 in her will to various other organisations and women. 

Women’s Networks in Bloomsbury

Jessie Boucherett began her journey as a writer, patron and activist through feminist networking. She was an early member of the London-based Langham Place Group in the 1850s who sought to improve women’s social position through supporting the creation of better employment and educational opportunities. The reading room set up at Langham Place, London provided her with several contacts, including poet Adelaide Procter and reformers Bessie Rayner Parkes and Barbara Leigh Smith (later Bodichon) who were interested in starting an organisation to help fund the training of women in non-traditional trades. ‘The first trade we thought of was printing,’ Boucherett recalled in an article she wrote for The Woman Question in Europe in 1884. Not only was the trade well-paid and maintained a relatively high degree of status among the skilled trades, it was also something women could be easily trained to do as compositing did not require heavy lifting, but only the ability to place letters on a composing stick. These conversations and contacts influenced Boucherett’s decision to support SPEW as an aid organisation for women that is that still exists today under the name of the Society for Promoting the Training of Women.

The Society, although affiliated during its early years with the progressive National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (NAPSS), was run and largely funded by women throughout its long life. SPEW was founded in 1859 with the explicit intention of providing financial backing through interest free loans and institutional support for women-run employment training programs. Holding its first official meeting in January 1860, the Society enjoyed a distinguished list of members due to its loose affiliation with the NAPSS. Despite strong ties with this male-run organisation, women ran the organisation throughout its long life.  SPEW’s incorporation as a limited liability company with shareholders in 1879 made this possible.

In 1860, the society set up its offices in the middle of Bloomsbury at Queen Square. There women learned the skills of book-keeping and law-copying. The Society chose this location most likely because, unlike many surrounding areas, Queen Square lacked restrictions on commercial and non-residential tenants. Named in honour of Queen Anne, it proved an auspicious place to set up a woman-centred enterprise. In the early 1860s, Queen Square residents included the Female School of Art, the Working Women’s College, the Ladies’ Charity School, the Home for Gentlewomen and the Alexandra Institute for the Blind which served blind women.

Boucherett’s own interest in woman-centred activism originated in the debate over the ‘redundant woman’ that took place in the mainstream Victorian press during mid-century. Boucherett was influenced by Harriet Martineau’s widely read article published in the Edinburgh Review in 1859 about what she called a new class of ‘superfluous’ women who had no means of employment and little family support. An article in the English Woman’s Journal which she spotted on a railway bookstall about this issue prompted Boucherett to seek out this community of like-minded women activists. She made her way to Langham Place to meet the staff of women at the Journal which had been founded that previous year in 1858.

Boucherett and Journalism

The English Woman’s Journal was recognised as a well-respected women-run magazine which, at its height of popularity, had a circulation of 1,000 copies per month. While it provided SPEW with a forum to help dispel beliefs that women were incapable for work in the industrial trades as well as the professions, it was plagued with financial difficulties and folded in 1864. Boucherett decided to take up and improve upon the work of the journal in a new periodical. She already had established herself as a writer having penned Hint for Self-Help: A Book for Young Women in 1863. In October 1866, she formed a new periodical based on the principles of the failed Journal. The Review immediately engaged itself in radical political issues such as granting women the franchise.  As one of the first public voices on this subject during the mid-1860s, the Review set out to spark a serious debate over votes for women. The first number of the Review, for example, contained two items concerned with the status of women: ‘Some Probable Consequences of Extending the Franchise to Female Householders’ and ‘Public Opinion on Questions Concerning Women’. That same year, Boucherett became involved with the drafting of the first suffrage petition presented to parliament by John Stuart Mill. 

In 1869, Boucherett attempted to replace the Englishwoman’s Review with a new title: Now-a-Days. This new periodical took a more global approach and focused on women’s issues, activities, and political culture at home and abroad.  Boucherett sent the Review’s subscribers the July number of Now-A-Days as a specimen of this periodical whose writers consisted ‘chiefly, but not exclusively ladies’ from all around the world. Now-a-Days was ‘ephemeral, of a day’, as one reader remembered.   This statement had more than an element of truth in it as only one issue of the periodical appears to have been printed.  In January of 1870, she started a new series of the Englishwoman’s Review.  This series of the Review extended this project by supplying readers with news and information while meticulously recording women’s political activities.  Through her guidance and financial assistance the Review provided a continuous record of women’s activism while acting as a forum for women’s political expression. She also continued to write about women’s employment which included an article in Josephine Butler’s, Women’s Work and Woman’s Culture in 1869.

Feminist Patronage

Though she strongly identified with Victorian Conservative politics, Boucherett’s writing on women’s issues and patronage of women-run business placed her squarely at the centre of a budding and progressive feminist movement. Boucherett’s most enduring legacy perhaps was her encouragement of the writing and careers of other women writers. This included providing both patronage and encouragement. She actively supported writers who took a less political line on women’s activism such as Louisa Hubbard who published Work and Leisure, a periodical that created a space for new women writers. She also had a hand in the Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage Journal which began publication on March 1, 1870 as the organ of the Manchester Branch of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage.  The Women’s Suffrage Journal was the result of what was characterised as ‘long and careful’ planning between Lydia Becker and Jessie Boucherett. Compared to women’s periodicals such as the Englishwoman’s Review, the Suffrage Journal had a more news-centred approach and focused primarily on politics. Boucherett’s long running Review, by this time a quarterly paper priced at one shilling, was almost half the physical size of this new paper.

Boucherett’s feminist networks and belief in the importance of women’s publishing meant that she ignored the potential for rivalry between competing titles and continued to support multiple publications written by and for women. In the end, she understood the importance of patronage in the competitive world of periodical publishing of the second half of the nineteenth century, an industry which did not necessarily advantage women. Boucherett’s financial backing protected the Review which continued publication until 1910 thanks in part to the sizable legacy she left to support in her will.

References

‘Obituary’, London Times, (October 21, 1905).

‘History of SPEW’, Early History Box, SPEW archives, Girton.

Ellen Jordan and Anne Bridger, ‘An Unexpected Recruit to Feminism’ Women’s History Review, July 2006: 385- 412.

Theodore Stanton, The Woman Question in Europe, (London: Sampson Low, 1884), 259.

Tusan, Michelle. Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain (University of Illinois Press, 2005).

Tusan, Michelle. ‘”Not the Ordinary Victorian Charity’: The Society for Promoting the Employment of Women Archive’ History Workshop Journal, Issue 49, Spring 2000: 221- 230.

UCL Bloomsbury Project https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bloomsbury-project/institutions/society_promoting_employment_women.htm

Linda Walker, ‘Jessie Boucherett’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online.

Michelle Tusan is Professor of History at University of Nevada Las Vegas. Her latest book, The Last Treaty: The Middle Eastern Front and the End of the First World War, was published by Cambridge in 2023. Other books include: The British Empire and the Armenian Genocide: Humanitarianism and Imperial Politics from Gladstone to Churchill (2017/2019); Smyrna’s Ashes: Humanitarianism, Genocide and the Birth of the Middle East (2012); Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain (2005) and articles in the American Historical Review, The Journal of Modern History and Past and Present. She also has published a co-authored textbook, Britain Since 1688: A Nation in the World. She is President of the North American Conference on British Studies.

MINI BIOGRAPHY

Education

Educated at home until her teenage years.

Avonbank, Stratford-upon-Avon: School of the Four Miss Byerleys.

Some Key Achievements and Interests

1859 Co-founded with Adelaide Procter the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (SPEW), affiliated to the Social Science Association (SSA), to help women become independent financially through employment. The society offered training and held a job register. Through SPEW women found training and employment for women as shop keepers, clerks, telegraphists etc opening many doors for women. They strove to transform the opinion held by many that middle-class women in employment could not retain their respectability. Boucherett was motivated by reading an article by Harriet Martineau on the subject of ‘Female Industry’ in the Edinburgh Review to take action.

One passage, her rallying call, was printed on the title page of SPEW Annual Reports from 1865-1940:

“The tale is plain enough – from whatever mouth it comes. So far from our countrywomen being all maintained, as a matter of course by us, ‘the breadwinners’, three millions out of six adult Englishwomen work for subsistence; and two out of the three in independence. With this new condition of affairs, new duties and new views must be accepted.” (Martineau 1859: 336).

For the development of Boucherett’s argument and focus see: The Obstacles to the Employment of Women; The English Woman’s Journal, February 1860 excerpt:

“The fact revealed in the census of 1851, and brought into notice by the article on female employment in The Edinburgh Review for April,1859, that two millions of our countrywomen are unmarried and have to maintain themselves, startled every thinking mind in the kingdom, and has done much to effect a change in public opinion, with regard to the expediency of opening fresh fields of labour to the industry of the weaker sex. Until that circumstance became known, benevolent persons were generally of opinion that as married life is the happiest lot for women, so all public plans and arrangements in relation to them should be made solely with a view to their occupying that position, for though it was always apparent that a considerable number of single women existed, and that some experienced difficulty in earning a livelihood, the greatness of their numbers was never suspected, nor the cause of their difficulties understood. When, however, it was shown that one third of the women of Great Britain were unmarried and unprovided for, except by such means as their own exertions might procure, it was at once perceived that to make all social arrangements on the supposition that women were almost invariably married, and supported by their husbands, was to build on a fallacy, and that these two millions of independent workers, if considered at all, must be regarded as their own ‘bread-winners’.”

1866 Organised committee to present first petition for women’s voting rights to Parliament drafted with Barbara Bodichon and Emily Davies.

1866 Founder and Editor of the Englishwoman’s Review, a feminist periodical, (published after the demise of the English Woman’s Journal).

Campaigner for women’s higher education and involved in the foundation of Girton College.

1870 Co-founded the Women’s Suffrage Journal.

Issues

Jessie Boucherett had fewer barriers standing in her way than most women: she came from a wealthy family and, on the death of her siblings, the family property passed to her. This enabled her to dedicate herself to her work for women’s rights, to establish publication such as the Englishwoman’s Review, provide the financial backing for such ventures and support SPEW. Her financial resources enabled her to overcome restrictions that many women faced.

Connection to Bloomsbury

SPEW founded in Bloomsbury.

Boucherett was Proprietor of the School, established under the auspices of SPEW, to offer general education for girls with an emphasis on writing and arithmetic, located from 1865 at 45 Great Ormond Street. Also in Queen Square in Bloomsbury, overseen by Boucherett, were classes for women in book-keeping and law-copying.

Female networks – wide ranging including:

Adelaide Anne Proctor, Barbara Bodichon (co-founders of the the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women); Bessie Rayner Parkes, Emily Faithfull members of SPEW; Helen Taylor (with whom she promoted the idea of parliamentary reform); Lydia Becker (co-founder of the Women’s Suffrage Journal); Helen Blackburn (colleague on the Englishwoman’s Review); Frances Power Cobbe, Harriet Martineau, Mary Somerville (members of committee to petition Parliament).

Writing/Publications include:

Articles in The English Woman’s Journal

1863 Hints on Self-Help for Young Women

1868 The Condition of Women in France

1869 chapter; ‘Provisions for Superfluous Women’ in Josephine Butler’s volume of essays Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture (London 1869)

1884 essay ‘The Industrial Movement’ in The Woman Question in Europe ed Theodore Stanton (New York, 1884)

1896, in collaboration with Helen Blackburn, The Condition of Working Women and the Factor Acts (London)

Further reading:

Wikipedia contributors. Jessie Boucherett. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 11:37, 08 April 2023, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessie_Boucherett

Charlotte Fell Smith in Dictionary of National Biography accessed through Wikisource 11:47, 8 April 2023 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1912_supplement/Boucherett,_Emilia_Jessie

History of Futures for Women – Future For Women (SPTW)

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the Langham Place Group, ed Lacey, Candida Ann Lacey; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986

Timely Assistance: The Work of the Society for Promoting the Training of Women 1859-2009; Anne Bridger and Jordan, Ellen ISBN 978 0 9562449 0 1