Writer, social reformer, emigration organiser.

31 March 1829 – 12 November 1903

A Tribute to Maria Rye by Ruth Quante

Maria Rye was born in 1829 in London, the eldest of nine children.  She was the daughter of Maria Tuppen, whose father was a successful builder, and of Edward Rye, a solicitor. The family belonged to the professional class. They owned neither property nor land: their income depended solely on work.  As a child growing up in Chelsea, Maria was keenly aware of Victorian gendered ideas of education. While her brothers were sent to school, Mary and her sisters were taught by a governess. They also educated themselves by reading from their father’s extensive library. Rye resented that her mediocre girl’s education placed her at a disadvantage. She wrote about this in her article An Infallible Recipe for Making Poor Relations (1857):

‘At a given period the boys, who, until that hour, have not evinced the slightest superiority in perception, or exhibited greater aptitude for receiving knowledge, are suddenly removed, and enter upon a course of study, which, from long experience, is well known to brace the mind, the realities of after-life; the girls, on the contrary, remain in the lowland of elementaries for some three or four years more, after which they are advanced into the prettiness of certain frivolities, better known under the general head of ‘accomplishments.’ (qt. Diamond 5).

Rye’s consciousness of such inequalities foreshadowed her commitment to women’s emancipation to which she would dedicate her life. As a teenager she worked as a law-copyist for her father but soon realised her passion was writing. This also offered a way of providing herself with a supplementary income. Under the pen name M.S.R., she published well-received articles in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine and, by 1856, had already become one of its regular contributors, publishing at least an article a month. Her title The Property of Married Women provoked a strong reaction. Until the passing of the first Married Women’s Property Act in 1870, married women had no right to hold property; they were classified, together with criminals and minors, as persons without independent legal status. In her article, Rye, with a surprisingly detailed and comprehensive knowledge of the British legal system, pointed out how women were affected by Common Law’s injustices and appealed to her readers to sign a petition, started by Barbara Leigh Smith (later Bodichon), a member of the feminist Langham Place group. This petition was to pressure Parliament to pass a bill granting wives the right to own property. Rye became the Secretary of the Women’s Committee which promoted the Married Women’s Property Bill and, in this role, she gathered evidence of women’s oppression. She directly linked this oppression to the legal exclusion of women from owning property. She published radical articles in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine and encouraged women to reveal their experiences of marginalisation. This provoked the Committee to organise a new petition. It attracted 26,000 signatures but Parliament would not recognise either petition. However, the formation of a group that initiated such a far-reaching petition on the behalf of women’s rights marked the inception of organised feminist movement in Britain.

In 1858 a few women associated with the Langham Place group founded the Englishwoman’s Journal and Rye became one of its shareholders. The publication was exclusively managed and printed by women. In Bloomsbury’s Great Coram Street offices, it trained women and girls to become compositors.

The troubling term The Woman Question was provoked by the 1850 census. Figures showed that women outnumbered men by half a million in England and Wales. What should society do with all these spare, husbandless women?  In response, the Langham Place Group established the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (SPEW) in 1859.  It aimed to find jobs for unskilled women and girls who were struggling to find employment on the competitive London labour market. In addition to offering apprenticeships at the Victoria Press, SPEW established the Telegraph School for Women in Bloomsbury as well as a law-copying office, which she ran, in Queen’s Street in 1860.  Here Rye used her law copyist experience to teach tentrainees.  In her important role she displayed a strong Protestant work ethic. She tolerated no sloppiness and was known for her steadfast advocacy of the Church of England. She rejected some candidates who wished to join her because their religious beliefs did not correspond to hers.

In her 1861 essay The Emigration of Educated Women Rye reported that nine out of ten women were unable to find employment in Britain while the colonies, especially Australia and New Zealand, had a significant shortage of female workers. With the aid of SPEW, she co-founded with Jane Lewin in 1862 the Female Middle Class Emigration Society (FMCES) to promote work in the British Empire.

This new power base as secretary of a society organising communication and business for an international project had a significant impact on Rye’s self-confidence. Previously she had refused to talk in public and had asked men to deliver her speeches. However, in June 1862 she spoke at a conference of the National Association of Political and Social Science on behalf of the FMCES to state the importance of this initiative. In her speeches and writings promoting the FMCES, Rye never tired of emphasising how women could not only secure their economic independence through emigration but that emigration also presented a way of making a valuable and appreciated contribution to the Empire.  While from today’s perspective, the intersection between colonialism and feminism seems contradictory and irreconcilable, the Victorians celebrated imperial expansion.

In November 1862, Rye left Britain for the first time. She spent the next four years in New Zealand and Australia. After helping 302 women to emigrate, she returned to England in 1866. In The Times of 29 October 1869 Maria Rye was described as ’the most successful of the priestesses of emigration’. As a result of her work, the government recognised her dedication to colonial endeavours by awarding her with an annual state pension of £70. However, some criticised her for sending unskilled women to the increasingly crowded colonial towns. This resulted in her shifting her gaze towards the potential of sending London slum children abroad. In the late 1860s she opened the Peckham Home for Little Girls to establish a safe London place to house these children.  They were then taken to a refuge for British girls who travelled to Niagara in Canada where they would be adopted.  In October 1869, Rye left England with 77 girls under eleven. Over many years she brought about 4,000 children across the Atlantic. It remains unclear what happened to those adoptees. They may have been abused or trafficked. No checks were made.  She did receive grateful letters from some children but there is no evidence that this was reliable testimony.

When Rye was 66 in 1896, she retired to England. She gave both her properties in Peckham and Niagara to the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society which continued her work until the outbreak of World War I. Rye bought a house for herself and her three sisters in Hemel Hempstead where she died from bowel cancer on 12 November 1903.

Rye can be considered as an important character within First Wave Feminism.  She represents a complex and sometimes contradictory figure. Rye was inflected by her Anglican beliefs and also a major actor in the advancement of female employment. She also supported British Imperialism. Rye acknowledged the Victorian ideology of separate spheres (the public man and the domestic woman) within marriage but also undermined it by strengthening the presence of single women in the public arena. She was an Anglican conservative but also a pioneer who helped to structurally change British attitudes towards women. For forty years she helped shape British domestic and foreign policy. Rye devoted her life to support her fellow ‘spinsters’ and others considered ‘superfluous’. She understood that the Empire’s wealth was an opportunity for British white colonisers: women as well as men. Rye partly answered the so-called Woman Question by creating her grand scheme of sending girls and women abroad. This certainly promoted the concept of female economic independence while also serving British imperialist ambitions.

Further reading:

• Bridger, Anne & Jordan, Ellen, Timely Assistance; The Work of the Society for Promoting the Training of Women 1859-2009. MRM Associates: Reading, 2009.
• Collingwood, Judy. Rye, Maria Susan. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 September 2004. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/35896.
• Diamond, Marion. Emigration and Empire: The Life of Maria S. Rye. New York and London: Routledge, 2016.
• Myers, Janet C. Performing the Voyage Out: Victorian Female Emigration and the Class Dynamics of Displacement. Victorian Literature and Culture, 2001, pp.129-146.
• Ruiz, Marie. Migration Infrastructure and Brokerage in Victorian Female Emigration Societies. Journal of Migration History(7), 2021, pp. 24-50.
• Rye, Maria S. Female Middle Class Emigration. Times, 29 April 1862, p.14.
• Rye, Maria. Emigration of Educated Women: A Paper Read at the Social Science Congress in London, 1861. Printed and Published by Emily Faithfull & Co. 1861.
• Records of the Female Middle Class Emigration Society, held by the London School of Economics’ Women’s Library (ref. no. 1FME, box FL001).
• Rye, Maria Susan (1829-1903), social reformer: personal and family papers (nationalarchives.gov.uk).
• Rye, Maria Susan. Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/Rye, Maria Susan Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/Rye, Maria Susan – Wikisource, the free online library.
• Summary report on personal and family papers 1854-c1969 of Maria Susan Rye (1829-1903), social reformer; The National Archives; June 1994; https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nra/lists/GB-800819-Rye.htm.
• Maria Rye sets up a law stationer’s business in Lincoln’s Inn to provide employment to young women; First 100 Years; 13 June 2016. https://first100years.org.uk/timeline/maria-rye-opens-law-stationers-office/.
• Story: Rye, Maria Susan; Te Ara: the Encyclopaedia of New Zealand; 1990. https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1r22/rye-maria-susan.

Ruth Quante is a third-year doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of Heidelberg. Her research project deals with women and wage labour in late-Victorian literature and culture. In 2021, she spent six months as a visiting researcher at King’s College London and explored the London archives.

MINI BIOGRAPHY

Education

No formal education. Mainly learned from reading in her father’s library.

Some Key Achievements and Interests

1855-1858 Secretary of the association that promoted the Married Women’s Property Bill.

1859 Founding member of Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (SPEW).

Worked to support educated middle-class women find employment.

1860 Set up law copying classes for the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (SPEW) in a room in Queen’s Square, Bloomsbury. These later moved to Lincoln’s Inn Fields offering training women and a business services copying documents. The advertisement for these classes stated: ‘Only Female Clerks are employed in this office.’

In 1846 Anna Jameson advocated clerical work as being suitable employment for women:

She can write a good hand, and is a quick and ready accountant.  She might be a clerk, – or a cashier, -or an assistant in a mercantile house. Such a thing is common in France, but here in England, who would employ her? Who would countenance such an innovation on all our English ideas of feminine propriety? I have heard of women employed in writing and engrossing for attorneys, but this is scarcely an acknowledged means of assistance; they are employed secretly, and merely because they are paid much less than men. 

[quoted from Bridger & Jordan; Timely Assistance]

The classes were oversubscribed, prompting Rye to turn to emigration as an answer to the overwhelming need for women to undertake paid employment.

1860 With Isa Craig established the Telegraph School for Women at 6 Great Coram Street, London to help women find employment.

1860 Involved in the founding of the Victoria Press with Emily Faithfull offering girls training as compositors.

1862 Co-founded with Jane Lewin the Female Middle Class Emigration Society (FMCS) with the help of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon helping to organise jobs for middle class women and domestic servants in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. She went to these countries to establish the wellbeing of those she sent. The Female Middle Class Emigration Society was informally affiliated to the Social Science Association (SSA).

1863 Seeing the poor treatment women faced upon their arrival in the colonies, made a public charge against the government.

Unsatisfied with the insufficient improvements being made, started sending more working-class women and children in need of employment to Canada.

1867 Opened the Peckham Home for Little Girls and from 1868 devoted herself to the emigration of pauper children.

A report in the Times 29 October 1869 described Maria Rye as ‘the most successful of the priestesses of emigration.’ 

1895 reported that 4000 English and Scottish children had been sent to Canada.

Issues

Job opportunities for both middle-class and working-class women in a society very limited in a society that undervalued the work of women.

Connection to Bloomsbury

The Telegraph School for Women in Bloomsbury.

The Victoria Press, which was initially based in Bloomsbury.

SPEW networking and business in Bloomsbury.

Organised for children from the Bloomsbury Industrial School to emigrate.

Female networks include:

Members of the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women particularly Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon who offered financial support, Bessie Rayner Parkes, Emily Faithfull, Florence Nightingale, Isa Craig, Jane Lewin, Mary Howitt.

Writing/Publications/Papers include:

Wrote in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine to advocate for the reform of laws dictating married women’s property.

1861 Presented the paper ‘The Colonies and their Requirements’ at the Dublin Congress of the Association for the Promotion of Social Science regarding the situation for young educated women in workhouses because of lack of opportunities for women. Paper later reprinted as ‘Emigration of Educated Women’ and in The English Woman’s Journal .

Further reading:

Maria Susan Rye (1829-1903), social reformer: personal and family papers (nationalarchives.gov.uk)

Bridger, Anne & Jordan, Ellen, Timely Assistance; The Work of the Society for Promoting the Training of Women 1859-2009, MRM Associates, Reading 2009.

Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/Rye, Maria Susan

Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/Rye, Maria Susan – Wikisource, the free online library

“Summary report on personal and family papers 1854-c1969 of Maria Susan Rye (1829-1903), social reformer”; The National Archives; June 1994; https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nra/lists/GB-800819-Rye.htm

“Maria Rye sets up a law stationer’s business in Lincoln’s Inn to provide employment to young women”; First 100 Years; 13 June 2016.

https://first100years.org.uk/timeline/maria-rye-opens-law-stationers-office/

“Story: Rye, Maria Susan”; Te Ara: the Encyclopaedia of New Zealand; 1990.

https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1r22/rye-maria-susan