Margaret Bateson (Heitland) 1860 – 1938
Social reformist, journalist, suffragist
27 February 1860- 31 May 1938
Margaret Bateson: A tribute by Arlene Young
Margaret Batson was a distinguished journalist and an outspoken advocate of women’s rights, including the right to vote and the right for middle-class women to have access to gainful employment. In the 1880s and 1890s, ‘respectability’ required women to limit themselves to married domesticity. Not only did Bateson support women’s access to work, she demanded female entry into areas considered male preserves—branches of the medical sciences, finance and bureaucratic administration. Bateson wittily synthesised the problem recalling the campaign by male doctors to exclude women from their ranks, warning that ‘when an irresistible Force, namely Woman, encounters an immovable Body, namely Man, that Body must either think better of its immobility or prepare to be pulverised.’
Bateson was born in Cambridge in 1860, where her father was master of St. John’s College. In her early twenties, Bateson, who was fluent in French and German, tutored students in Cambridge and was active in the women’s suffrage movement. When her mother, Anna Aikin Bateson, and Millicent Garrett Fawcett established the Cambridge Women’s Suffrage Association in 1884, Bateson became its Assistant Secretary. Although she always remained active in the suffrage movement, Bateson made the bold move to leave Cambridge for London. She lived in Bloomsbury in 1886 and in 1888 began work for The Queen, The Ladies’ Newspaper and Court Chronicle. The Queen was a society paper, as the full title of the journal suggests but, by the 1890s, it had features directed towards a middle-class readership. Most notable was the women’s employment column, initiated in 1889, and edited by Bateson. In addition to maintaining this column throughout the 1890s, Bateson contributed articles not only to The Queen but also to Woman’s World, The Englishwoman’s Year Book and the Girl’s Realm. Her journalism also reached other social classes and interest groups in articles she wrote for the Girl’s Own Paper, a publication directed to a lower-middle to middle-class audience of young women, and for the Woman’s Signal, a feminist and temperance paper.
Bateson’s most comprehensive advocacy for employment options for middle-class women, and for the respectability of women in the workplace, took the form of an extended series of interviews featured in The Queen in 1893 (collected and published as a monograph in 1894). These articles were mostly accompanied by a flattering photograph of the subject under the overarching title of ‘Professional Women upon their Professions.’ Bateson unapologetically defined ‘profession’ in the broadest terms as ‘any form of work which a woman is paid by the public, or entrusted by the public to do, and which she performs under that full sense of responsibility which we term the professional, in contradistinction to the amateurish spirit.’ The twenty-six professions presented under this broad rubric included work in the performing arts, an area of employment regarded as indecorous, even immoral, by the standards of Victorian respectability. Included as well were the carefully guarded male preserves of medicine and bureaucratic administration. In the profile of each profession Bateson implicitly addressed any misgivings that might arise as a result of social or cultural assumptions regarding various kinds of work. By contrast, to make more generally accepted areas of women’s employment more attractive, Bateson interviewed two professionally and socially prominent women for teaching and nursing, giving a lustre to areas of work that by this time might otherwise seem too conventional to some aspiring young women. Bateson pointed out that high school teaching was ‘the position of the ideally respectable lady’ and that nursing was enjoying a renaissance. She also interviewed women in what were seen as less appealing branches of these professions, such as infirmary nursing and ‘education of deficient children,’ representing the special demands of these areas of work as challenging rather than as daunting or disheartening.
In the interviews in ‘Professional Women on their Professions,’ Bateson was unequivocal in her support of women’s access to male-dominated areas of employment. She mitigated popular objections to the idea of women’s entrée into male enclaves by cleverly revealing that women were not taking anything away from male privilege. ‘In medicine, in teaching, in journalism, in all professions which are carried out not in the solitude of the studio or the study, but out in the crowded world, by means of direct human intercourse—in such professions as these’ Bateson observed, ‘women do not oust men from their places, but they make places for themselves that men have hardly known to be places at all.’ Her illustration of this principle was Amy Bell, a brilliant and determined stockbroker who, because of her sex, was not admitted to the Stock Exchange. The resolute Miss Bell had instead opened an ‘office hard by the Stock Exchange’ and had identified a specialised clientele—women—who she was able to advise ‘in ways that the ordinary stockbroker in a large business would hardly think of or contemplate.’ Accountant and auditor Mrs. Harold Cox [Helen Cox] laboured under a similar disadvantage, being ineligible, as a woman, to be ‘chartered.’ Cox’s response, strongly endorsed by Bateson, was to ‘steadfastly decline all work that is not offered . . . upon the same terms as it would be offered to a man.’
Bateson was also untiring in her active advancement of working women. As a successful journalist, she was supportive of other women journalists and authors in London’s literary community. In the late 1890s, she was involved in the establishment of employment bureaus for women, one of which was administered through The Queen, and she lectured extensively on women’s employment issues. In all her various writings on women and work, Bateson’s most radical statement was perhaps her assertion that ‘married and family life stand to gain enormously’ if women maintain their careers after marriage. ‘The professional married woman,’ she contended elsewhere, ‘has the best of both worlds,’ an ideal she herself embodied. After her 1901 marriage to Cambridge academic William Heitland, she maintained her career in journalism, contributing to The Queen and to suffrage newspapers. She also resumed her connection with the Cambridge Women’s Suffrage Association. Bateson died in Cambridge on 3 June 1938, three years after the death of her husband.
Margaret Bateson lived her life as she strove to support others to do: by experiencing ‘the intense happiness that merely being and doing something yields.’ That an active and productive life was a fulfilling one was the kind of ‘truism,’ she observed, that ‘people forget are true. And the last couple of generations or so, which doomed women to inertia, alternating with amateurism, forgot this venerable truth.’ It was this forgetfulness that Bateson dedicated her life to challenging by tirelessly reasserting this ‘venerable truth.’
Arlene Young is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media at the University of Manitoba, Canada. She has published widely on issues of class and gender in Victorian England in international academic journals. Her most recent monograph, From Spinster to Career Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Victorian England, was published in 2019.
MINI BIOGRAPHY
Education
Educated Highfield School, Hendon, then in Heidelberg becoming fluent in French and German.
Some Key Achievements and Interests
Appointed first Honorary Assistant Secretary, and in 1913 President Cambridge Women’s Suffrage Association (set up by her mother, Anna Aitkin, and Millicent Garrett Fawcett).
Fought for women to achieve degrees.
1888 – 1914 Worked for Queen, mostly on the employment section, drawing attention particularly to the low rate of pay commanded by women.
1888 Organised campaign of meetings in various towns for the Women’s Suffrage Society.
Wrote for Women’s World, The Englishwoman’s Year Book, the Girl’s Realm and the Girl’s Own Paper.
1892 Involved in the founding of the Women Writers’ Club (founded Frances Low), a space where women writers could work and network.
1893-1895 Wrote a series of features on working women interviewing 25 women published under the title of ‘Professional Women upon their Professions’. Her features aimed to give an insight into different professions (in the arts, education, medicine, social services, business, etc to benefit women looking for a career.*
1896 Presented paper ‘Openings for the Employment of Educated Women’ at 10th conference of The Central Bureau for the Employment of Women (CBEW), a central employment bureau for women which she helped to found.
1898 Became Honorary Secretary of CBEW.
Became a member of the CBEW Executive Committee, a member of the Council, Vice Chair and finally Vice President 1908-1913.
1899 In charge of the press at the International Women’s Congress.
Issues
Met resistance to her fight for educated women to find paid work. It was assumed that women had private means so did not need an income to live on which as not the case for a great many.
“At the present time the earnings of a woman in the highly educated class are seldom enough for her to live upon except in the poorest way and in my own case not enough for that. Employers now act on the assumption, first that a woman has some private means, and secondly that her future will in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred be bounded by marriage. For one or two well-to-do women to hope by their opposition to change the condition of the market is sheer madness. I make a note of the existing state of affairs in order to judge at some future period whether any change for the better has taken place.” Quoted from her diary in Women Who Meant Business: Stories of early business women who broke the mould Margaret Bateson (1860-1938) – Women Who Meant Business
Connection to Bloomsbury
1886-1888 Lived in Bernard Street, Bloomsbury then 1888 moved to Vernon Chambers.
Female networks
Many through different societies and committees involved with.
Good friend of Amy Levy and Helene Reynard.
Writing includes:
1895 Professional Women upon their Professions: Conversations – available online
*Primarily my endeavour has been to show by the evidence of trusty witnesses what possibilities for happy labour women may expect to find in certain of the professions and evocations that are now open to them….
I had another hope. And it was principally for the realisation of this other hope that I chose the conversational method, despite the difficulties that I knew must attend it. I had before me the image of some girl who has not yet found her niche in the world. The world is before her where to choose; but she would give much gratitude to anyone who would guide her in her choice. But somehow there appears to be no mentor at hand -no one even who can offer almost any suggestion. A loneliness of spirit falls upon her that is all the more intense because of the very excess of guidance with which her infant and scholastic years were surrounded. Then she was told every moment what was the duty of that moment; now there is a pond such matters as silence that may be felt. True, that perhaps she need not do anything….[she talks of one road ahead being romance but …]
Then succeeds the time of reaction end of blankness; The time when the girl becomes aware how great are her capacities not only for emotion but for thought and action, and how utterly non-existent or the opportunities for their development- at all events in that part of the social system in which she finds herself. The centre of feminine professional activity is for her so near and yet so far. She is indeed in sorry plight.
Women she interviews included: Mrs Harold Cox, Miss A Hughes, Mme Katti Lanner.
Further reading:
Diary of Margaret Heitland, 26 February 1889, Papers of Margaret Heitland (MHP from hereon), 7MHE, Women’s Library, London