Whatever happened to Miss Bebb?

+(,121/,1( Citation: Rosemary Auchmuty, Whatever Happened to Miss Bebb Bebb v the Law Society and Women's Legal History, 31 Legal Stud. 199 (2011) Provided by: University of Reading Library Content downloaded/printed from HeinOnline Tue Dec 11 09:42:17 2018 -- Your use of this HeinOnline PDF indicates your acceptance of HeinOnline's Terms and Conditions of the license agreement available at https://heinonline-org.idpproxy.reading.ac.uk/HOL/License -- The search text of this PDF is generated from uncorrected OCR text. -- To obtain permission to use this article beyond the scope of your HeinOnline license, please use: Copyright Information Use QR Code reader to send PDF to your smartphone or tablet device

Legal Studies, Vol. 31 No. 2, June 2011, pp. 199-230 DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-121X.2010.00180.x

Whatever happened to Miss Bebb? Bebb v The Law Society and women's legal history Rosemary Auchmuty Professor, School Director of Teaching and Learning, University of Reading

Gwyneth Bebb gave her name to a landmark case in the campaign to open the legal profession to women. In spite of this achievement, which is often mentioned but rarely analysed, historical accounts have given little or no attention to the woman or the campaign of which she was part; and what happened to her then and later has remained shrouded in mystery. The article finds that her disappearance was due in part to the circumstances of her life, outlined here, but mainly to the tendency of institutional histories, if they acknowledge women's contribution at all, to present it as a simple (though discontinuous) tale of progress, thereby masking continuingprejudice and inequality. The article argues that women's lives need to be properly examined to produce a more complete and truthful explanationof how things were, and how they are now.

INTRODUCTION Bebb v The Law Society' (Bebb) was the case in which Miss Bebb challenged the Law Society of England and Wales's refusal to allow women to become solicitors. She lost; and the profession remained closed to women until 1920 when both the Law Society and the Bar were obliged to admit women following the enactment of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919. As a reported case, Bebb has gone down in history as a landmark in the movement to open the legal profession to women. It tends to stand alone, however; earlier attempts to breach the barriers, and earlier - and later - rejections are not so well documented, and have disappeared from most accounts, leading to the assumption (as one of my students put it) that women could not have minded too much about their exclusion since they never complained before 1913, and to the equally mistaken conclusion that acceptance was fairly easily gained once they did complain - or after they had 'proved themselves' in the war.2 Just as the context for the case has been lost, so has the woman concerned. We learn very little about Miss Bebb from the published case report because, in law, her story was unimportant in the face of a legal doctrine - the doctrine of precedent - underpinned by a wider principle - the principle of male supremacy. But to the student of women's legal history she is important, because she was part of a struggle for equality that is still ongoing. This then is my first justification for fashioning a paper around the 1. [1914] 1 Ch 286. 2. Eg 'In Bebb v Law Society the plaintiff spinster brought an action against the Law Society ... After the First World War, and the dramatically changed role which women played during the course of the conflict, society began to take a radically different view of women's proper role in society': AH Manchester Modem Legal History (London: Butterworths, 1980) pp 70-71. D 2010 The Author. Legal Studies @ 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

200

Legal Studies, Vol. 31 No. 2

question 'Whatever happened to Miss Bebb?' Simply to explain (if one could) how this real person came to give her name to an important legal decision would be worthwhile in itself; as Gwynedd Parry puts it: 3 'Biography facilitates our appreciation of the role of the individual agent, and, as a result, the complex range of psychological desires, ambitions, fears and prejudices that, through the choices and actions of the individual agent, can influence if not steer the course of wider legal, historical and social development.' For women's legal history, biography is especially important. Women's lives are different from men's - socially, emotionally, physically - and, in Miss Bebb's time, politically, economically and legally as well; so, June Purvis argues, 'we must bring women "back" ' into history and 'study the material forces that have shaped their lives and experiences'. 4 Today women make up half our entrants into the legal profession, well over half our law students, half the world indeed - yet their heritage has been overlooked, ignored, suppressed or distorted for a very long time. This is largely because conventional legal scholarship has been inward-looking, recognising only the validity of its own (legal) sources; thus, in an era before women had any role in law making, they were inevitably absent from the story. Yet their very absence needs to be properly explored and explained, not just because today's women lawyers and law students need to know their own history, but because that absence, and the means by which women were eventually accepted into the profession, have themselves shaped the profession's history. The version of history handed down to us has largely been one of progress, in which women's admission to the legal profession marked the achievement of equality in this sphere (and thus the end of the story). Yet, as we now know, it was only the beginning; the formal entry of women ushered in a prolonged reaction of institutional sexism and discrimination that have still not been wholly eradicated.' The other motivation for this paper came from the fact that Miss Bebb did truly disappear from history after the case. This was partly because what happened to her was irrelevant in the standard institutional tale of progress. Women eventually gained the right to become solicitors and barristers - end of story. Whether Miss Bebb or any of the others actually did become a solicitor or barrister is rarely stated, and whether (if they did) everything went swimmingly thereafter, or they faced further difficulties in their careers, is not examined. Yet, even in those accounts of women's lives which do take the story of women in law further, Miss Bebb is absent. This is surprising when so much was predicted for her. She should have been the country's first woman to be called to the Bar, but that honour went to Ivy Williams. She should have made her name as a feminist barrister, but Helena Normanton is the name usually recalled; 3. RG Parry 'Is legal biography really legal scholarship?' (2010) 30 Legal Studies 208. 4. J Purvis 'Doing feminist women's history: researching the lives of women in the Suffragette Movement in Edwardian England' in M Maynard and J Purvis (eds) Researching Women's Lives From a Feminist Perspective (London: Taylor & Francis, 1994) p 167. As Joanna Wade put it, 'the misogyny of both lawyers and the law was to continue pretty 5.

much unabated' after the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919. JWade 'Portia, Portia & Co: women and law, 1860s-1920s' in S Alexander (ed) Studies in the History of Feminism (1850s-

1930s) (London: Department of Extra-Mural Studies, 1984) p 33. The literature on women's continuing inequality in the legal profession is extensive, but see, eg, C McGlynn 'The status of women lawyers in the United Kingdom' in U Schultz and G Shaw (eds) Women in the World's Legal Professions (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2003) pp 139-158. @ 2010 The Author Legal Studies © 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars

Whatever happened to Miss Bebb?

201

or as a feminist solicitor, like her comrade in the Bebb case, Maud Crofts. Her name does not even appear in the centenary history of her college.6 Finding out what happened to Miss Bebb thus became a quest in the classic 'hidden from history' tradition of women's history. Who was she? What was her background? What factors led her to challenge the male domination of law? How did she deal with the contradictions of her life and the setbacks she experienced? And why did she disappear? These questions are intrinsically interesting, but also necessary for anyone who wishes to re-frame institutional history from the perspective of women and reform movements. At the same time, fleshing out the human actors provides students and young lawyers with role models and the possibility of experiencing empathy, while also challenging the dehumanised 'objectivity' so central to the lawyer's training.

EARLY YEARS She was born on 27 October 1889 at Brasenose House in High Street, Oxford, next door to All Saints' Church where, two weeks later, she was baptised Gwyneth Marjorie. Her father was the Rev Dr Llewellyn John Mountfort Bebb, Fellow (and later Vice-Principal) of Brasenose College; her mother, Louisa Marion nde Traer, a surgeon's daughter. Dr Bebb was himself the son of a clergyman; born in Cape Town (though the Bebbs were of Welsh descent), he had gone up to New College, Oxford, on a scholarship. He was only 24 at the time of his marriage in 1886; his wife was 27; and Gwyneth was their third child in three years of marriage. The 1891 census shows the family living with Mrs Bebb's widowed mother (aged 50, she was only 18 years older than her daughter), together with a cook, houseparlourmaid, nurse and nursemaid - so Gwyneth's mother did not lack for help with her young family. By 1894 they had their home at 96 Banbury Road. But in 1898 Dr Bebb left Oxford to become Principal of St David's College, Lampeter.7 The family followed a year or two later. By the time of the 1901 census, four of the then six children' were living in the college with their parents; presumably the two oldest boys were away at school. The fact that the elder girls, at 12 and 11, were not away might suggest that they were educated at home or possibly at a local day school though, due to the isolated position of the college, there seems not to have been a good day school to hand. At some point Gwyneth Bebb attended a school in London: St Mary's College, Paddington. The Victoria County History for Middlesex identifies this as St Mary Magdalene College for Ladies in St James's Terrace at 122 and 124 Harrow Road: 'Called simply St Mary's college and aided by the L.C.C. [London County Council] as 6.

P Griffin (ed) St Hugh's: One Hundred Years of Women's Education in Oxford

(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986). Miss Bebb did, however, appear on the college website: D Quare St Hugh's College History' (accessed October 2008 but now apparently unavailable): http://www.st-hughs.ox.ac.uk/TheCollege/HistoryfoLThe-College.php. 7. St David's College was established in 1822 as a theological college for Welsh ordinands. In 1852 it was granted the power to award its own Bachelor of Divinity degree, the first institution to do so after Oxford and Cambridge. From 1865 it gave a BA as well, and not all its students studied divinity or became Church of England priests. Absorbed into the University of Wales federation in 1971, it is now known as University of Wales Lampeter. One of its most distinguished professors emerita is Mary Grey, a feminist theologian. 8. There were seven in the end, four sons and three daughters. Q 2010 The Author Legal Studies @ 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars

202


a girls' secondary school in 1906 but not in 1913',9 it was an Anglican foundation, presumably associated with the church of St Mary Magdalene in Woodchester Street (now Rowington Close). St Mary's College would have been an excellent choice for a cash-strapped clergyman from remote Wales with a large family and a clever daughter to educate, for the fees would have been low and there was a boarding hostel attached.

OXFORD Gwyneth Bebb matriculated (that is, passed the entrance examinations) to Oxford and, in 1908, went up to St Hugh's Hall to read Jurisprudence. St Hugh's had been established in 1886 by the Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Elizabeth Wordsworth, as a Church of England foundation for 'girls from modest homes'1 o whose families could not afford the fees of her own college; daughters of clergymen like Gwyneth Bebb were particularly envisaged." In 1910, while Miss Bebb was a student, the private institution was recognised by the university and in 1911 it was incorporated as a college. The choice of St Hugh's rather than the more expensive Somerville or Lady Margaret Hall offers further evidence that the Bebbs sought an Anglican residence where a poor clergyman's daughter would not feel out of place. But St Hugh's was a good choice for another reason: it had a reputation for strong scholarship in some less usual subjects for women and had been home to the most recent women studying law. Insofar as the colleges provided or at least supervised the teaching of their students, it made sense to choose a college which had some experience in making the necessary arrangements. None of the women's colleges had their own law tutors at this date; instead they negotiated with selected men's colleges to share the services of their tutors.' 2 By Miss Bebb's time, all the men's colleges accepted women students into their lectures - Magdalen, the last, had capitulated in 1906" - and the 9.

'Paddington: Education', A History of the County of Middlesex vol 9: Hampstead,

Paddington (1989), pp 265-271, available at http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx? compid=22679. 10. P Hartnoll 'Introduction' in Griffin, above n 6, p 1. Wordsworth was the daughter of the Bishop of Lincoln, formerly headmaster of Harrow School. Educated at home (in contrast to her brothers who went to Winchester and Oxford), she was nevertheless an educated woman and a published poet and novelist. F Lannon 'Wordsworth, Dame Elizabeth (1840-1932)' Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, available at http://www.oxforddnb.com/articles (ODNB).

11. Elizabeth Wordsworth quoted in B Kemp 'The early history of St Hugh's College' in Griffin, above n 6, p 15. It was the third of the four women's colleges at Oxford: Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall had been founded in 1879 and St Hilda's in 1893. Women who lived at home and were not attached to any college could join the Oxford Society of Home Students. 12. 'Towards the end of each term a meeting of all the tutors of all the women's colleges is held. The men tutors state the number of hours they are prepared to give per week to the women, and then the tutors fight': L Grier The Life of Winifred Mercier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937) p 50. Mercier was at Somerville 1904-1907 and went on to become Principal of Whitelands Training College. 13.

AMAH Rogers Degrees by Degrees: the Story of the Admission of Oxford Women to

Membership of the University (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938) p 62. Rogers was Oxford's first woman don and a member of the St Hugh's Council 1894-1936. J Howarth 'Rogers, Annie Mary Anne Henley (1856-1957)' ODNB, above n 10. Q 2010 The Author Legal Studies 0 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars


203

Association for the Education of Women arranged supplementary 'coachings' if necessary. 4 Miss Bebb entered the Honours School of Jurisprudence (as the Oxford undergraduate law programme was called) during a period when it enjoyed unprecedented popularity. At the point of its creation - that is, when the Honours School of Jurisprudence separated from the Honours School of Modem History in 1872 - it had fewer than 100 students; but when Miss Bebb joined in 1908, there were almost 400." The recent growth was partly due to the advent in 1905 of Rhodes scholars, for whom law was the most frequently chosen subject.16 It was certainly not due to its attractiveness for women. Miss Bebb was only the seventh woman at Oxford to embark on a law degree. She had been preceded at St Hugh's by Ludmila von Voght, who entered in 1904 and left with second-class honours in 1907, and by Grace Nugent Smith, who entered in 1905 but did not complete the course. The first woman to study law at Oxford was Cornelia Sorabji, who studied at Somerville from 1889 to 1892 and achieved third-class honours in the Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL) examinations. She was followed at Somerville by Alice Adams (1896-1899) and Christiana Elizabeth Jeffery (1902-1905), both of whom took thirds in the BA Jurisprudence. Finally there was Ivy Williams, a Home Student, who distinguished herself with a second in jurisprudence in 1899, a second in the London LLB in 1901, and eventually an Oxford DCL; she went on to become the first woman law tutor and college lecturer at Oxford." During her time at St Hugh's, Miss Bebb had only one female contemporary studying law. Marion Balfour Crick entered St Hugh's in 1909 but did not complete the degree. This meant that, for most of her legal studies, Miss Bebb was the sole woman in a school of almost 400; and the sole law student in a college of about 30 women and four resident tutors all engaged in some other discipline. In this respect, her experience was no different from that of Cornelia Sorabji, the first woman to study law at Oxford - but that had been 20 years before, and one might have expected greater progress. Why did so few women study law? The obvious reason is that it did not lead to a career for women. In 1908 the legal professions were still barred to women and, if you happened to be a woman who needed to earn her own living, there were many more useful courses you could have taken, such as those suitable for mission work or school teaching, the two professions St Hugh's students most commonly prepared for." That she did not embark on such a course, but chose law, suggests either that her family was sufficiently wealthy and complaisant to support her in three years of essentially dilettante study followed by ladylike leisure (which does not seem to have been the case) or that she had a deliberate goal in mind: the pursuit of a legal career, once the 14. J Howarth '"In Oxford but . .. not of Oxford": the women's colleges' in MG Brock and MC Curthoys (eds) The History of the University of Oxford vol VII: Nineteenth-century Oxford Part 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000) p 248; V Brittain The Women at Oxford (Basingstoke:

Macmillan, 1960) p 51. 15. MC Curthoys 'The examination system' in Brock and Curthoys (eds) The History of the University of Oxford vol VI: Nineteenth-century Oxford Part 1(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) pp 361 and 370; B Nicholas 'Jurisprudence' in Brock and Curthoys, vol VII, above n 14, p 386. 16. Curthoys, ibid, p 360. 17. Fox, 'Williams, Ivy (1877-1966)' ODNB, above n 10. R Auchmuty 'Early women law students at Cambridge and Oxford' (2008) 29 Journal of Legal Studies 80. Neither Lady Margaret Hall nor St Hilda's had had a law student by Miss Bebb's time. 18. Quare, above n 6. © 2010 The Author Legal Studies @ 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars

204


profession was opened to women. Opponents of women's aspirations argued repeatedly that women lacked the intellectual strength, the logical ability and, especially, the rational judgment to practise law;" perhaps Miss Bebb hoped to prove them wrong. Certainly, her friend and fellow campaigner Nancy Nettlefold said later that 'Miss Bebb and Miss Nettlefold definitely took Law at Oxford and Cambridge in order to qualify themselves for the profession and prove that women were capable of tackling the law'. 20 While a law degree was not a prerequisite for a legal career," Miss Bebb may also have felt, as Christabel Pankhurst had, only 5 years before, that it was the best possible training for the legal struggle that lay ahead.22

LEGAL STUDIES The BA Honours Jurisprudence was opened to women in 1890, probably in consequence of Cornelia Sorabji's application to study law at Somerville. It consisted of the Jurisprudence Preliminary examination at the end of the first year (introduced in 1886, this was also taken by students in the Honours School of History) and Finals at the end of the third. Women had the same instruction and sat the same examinations as the men, but their results were published separately and they were not entitled to degrees.2 3 Despite the shift from a largely civil law curriculum to an increasingly common law one in the nineteenth century, Roman law remained a core subject for the Honours School of Jurisprudence, with Justinian's Institutes an essential text. In addition, students took history of English law and aspects of English law, for which Blackstone's Commentaries was closely studied, as well as general jurisprudence and international law.24 By the turn of the century the traditional linear exposition of English law - case by case, Act by Act - had given way to an approach that started from the modern principles. In this, the courses in contract (introduced in 1877), real property and constitutional law (1886) and torts (1905) were aided by the publication of new-style textbooks written by Anson, Pollock, Digby, Holdsworth and other professors of the late nineteenth-century 'Golden Age' of legal scholarship.25 Frederick Pollock (1845-1937), Corpus Christi Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford from 1883 to 1903, is credited with being the founder of modern legal method - that is, the identification of principles from case-law - and the creator of the modern textbook 19. See Wade, above n 5, pp 37-39. 20. Notes made by Miss George, secretary to Mrs Oliver [Ray] Strachey, 4 March 1920, from information provided by Miss Nettlefold to brief Mrs Strachey for her speech at a dinner given by the Lord Chancellor to celebrate women's admission to the legal profession. Nettlefold Scrapbook (NS) vol 2, p 36 (in the Women's Library, London).

21.

Indeed, a degree was not a prerequisite, though most barristers had one by this time; not,

however, solicitors. 22. Pankhurst studied law at the Victoria University, Manchester, between 1903 and 1906, graduating with first-class honours: R Auchmuty 'Feminists as stakeholders in the law school' in F Cownie (ed) Stakeholders in the Law School (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2010) pp 42-45. 23. Rogers, above n 13, p 23; Howarth, above n 14, p 257; Curthoys, above n 15, p 363. 24. FH Lawson The Oxford Law School 1850-1965 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968) p 36; Nicholas, above n 15, pp 389-394. 25. A Bell 'Oxford's contribution to modem studies in the arts' in J Prest (ed) The Illustrated History of Oxford University (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) p 207. @ 2010 The Author Legal Studies 0 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars


205

with its 'systematic exposition' of those principles. 26 His Principles of Contract at Law and in Equity (1876) and The Law of Torts (1887) were early exemplars of a

presentation style that has continued to this day. While today's law teachers may view this development with mixed feelings, regretting our students' over-reliance on 'the textbook' and their reluctance to read actual decisions, we need to be reminded of the conditions that prompted them. Pollock and his associates aimed not only to make the law accessible to their students but also to expose and draw out its logic and principled development. Their hope was to influence not only the academic study of law but, eventually, the practice of it, and particularly to move lawyers from what sometimes looked like the unthinking following of precedent to a reasoned consideration of the underlying principles. 27 For feminists and for other groups hoping to develop the law, this new approach offered both encouragement and valuable tactical tools; and it was ironic, though hardly accidental, that Bebb was so clearly to demonstrate how the old ways worked against them. The Law Faculty at Oxford, as at all English universities at this period, was small. We can be sure that Gwyneth Bebb attended lectures by Thomas Erskine Holland (1835-1926), Chichele Professor of International Law betweenl874 andl910; Albert Venn Dicey (1835-1922), who held the Vinerian Chair of English Law from 1882 to 1909; his successor in the Vinerian Chair, William Martin Geldart (1870-1922); and Paul Vinogradoff (1854-1925), who succeeded Pollock in the Corpus Christi Chair in 1903 and held it until his death. Most importantly, William Holdsworth (18711944) was Fellow of St John's College from 1897 and Reader in English Law from 1910; he was to follow Geldart in the Vinerian Chair upon the latter's death in 1922: 'He taught law [at St John's] for ... 25 years, covering the whole academic curriculum, as was then expected of college tutors' .28 Holdsworth had tutored Ivy Williams at both Oxford and London;29 he almost certainly taught Gwyneth Bebb as well. All these men were supportive of higher education for women. 30 Dicey gave substantial financial support to the women's colleges at both Oxford and Cambridge, while Geldart's widow gave in his memory 'a valuable gift of law books and the sum of F500' to the library of the Association for the Education of Women at Oxford. 3 Paul Vinogradoff's lectures were described by the Vice-Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Eleanor Lodge, as 'a great addition to the joy of living'.32 St Hugh's students of this period wrote warmly of 'the kindness and hospitality shown to them by the Professors and others who taught them, and by other residents in North Oxford. It is clear from

26.

Ibid, pp 208-209; N Duxbury Frederick Pollock and the English Juristic Tradition

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 27. MC Curthoys 'The careers of Oxford men' in Brock and Curthoys, vol VII, above n 14, p 486; RA Cosgrove 'Pollock, Sir Frederick, Third Baronet (1845-1937)' ODNB, above n 10. 28. HG Hanbury, rev D Ibbetson 'Holdsworth, Sir William Searle (1871-1944)' ODNB, ibid. 29. Auchmuty, above n 17, at 89. 30. Though not of all feminist causes - Dicey, like many educated men, opposed votes for women. Howarth, above n 14, p 302. 31.

P Adams Somervillefor Women: An Oxford College 1879-1993 (Oxford: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1996) p 62; Rogers, above n 13, p 131. 32. EC Lodge Terms and Vacations (London: Oxford University Press, 1938) p 11. Lodge was Vice-Principal of Lady Margaret Hall 1906-1921 and later Principal of Westfield College, University of London: F Lannon 'Lodge, Eleanor Constance (1869-1936)' ODNB, above n 10. @ 2010 The Author Legal Studies @ 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars

206


other reminiscences that this was a prominent and valuable part of student life before 1914'.1 Against Miss Bebb's isolation as the sole woman law student of her year must be set the huge advantage she enjoyed in being taught by the same lecturers and tutors as the men. They were among the most distinguished legal scholars of that - or any - age. Contrast this with the experience of women students in other, more popular, disciplines at Oxford, who were taught by members of the Society of Oxford Women Tutors, formed in 1909. Some of these were very able scholars, others less so; but all suffered from their second-class position, lacking the time or encouragement to undertake research and, crucially, excluded from the examining process. Without insider knowledge of what was required, they did their best, but their students often fared less well in the examinations than they had hoped or expected.34

COLLEGE LIFE When Miss Bebb went up to Oxford in 1908, St Hugh's Hall occupied a house at 17 Norham Gardens, acquired in 1888 to replace two earlier residences in the same road, and a house at 28 Norham Gardens, acquired in 1901. In 1892 a wing had been added to number 17 to provide extra student rooms, a dining room and a chapel; and, in 1909, as further students arrived, more accommodation was furnished by renting Fyfield Lodge on Fyfield Road." The houses were pleasantly situated, with gardens, and near the river, but already by Miss Bebb's time they were too small even for the modest needs of the growing body of students. Here there were no separate sitting-rooms, as at Girton, but small bedsitters and even a few shared rooms, a boon for girls from poorer families who found that 'By sharing a room with another student for the first two years, St Hugh's Hall would take a student for only f70 a year'." Miss Bebb's fellow students came mostly from professional middle-class backgrounds - with fathers in the church (20% of the total), law, medicine, education, the civil service, army and navy - and were themselves aiming for professional careers. There were some girls from manufacturing or commercial, and even farming, families, but very few from the upper or lower reaches of the social spectrum." In background, therefore, Miss Bebb would have had much in common with her peers at St Hugh's. Though English was the most popular choice of subject, the college always had a high proportion of science students. The academic standard was high: about 10% of graduates before 1911 got firsts. Several went on to become university lecturers at other women's colleges.38 33. Kemp, above n It, p 28. 34. Howarth, above n 14, p 285. 35.

G Battiscombe Reluctant Pioneer: A Life of Elizabeth Wordsworth (London: Constable,

1978) p 123. 36. Ethel Wallace, a contemporary of Miss Bebb, quoted in P West 'Reminiscences of seven decades' in Griffin, above n 6, p 64. It was not until Miss Bebb had left that land was acquired, in 1912, for the first of the purpose-built buildings that form the nucleus of the present college at the junction of St Margaret's Road and Banbury Road. Quare, above n 6. 37. Kemp, above n 11, p 28. See also MC Curthoys and J Howarth 'Origins and destinations: the social mobility of Oxford men and women' in Brock and Curthoys, vol VII, above n 14, pp 58-81. 38. Kemp, above n 11, pp 29-30. 0

2010 The Author Legal Studies 0 2010 The Society of

Ugal Scholars


207

The college routine was invariable: mornings were for classes and study, evenings for further study if no social event was taking place, and afternoons for play. Depending on the season, there was tennis, hockey, cycling, sculling and punting, and swimming - ladies could use the public baths once or twice a week.39 Yet, despite these opportunities, the most striking feature of life for the women students at Oxford before the first world war was their lack of physical freedom. The chaperonage rules meant that they could never go by themselves to lectures or tutorials, or generally about town, and could never be alone with a man. In Miss Bebb's time, a 10 pm curfew was imposed. Students were forbidden to attend dances in term time 'and to this there is absolutely no exception'.' Dress codes were strict; no lady would be seen outdoors without a hat, for example, so the St Hugh's students had to don one even when moving between the two college houses on Norham Gardens.41 In consequence of these restrictions, students made their social life largely within the college walls, with tea and cocoa parties, charades, plays and other entertainments, and clubs and societies of all kinds, from sporting and musical to political and debating. These last, especially one called Sharp Practice which was popular at all the women's colleges at this time and which involved a randomly selected student having to speak impromptu on an unprepared topic, gave the women experience in public speaking and thinking on their feet - the best possible training for future campaigners and barristers.42 In addition, team activities like drama and games engendered 'the bonding and confidence characteristic of the male college environment', notes Susan Leonardi in her study of Oxford women novelists.43 For many students, in fact, the physical limitations of college life were as nothing compared to what they endured at home. In many families, daughters were expected to be at the beck and call of others. 'We were free at college, for the first time in our lives,' proclaimed Winifred Peck (nde Knox), a contemporary at their sister college Lady Margaret Hall, 'from the far more tiresome convention that one's day was at the disposal, or at least under the direction, of authority . . .'." 'To have a room to yourself and to be able to arrange your own day was an experience as novel as it was ideal,' concurred Eleanor Lodge.45 And there was freedom of a different sort: intellectualfreedom. If you had been the only girl in your family or circle to have academic inclinations, you would have been used to being thought odd - or worse. 'Before the war, when I was at college' [Newnham, in her case], Mary Agnes Hamilton wrote, 'people used to say to me "You are at college?" and stare, as if they were expecting to see horns and a tail peeping out from under my skirt'.46 The founder of St Hugh's, Elizabeth Wordsworth, described 'a curious dread in some quarters' (notably among 'the old Oxford Conservatives' and 39. 40. 41.

West, above n 36, pp 75 and 81. Ibid, p 77. Hartnoll, above n 10, p 2.

42.

EC Lodge 'Growth, 1890-1922' in Lady MargaretHall:A Short History (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1923) p 48. 43.

S Leonardi Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College Novel-

ists (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989) p 35. 44. W Peck A Little Learning (London: Faber, 1952) p 156. 45. Lodge, above n 42, p 74. 46. MA Hamilton Newnham: An Informal Biography (London: Faber, 1936) p 24. A student at Newnham 1901-1904, she went on to become a Labour MP: JN Grenier 'Hamilton, Mary

Agnes (1882-1966)' ODNB, above n 10. ( 2010 The Author Legal Studies 0 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars

208


the High Anglicans) 'of developing the intellectual side of a woman's life'. 47 At college, however, to be academic was normal - a huge relief. For some of the women, the greatest reward was coming into contact with the great intellectual traditions and scholars of the age. Novelist Ann Bridge wrote in 1937 of a middle-aged governess who had a 'scholarly attitude to the glory and value of pure learning (acquired at Oxford, where, thirty years ago, women students had an attitude of discipleship which would be unrecognisable and incredible today)'.48 For other women, however, it was not the male professors but the other students who provided the greatest intellectual rewards. Francesca Wilson wrote of her own experience before the first world war:4 9 'No one who was not at college in those days knows how stimulating and exciting this little world was. You came out of the narrow confines of your family and met girls, many of them exceptionally intelligent, of the greatest variety ... The talks we had, the exploration of each other's minds were to many of us then far more stimulating and rewarding than our studies.' Rigid protocols determined who could initiate friendships with whom - freshers could not invite second-years to cocoa in their rooms - and there were conventions about when Christian names could begin to be used. In spite of these enforced formalities, lifelong friendships were forged in the intimacy of a shared setting and a shared endeavour.o The governance of St Hugh's in Miss Bebb's time resided with two women who impressed their personalities on the college. Principal since its foundation, Annie Moberly was one of 15 children of a former Bishop of Salisbury and a goddaughter of the novelist Charlotte Mary Yonge. Though born too early to benefit from an academic education herself, she came from an educated family and, as her student Professor Joan Evans later pointed out, understood the value of scholarship." Her deputy, by Miss Bebb's time the dominant personality in the college, was Eleanor Jourdain, who came from a less prestigious background - she was the eldest of ten children of a country vicar - but was a college girl, having taken a second in history at Lady Margaret Hall in 1883 and a doctorate from the University of Paris in 1904.52 The pair were something of a cause cglbre in Miss Bebb's time. Prior to taking up her post as Vice-Principal, Miss Jourdain had accompanied Miss Moberly on two visits to Versailles in 1901 and 1902, where they had the supernatural experience of returning to the time of Marie Antoinette. They wrote up what they had seen in a best-selling book entitled An Adventure which, published in 1911 (Gwyneth Bebb's final year at college), was at first received sceptically and then, as psychical research gained 47. E Wordsworth Glimpses of the Past (London: AR Mowbray, 1912) p 159. 48. A Bridge Enchanter'sNightshade (London: Chatto & Windus, 1937) p 183. Her sister was an academic. 49.

FM Wilson Rebel Daughterof a Country House: The Life of Eglantyne Jebb, Founder of

the Save the Children Fund (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1967) pp 57-58. 50. West, above n 36, p 77. 51. J Evans 'Preface' to CF Moberly and EF Jourdain An Adventure (London: Faber, 5th edn, 1955) p 14. 52. Ibid, pp 15-16. She succeeded Miss Moberly as principal in 1915 and died, after a very public row over the dismissal of a college tutor which led to the Chancellor's intervention, in 1924: R Trickett 'The row' in Griffin, above n 6, pp 48-61; Battiscombe, above n 35, p 208; Evans, ibid, pp 15-16; J Howarth 'Moberly, Charlotte Anne Elizabeth ("Annie") (1846-1937)' and J Howarth 'Jourdain, Eleanor Frances (1863-1924)' ODNB, above n 10. 0 2010 The Author Legal Studies Q 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars


209

credence in the inter-war years, with increasing seriousness. Ethel Wallace, an exact contemporary of Gwyneth Bebb's at St Hugh's, recorded that Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain described what they saw quite openly with students at a college assembly, displaying a knowledge of eighteenth-century Versailles which, apparently, they could not have gleaned from other sources. '1am certain that they were perfectly genuine, whatever recent critics may say,' Miss Wallace recalled in old age." FEMINISM IN TRANSITION All historical periods are in some sense transitional, but it is clear that the years in which Gwyneth Bebb was at Oxford deserve the title more than most when it comes to women's history, in particular the history of women's education, employment and the suffrage movement. For Miss Bebb's generation, higher education for women was neither novel nor normal: 30 years had passed since Oxford had opened its doors to women, yet their status remained marginal. On the one hand, the battle had been won: the presence of women in the universities was accepted, and all but Cambridge and Oxford granted them degrees on equal terms with men. That is not to say that individual women did not continue to face personal struggles to be allowed to go to university - Vera Brittain, who went up to Oxford in 1914, is a case in point5 4 - but opposition was usually strongest in families whose circumstances were such that the women did not have to work. Gwyneth Bebb, however, came from a family who valued education and it seems that her father encouraged her aspirations. On the other hand, women were far outnumbered by men at all universities, there were no teachers of their own sex, and at Cambridge and Oxford they were barred from being members of the university, taking degrees or becoming university lecturers. Harold Macmillan went so far as to claim that Oxford before the First World War was a woman-free zone: 'Ours was an entirely masculine, almost monastic society. We knew of course that there were women's colleges with women students. But. .. for practical purposes they did not exist'. Women who studied law felt their exclusion worse than most. Without a career at the end of it, the law degree continued to attract very few female students. Early hopes that entry to the professions was just around the corner were fading; it was hard to sustain that kind of optimism when every effort to gain admission, from the first requests to sit for professional examinations in the 1870s to those of Bertha Cave, 56 Christabel Pankhurst and Ivy Williams to join the Bar in 1903, led to rejection. 53. Quoted in West, above n 36, pp 65-66. 54. V Brittain Testament of Youth (London: Gollancz, 1933). 55. Quoted in Leonardi, above n 43, p 21. 56. In 1873 Maria Grey and 91 other members of the Women's Education Union unsuccessfully petitioned Lincoln's Inn to open its lectures to women: NS, above n 20, vol XIII: Englishwomen's Review (1873), pp 134-144. A Small Group for the Promotion of Legal Education for Women was set up in London in 1878, with the aim of gaining entry for women into the legal profession:(1878) 60 Englishwomen's Review 151. The following year, a woman (possibly Eliza Orme) unsuccessfully applied to the Law Society to take its preliminary

examinations. For accounts of women's efforts to enter the legal profession in England, see, eg, JC Albisetti 'Portia Ante Portias: women and the legal profession in Europe, ca 1870-1925' (2000) 33 Journal of Social History 833; M Birks Gentlemen of the Law (London: Stevens, 1960) pp 276-278; SP Breckenridge 'A recent English case on women and the legal profession' @ 2010 The Author Legal Studies @ 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars

210


The result was that the numbers of women law students actually declined when Miss Bebb was at Oxford from five in the decade 1901-10 to only three in the following decade." Women were excluded from the legal profession on the same grounds as from the national suffrage and most public offices: that there was no precedent for women in these roles, and only a specific Act of Parliament could overturn their longstanding legal disability. This was the ratio of the series of what became known as the 'persons' cases," in which courts ruled that women were not 'persons' within the sense of the legislation being interpreted, or were not encompassed within the masculine pronoun despite general legislation to the contrary. Outside the courts, however, a different set of arguments was employed to justify women's exclusion from the profession. Even after women had demonstrated their intellectual ability in academic studies, they were still held to be unsuited to law because their role was domestic, their nature too emotional, sensitive, partial or manipulative, or their presence in court too distracting.59 For ambitious university women, therefore, this could have been a dispiriting time. But there was one thing that made those years when Miss Bebb was at Oxford both exciting and inspiring: feminism. No woman of Miss Bebb's generation could have been untouched by this movement, and for few could it have been more significant. As her college's founder wrote in her reminiscences of 1912, 'no one had more reason to bless the "Women's Movement" than the clergymen's daughters'. 60 Instead of accepting a narrow future as a 'grown-up daughter at home', at everyone's service, or the pitiable alternative of governessing, early twentiethcentury women were expressing 'resentment of the restriction of opportunity which hampered the educated woman who had to earn a living, or wanted to enter a career'." This led to renewed feminist activism, in which Miss Bebb was to play a part. (1915) Journal of Political Economy 67; (1878) 60 Englishwomen's Review 151; H Kennedy 'Women at the Bar' in R Hazell (ed) The Bar on Trial (London: Quartet Books, 1978) pp 148-162; H Kirk Portraitof a Profession:A History of the Solicitors' Profession,1100 to the Present Day (London: Oyez, 1976) pp 110-111; N Franz English Women Enter the Professions

(Cincinnati OH: Privately printed, 1965) ch IX; EM Lang British Women in the Twentieth Century (London: T Werner Laurie, 1929) pp 145-151; P Marin 'First women of law' (2006) April, Law Society Gazette 40; MJ Mossman The First Women Lawyers: A ComparativeStudy of Gender Law and the Professions (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2006) ch 3; E Skordaki 'Glass

slippers and glass ceilings: women in the legal profession' (1996) 3 International Journal of the Legal Profession 7; S Ward 'Girl power: focus women solicitors' (1997) December, Law Society Gazette 22. 57. University of Oxford Law Lists. 58. Chorlton v Lings (1868) 4 LRCP 374; Jex-Blake v Senatus of the University of Edinburgh (1873) 11 M 784; Beresford-Hope v Lady Sandhurst [ 1889] 23 QB 79. Bebb v The Law Society

[1914] 1 Ch 286 was to join this list, as was Lady Rhondda'sClaim [1922] AC 339. These cases have been trenchantly analysed in A Sachs and JH Wilson Sexism and the Law: A Study of Male Beliefs and Judicial Bias (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1978). See also R Pearson and A Sachs 'Barristers and gentlemen: a critical look at sexism in the legal profession' [1980] Modern Law Review 400 at 401-405. 59. See, eg, the NS, above n 20, vol 2, p 7; Pearson and Sachs, ibid, pp 401-404; and the references in n 56 above. 60. Wordsworth, above n 47, p 160. 61. Hamilton, above n 46, p 167. @ 2010 The Author Legal Studies 0 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars


211

Many feminist victories had been won in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, 62 and some campaigns - for example those concerning the exploitation of women at work and sexually - were still ongoing when Miss Bebb was at college.63 Most importantly, the movement for votes for women, which had been active for longer than anyone cared to remember - John Stuart Mill introduced the first Bill for votes for women into Parliament in 1864 and there had been one practically every year since - was reaching its apogee. The Pankhursts' Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded in 1903, was frequently in the news, and even those who deplored its unladylike militancy must have felt the franchise was winnable now. Many early women law students were feminists; in some cases, it was feminism that led them to law school. Christabel Pankhurst, for instance, had left Manchester University in 1906 with first-class honours in law. Oxford women were generally pro-suffrage. St Hugh's students, led by Miss Jourdain, took part in WSPU processions in 1908 and in 1910. The Oxford Women Students' Suffrage Society was formed in 1911 and its members marched in the 1911 suffrage procession, along with St Hugh's alumnae who were affiliated to the non-militant National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS).M That Miss Bebb should have been part of this movement was almost inevitable. THE CAMPAIGN In 1911, Gwyneth Bebb passed her law finals with first-class honours, the first woman at Oxford to do so. According to Nancy Nettlefold, Miss Bebb's examination performance was so brilliant that, had the candidates' names been placed in order of merit (which was not the custom at Oxford), she would have been joint top of the list with one of the men.65 Since Curthoys notes that, in the period 18751914, about 60% of the male jurisprudence students graduated with third or 62. For example, the Municipal Franchise Act 1869, Municipal Corporations Act 1882 and Local Government Act 1888, which gave women the vote in local government elections; the Married Women's Property Acts 1870-1893; the Matrimonial Causes Act 1878, which allowed women to separate from violent husbands; the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1883; and the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, which raised the age of consent. There is an extensive literature on Victorian and Edwardian feminism and legal reform; see, eg, R Auchmuty 'The Married Women's Property Acts: equality was not the issue' in R Hunter (ed) Rethinking Equality Projects in Law: Feminist Challenges (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2008) pp 13-40; M Doggett Wife-Beating and the Law in Victorian England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984); L Holcombe Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women's Property

Law in Nineteenth-Century England(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983); ML Shanley Feminism, Marriageand the Law in Victorian England 1850-1895 (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); DM Stetson A Woman's Issue: The Politics of Family Law Reform in England (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1982). 63. See, eg, BL Hutchins Women in Modern Industry (London: G Bell & Sons, 1915); V Gollancz (ed) The Making of Women: Oxford Essays in Feminism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1917); L Bland Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality 18851914 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995); S Jeffreys The Spinster and her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880-1930 (London: Pandora, 1985); SK Kent Sex and Suffrage in Britain 1860-1914 (London: Routledge, 1990); E Mappin Helping Women at Work: The Women's Industrial Council 1889-1914 (London: Hutchinson, 1985). 64. Kemp, above n 11, p 32; Adams, above n 31, p 80. 65. NS, above n 20, vol 1, p 36. Q 2010 The Author Legal Studies @ 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars

212


fourth-class honours," Miss Bebb's first must have been powerful ammunition for public recognition of women's abilities. In September 1911 she took up a post as Investigating Officer for the Board of Trade. Under the Trade Boards Act 1909, local boards had been set up to ensure that wages and conditions in the industrial workplace met minimum conditions. Thanks to the appointment as Senior Investigator of the first woman economist at the Board of Trade, Clara Collet, women's employments were included and women inspectors appointed to investigate them." Miss Bebb's work included bringing prosecutions against employers in the sweated trades. Yet, even as she gained this useful legal experience, developments were afoot in the movement to open the legal profession to women with which, from this point on, her life was to be inextricably linked. The story of women's entry into the legal profession has often been told, though, like much of women's history, in fragmentary and sometimes distorted form, with many gaps remaining." In 1912 Edward Bell raised the possibility of admitting women to an unenthusiastic meeting of the Law Society. In the same year, Lord Wolmer introduced a private member's bill to admit women into the solicitors' profession, backed by barrister Lord Robert Cecil in the House of Lords and solicitor Jack Hills MP in the House of Commons.' Opposed by both branches of the legal profession, it got nowhere. A decision was made to pursue an alternative route through the courts. The Law Society was approached, and agreed to a test case. Four carefully selected women sent off applications to the Law Society in 17 December 1912 requesting permission to sit for its preliminary examinations and enclosing the requisite fee. These were returned by the Law Society with the explanation that, as women, they could not be admitted as solicitors. Miss Bebb and her companions thereupon brought four separate actions against the Law Society seeking a declaration that each was a 'person' within the meaning of the Solicitors' Act 1843 and was entitled to be admitted to the Law Society's preliminary examination. 66.

Curthoys, above n 15, p 362.

67. Collet, a friend of the first woman law graduate, Eliza Orme, did not call herself a feminist, but her research both for the Board of Trade and, earlier, for Booth's survey of the London poor, did more than anything else to alert the authorities to the harsh reality of many women's working lives and, for that reason, did more than anything else to improve them: D Doughan 'Collet, Clara Elizabeth (1860-1948)' ODNB, above n 10; D McDonald Clara Collet 18601948 (London: Woburn Press, 2004); Hutchins, above n 63, pp 131-133; MD McFeely Lady Inspectors: The Campaignfor a Better Workplace 1893-1921 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). 68. As noted by Patrick Polden (who has done much to fill the gaps); see 'Portia's progress: women at the Bar in England, 1919-1939' (2005) 12 International Journal of the Legal Profession 293 at 319-320. Ray Strachey, eg, in the first published history of the first wave of feminism, The Cause (1928), mentions Cornelia Sorabji as a legal pioneer but not Bertha Cave, Ivy Williams or Gwyneth Bebb - despite the fact that Strachey was chairwoman of the Committee for the Admission of Women to the Legal Profession at the point when admission was won. See J Alberti Beyond Suffrage: Feminists in War and Peace, 1914-28 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989) p 33; and the references in n 56 above. 69. Jack Hills, Conservative MP for Durham City since 1906, had been influential in the anti-sweating movement that led to the Liberal government's Trades Boards Act 1909. Perhaps he met Miss Bebb in connection with this. His pivotal role in the campaign to admit women to the legal profession goes unmentioned in his ODNB entry, where his main claim to fame is his

writings on fly-fishing: EHH Green 'Hills, John Waller (1867-1938)' ODNB, above n 10. 70. 'Women and the law: a High Court test case' The Times 21 January 1913; 'Women as solicitors: Varsity girls sue the Law Society' Express 21 January 1913. NS, above n 20, vol 1,

p 1. © 2010 The Author Legal Studies Q 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars


213

It is not clear why Miss Bebb was chosen as plaintiff for the test case: perhaps she was the best qualified of the candidates, perhaps she sent in her application first, or perhaps it was simply because her surname came first in the alphabet.' All four candidates had distinguished academic records, and all were suitably presentable. Karin Costelloe (1889-1953) was the younger daughter of the barrister who had appeared for the woman claimant in an earlier 'persons' case, BeresfordHope v Sandhurst, in the year of her birth.72 She had taken a first in the Moral Sciences Tripos at Newnham in 1911, the same year that her sister Rachel (Ray) had married, as his second wife, Oliver Strachey. The Stracheys were a famously feminist family," and Ray Strachey,74 already active in the suffrage movement, was to chair the Committee for the Admission of Women to the Legal Profession. It is not clear whether Karin Costelloe had any real desire to become a lawyer (thereby engaging her sister's interest) or whether it was the other way round, that her sister enlisted her as a suitable candidate. Maud Isabel Ingram (1889-1963), on the other hand, did want to become a solicitor. A barrister's daughter, educated at Roedean and Girton where she achieved second-class honours in history and a third in law in 1912, she was already working in a solicitor's firm." Lucy Frances ('Nancy') Nettlefold (1891-1966), whose father was a wealthy manufacturer, was still a student. She took a first in Part 1 of the Law Tripos at Girton and was shortly to take another in Part 2, the first woman to achieve this double honour.76

71. Initially it seems that Maud Ingram was to be the test case plaintiff ('A Girton girl, through her solicitors, will ask the Law Society to show cause why she should not be registered as a solicitor' Daily Telegraph II January 1913). Maud Crofts Scrapbook (CS) vol 1, p l (in the Women's Library, London). It seems to have been settled by May 1913 that Miss Bebb would take the case. Queen 24 May 1913, NS, above n 20, vol 1, pp 1-2. Miss Bebb was rejected by the Law Society in February 1913 but Miss Ingram's letter of rejection was dated 10 June 1913 - a copy is in CS, vol 1, p 4. 72. This concerned women's right to stand for election to County Councils. The judge in that case was Stephen J (Sir James Fitzjames Stephen), uncle to her future husband, Adrian, the barrister brother of Virginia Woolf, and father of Katharine Stephen, principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, 1911-20. Jack Hills MP had been married to Stella Duckworth (1869-

1897), half-sister to Adrian Stephen, a further link to the campaigners. 73. Lady Strachey was a friend of suffrage leader Millicent Fawcett; Philippa, one of her ten surviving children, was secretary to the Fawcett Society; another, Pemel, became Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge. Lytton Strachey was their brother. B Askwith Two Victorian Families (London: A & C Black, 1971).

74. Best-known today as the author of the first history of first-wave British feminism, The Cause (1928). She was later the first Chair of the Cambridge University Women's Appointments Board (1930-1939). See Alberti, above n 68; and B Caine 'Strachey, Rachel Pearson Conn [Ray] (1887-1940)' ODNB, above n 10.

75.

'Women lawyers' (1912) 8 Solicitor's Journal, 25 May; CS, above n 71. See also

M Jenkins 'Girl power: focus women solicitors' (1997) December, Law Society Gazette 23. 76. This achievement was noted in, inter alia, the Daily Telegraph, Yorkshire Post, Sunday Times, Westminster Gazette, Globe, Daily Graphic, Western Daily Press, Queen, Bayswater Chronicle, Common Cause and (on account of her father's business) the Ironmonger- evidence of the widespread public interest in women's higher education and/or their legal aspirations at this time, as well as the campaigners' highly developed sense of the value of publicity: NS,

above n 20, vol 1, p 30. @ 2010 The Author Legal Studies Q 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars

214


The forthcoming trial was announced at a dinner for women law graduates at the Lyceum Club on 10 March 1913." The Misses Bebb, Costelloe and Ingram all spoke, followed by Edward Bell from the Law Society and Holford Knight from the Bar. Presiding was Chrystal Macmillan, who in 1908 had challenged the exclusion of women from the university vote at her alma mater, Edinburgh University, under yet another statute that used the word 'persons', and who had (unsuccessfully but to much acclaim) argued her own case before the House of Lords.7 s Miss Bebb was reported as saying that 'prejudice and a fear of competition underlay a good deal of the opposition shown to women wishing to enter the legal profession'.79 This robust appraisal of the situation provides our first intimation that she had a fully developed feminist politics and was not simply in the struggle for her own sake. But the women's speeches were carefully leavened with 'just the touch of humour that argued their possession of a sense of proportion', approved the Manchester Guardian.80 Both Maud Ingram (later Crofts) and Nancy Nettlefold left scrapbooks of the campaign, now housed in the Women's Library in London, which collect together every newspaper account they could lay their hands on. From these sources it is clear that the media (with some exceptions like the right-wing Saturday Review) were on their side. 'If a woman can take a first class in law at Oxford,' demanded the Express on 25 January 1913, '. . . what right has the Law Society to prevent her from earning

her living as a solicitor?'"' There was, of course, considerable interest in the women's personal lives: the reports furnished details of their family background, interests and social life. Miss Bebb clearly guarded hers well, or else lived very quietly, for we learn nothing new about her from these journalistic delvings. 8 2 The accounts showed the women in a wholly acceptable light, in contrast to Christabel Pankhurst whose 'disgraceful' activities, the Leeds Mercury cautioned, threatened to jeopardised the women's case: 'delinquents like her must be excluded'. 83 The women themselves recognised the value of publicity and took every opportunity to present their case before the hearing. On 2 April 1913, for example, Miss Ingram spoke at an event organised by the Women Writers' Suffrage League at the 77. Evening Standard 11 March 1913; ibid, p 1. Maud Ingram's invitation is in CS, above n 71, vol 1, p 11. The Lyceum Club was a club for professional women founded by Constance Smedley in 1903. It was intended to provide for women the kind of intellectual venue and support network enjoyed by men at their clubs, with discussion meetings, dances, concerts and a bureau of services. At the time it was located at 128 Piccadilly, now the RAF Club: D Doughan and P Gordon Women, Clubs and Associations in Britain (London: Routledge, 2006) p 36. 78. Nairn and Others v University of St Andrew's and Others [ 1909] AC 147. One of the first

women admitted to Edinburgh University, Macmillan had first-class honours in mathematics and philosophy and an MA inphilosophy from Berlin. She was active in the suffrage movement and, once the legal profession had been opened to women, entered Middle Temple and was called to the Bar in 1924: S Oldfield 'Macmillan, (Jessie) Chrystal (1872-1937)' ODNB, above n 10. 79. Evening Standard 11 March 1913; also reported in the Daily News and Leader of the same date. CS, above n 71, pp 1 and 10. 80. 11 March 1913, in PI Cuttings Scrapbook (in the Women's Library, London). 81. NS, above n 20, vol 1, p 1. See also Lang, above n 56, pp 148-149. 82. In contrast to Miss Nettlefold who, we are told, had been presented at court and enjoyed lawn tennis, croquet and boating, while Miss Ingram was a tennis 'blue' and had captained the Cambridge Women's Team against Oxford for 2 years running. Unattributed, undated cuttings in NS, above n 20, vol 1, opening unnumbered pages. 83. 10 October 13, ibid, vol 1, p 7. 0 2010 The Author Legal Studies 0 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars


215

Suffrage Club on 'Professions Barred to Women' (the other was the Church),' and Miss Costelloe and Miss Nettlefold spoke about the case at the Cambridge Federation of University Women the following month." These appearances demonstrate the inter-connectedness and mutual support of the feminist groups and campaigns at the time and the overarching feminist politics that located women's efforts to enter the legal profession within a wider struggle against male domination of public life. THE CASE Bebb has been described so often that a brief account must suffice here. On 1 July 1913, Buckmaster KC 86 appeared for Miss Bebb before a hostile Joyce J," arguing for the admission of women to the profession on the basis of s 48 of the Solicitors' Act 1843, which stated that 'every Word importing the Masculine Gender only shall extend and be applied to a Female as well as a Male . . . unless it be otherwise

specially provided or there be something in the Subject or Context repugnant to such Construction'. The judge dismissed the action, finding that women were incapable of carrying out a public function in common law, and that the disability must remain 'unless and until' the legislature saw fit to alter it." Nancy Nettlefold kept the transcript of the hearing prepared by the shorthandtakers in the High Court. Tucked into one of her scrapbooks, it records the dialogue between counsel, judge and plaintiff, allowing us to see the actual words spoken by Miss Bebb - a rare glimpse of this elusive woman. When she admits to having achieved a first in jurisprudence, her counsel (later to become a distinguished Law Lord) responds: 'It is more than I could have done' .8 When the judge forces her to admit that her degree exempts her from the Law Society's preliminary examinations ('This is perfectly absurd. Here she is exempt from the examinations, and you want the Law Society to examine her'), she points out that she brought the case to avoid future disappointment if, having completed five years as an articled clerk, she should find herself debarred from practising because the Law Society would still not accept women. 0 She says she has not yet fixed up articles but believes there is a firm willing to take her on. Indeed, Edward Bell, solicitor, is called to testify that he would do so. The transcript is heavily and amusingly annotated by Miss Nettlefold. Alongside Buckmaster's quotation 'That would be inconsistent with one of the glories of our

84. CS, above n 71, vol 1, p 12. 85. 86.

Queen 24 May 1913; NS, above n 20, vol 1, p 2. Then a successful Chancery QC, bencher of Lincoln's Inn, Standing Counsel to Oxford

University, and Liberal MP for Keighley: W Goodhart 'Buckmaster, Stanley Owen, first Viscount Buckmaster (1861-1934)' ODNB, above n 10. 87. Joyce J had been one of the tribunal judges convened to hear (and dismiss) Miss Cave's appeal against being refused admission to Gray's Inn in 1903. 'Bebb, G.M. v the Law Society: notes of proceedings and judgment', p 40, NS, above n 20, vol 2 (in back sleeve). Aged 74 at the time of the Bebb trial, he retired from the Bench 2 years later: HG Hanbury 'Joyce, Sir Matthew Ingle (1839-1930)' ODNB, above n 10. 88. Bebb v The Law Society [1913] 109 LTR 36 at 39. 89. 'Bebb v the Law Society in the High Court of Justice Chancery Division, 1 July 1913', p 37, in NS, above n 20, vol 2 (in back sleeve). 90. Ibid, pp 37-38. @ 2010 The Author Legal Studies Q 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars

216


civilisation - the respect and honour with which women are held', Miss Nettlefold has scrawled 'Ugh!'," while one of the judge's remarks attracts the comment 'Fool!' 9 2 In the interval between the trial and the appeal, the campaign did not let up. Chrystal Macmillan and Nancy Nettlefold addressed the Hull Conference of the National Union of Women Workers in October 1913.93 Miss Nettlefold also did a round of fundraising lectures.94 In December 1913 the Court of Appeal heard the appeal.95 Here Lord Robert Cecil, for Miss Bebb, argued that women should be permitted to be solicitors because they had acted as attorneys in mediaeval times, and because there were women solicitors already in parts of the British Empire like Australia and Canada. Sir Robert Finlay KC, 96 for the Law Society, responded that these were not precedents, since no woman had ever been a solicitor in England and Wales. He also noted that, if women were admitted to the Law Society, then the Bar would have to accept them too; though he commented that 'no doubt this would make dining in hall far more amusing', the implication was the opposite.97 The Court of Appeal found against the appellant, the principal argument being (as Cozens-Hardy MR put it): 'There has been that long uniform and uninterrupted usage which is the foundation of the greater part of the common law of this country, and which we ought, beyond all doubt, to be very loth to depart from'. In other words, women never had been solicitors so they could not be solicitors now; and any change must come from Parliament." The case merits more detailed analysis than is possible here. The most obvious point to be made, however, is that both courts employed the doctrine of precedent and the notion that judges cannot make law in order to block a reform that would have been unpopular with both branches of the profession. This was not lost on the feminist press: 'We qualify in modern schools and colleges for modem requirements, and are ruled out on an antiquated law of precedent, and the opinion about sex disability expressed by a judge [Coke] who has been in his grave for three centuries!' 99 It is just possible that, with a different approach to statutory interpretation, recourse to ideas of social progress, perhaps a differently constituted court, the case might have been decided in Miss Bebb's favour. A letter from 'A Solicitor' to The Times castigated Ibid, p 20. Ibid, p 27. Eastern Morning News 9 October 1913, NS, above n 20, vol 1, p 5. Eg 'Women and the legal profession', Holy Trinity Parish Hall, Eltham, December 1913, vol 1, p 8 . In Miss Nettlefold's Scrapbook there are cuttings with photographs of Miss Bebb and her companions outside the court - eg the Daily Mirror and the Daily Sketch, both of 11 December 1913: ibid, vol 1, p 10. 96. 71-year-old Finlay had been Solicitor General and then Attorney General under the Salisbury and Balfour governments and was, at the time of the Bebb trial, both MP for Edinburgh and St Andrew's Universities and a practising KC: GR Rubin 'Finlay, Robert Bannatyne, first Viscount Finlay (1842-1929)' ODNB, above n 10. 97. 'Bebb, G.M. v the Law Society: notes of proceedings and judgment', above n 87, p 43. Indeed, Nellie Franz was later to observe that one reason barristers were so opposed to women's admission was that they were attached to particular forms of entertainment which they were reluctant to reveal to women, let alone share with them (Franz, above n 56, p 277), an observation borne out by the experiences of the first women members of the Inns, and by Helena 91. 92. 93. 94. ibid, 95.

Kennedy half a century later: H Kennedy Eve Was Framed: Women and British Justice

(London: Chatto & Windus, 1992) pp 37-40. 98.

Bebb v The Law Society, above n 1, at 294.

99. Mary Bull 17 Jan 1914. NS, above n 20, vol 1, p 13. O 2010 The Author Legal Studies 0 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars


217

the judges for not doing so: legislation, he insisted, was not needed.'" But once the court had dismissed as irrelevant the historical or colonial instances of women practising law, named by counsel for the plaintiff, the appeal to precedent would almost inevitably succeed at a time when judicial creativity was at a low ebb and Parliament regularly invoked as the only maker of new law. There is no sign in the judgments of the arguments used by opponents of women's admission about the sex's deficiencies or proper role, men's inability to resist a 'pretty girl' advocate, or overcrowding in the profession. Such views may have been held by the judges but they were not articulated here. What the media perceived, however, was a doctrinal cover-up for legal men's reluctance to share their power, privileges and professional space with women. Thus, the Daily Sketch captioned a photograph of Miss Bebb and Miss Ingram 'Are Men Lawyers Afraid of Women's Brains?',o' while the ChristianCommonwealth summed up the judgment: 'The male monopolists say, in effect, "you shan't!" '102 The case was widely reported, not simply in the legal press but in the national and provincial papers and abroad. For the most part the British papers, except the Irish, were critical of the judgment.' The Australian Western Mail pronounced with all the complacency of a former colony that had surpassed its motherland in justice for women (Australian women had had the vote since 1901):I0 'Women may pass the law school of a university with the highest honors [sic], and may be heartily congratulated by distinguished personages on their success, as Miss Bebb was by one of the judges of the Court of Appeal, but there it all ends - the girl graduates in law may go and darn stockings for their livelihood so far as the tribunals of the United Kingdom are concerned.' In England, the Daily Citizen, which assessed the Court of Appeal's decision as 'shaky' since it appeared to be saying 'that the mere denial of a right is itself the justification of the denial', urged Miss Bebb to take her case to the House of Lords hoping she would appear in person as the visible embodiment of the justice of her claim.'0o An appeal to the House of Lords was indeed considered, the reformers believing, rightly or wrongly, that they enjoyed more support in the higher court.'06 It seems, however, that the test case had been undertaken more as a publicity exercise than with any expectation of success, and even as it was making its way through the courts, the reformers continued down the parliamentary route. In early 1913, Lord Wolmer introduced a Bill that would open both branches of the profession to women. But it became clear, as Maud Ingram put it, that barristers were too entrenched 'behind 100. 16 December 13; ibid, vol 1, p 13. Pearson and Sachs argue this (above n 58, at 401). 101. NS, above n 20, vol 1, p.10. The Sydney Evening News of 27 January 1914 concluded that they were! Ibid, vol 1, pp 12-13. 102. 11 December 1913; ibid, p 10. 103. The Dublin Express found the idea of women barristers 'too alarming to contemplate' and feared women would want entry into every profession including the Army, Navy and Church (16 March 1914; ibid, vol 1,p 16), while the Belfast Evening Telegraph wrote: 'What a laughing stock we would be if we had Mrs. Justice Smith going on circuit' - a comment demonstrating the lack of reasoned argument that characterised much of the opposition. This report was also critical of the 'shrieking sisterhood' and insisted that few women had ambitions to be lawyers. 11 December 1913; ibid, vol 1, p 11. 104. 6 February 1914; ibid, vol 1, p 13. 105. 11 December 1913; ibid, vol 1, p 12. 106. Eastern Morning News 9 October 1913; ibid, vol 1, p 5. @ 2010 The Author Legal Studies 0 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars

218


the impregnable defence of immemorial custom" 0 - a view evidenced by the overwhelming defeat of a motion to admit women at the Bar's annual meeting that year," and reiterated by Sir Frederick Pollock in his address to the annual gathering of the Women Law Graduates in January 1914' - so, in the autumn of 1913, Jack Hills introduced a one-clause Bill confined to the solicitors' profession. In February 1914, a committee to obtain the opening of the profession to women was formed. Its membership included a large number of men and women prominent in public life, including many senior lawyers like Samuel Garrett, President of the Law Society. In March 1914 Lord Wolmer re-introduced the Solicitors' (Qualification of Women) Bill into the House of Lords and Jack Hills followed suit in the Commons. A deputation of, among others, Lord Robert Cecil, Sir Frederick Pollock, Mrs Fawcett and Mrs Humphrey Ward (normally on opposite sides of the suffrage debate), Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and the four Bebb litigants attended upon the Lord Chancellor, Lord Haldane, who was personally supportive, and a letter was sent to all MPs urging them to support the Bill." 0 Miss Nettlefold's scrapbook reveals heated debate in the press over the following months."' The outbreak of the First World War brought a halt to proceedings. In 1915, however, Stanley Buckmaster became Lord Chancellor, and he lost no time in introducing a new Bill, once again drafted to open the barristers' as well as the solicitors' profession to women." 2 Unfortunately, Asquith's government fell in December 1916 and with it the women's hopes, for the new Lord Chancellor was Lord Finlay, the very Robert Finlay who had appeared for the Law Society in Bebb. Finlay was opposed to women lawyers, and the matter lapsed. WAR WORK At the outbreak of the First World War, Gwyneth Bebb was still working for the Board of Trade. But in March 1917 she took up a post in the newly formed National Service for Women as Commissioner for the West Midland division. The move to the Midlands may have been made in anticipation of her marriage to a Tewkesbury solicitor the following month. The National Service Department, with Neville Chamberlain in charge, had been set up in December 1916. The Women's Section followed in February 1917 (so Gwyneth Bebb must have been one of its first appointees), with May Tennant as Director and Violet Markham as her deputy."' Miss Bebb's old campaigning friend 107. Evening Standard 11 March 1913; ibid, vol 1, p 1.

108. Polden, above n 68, p 294. 109. Manchester Courier 14 January 1914; NS, above n 20, vol 1, p 14. 110. Manchester Guardian 3 February, 10 February and 3 October 1914; Liverpool Daily Courier 6 March 1914; Common Cause 3 April 1914; ibid, vol 1, pp 14-15 and 18-19.

111. Ibid, vol 1, pp 16-29, including some by the litigants themselves, eg Maud Ingram's 'Why we want women solicitors: the woman's point of view' Evening News 14 March 1914 (at p 17). 112. lbid, vol 1, p 44. Polden, above n 68, pp 294 and 332. 113. V Markham Return Passage (London: Oxford University Press, 1953) p 99. Markham was a friend of Jack Hills and had been among the 1914 deputation to the Lord Chancellor to plead for government support for the Bill to open the solicitors' profession to women. Markham and Hills were both opposed to votes for women before the war, allies of Mrs Humphrey Ward's anti-suffrage organisation. It is curious now to recognise that people who opposed votes for women could nevertheless be enthusiastic supporters of women's claim to become lawyers; and @ 2010 The Author Legal Studies Q 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars


219

Nancy Nettlefold, having now completed her studies at both Cambridge and London, gave up her unofficial articles with a London firm of solicitors and found a job in the Women's National Service office. Markham recalls in her autobiography that the whole operation was a disaster, leading to the resignation within six months of Chamberlain, Tennant and Markham herself." 4 Miss Bebb and Miss Nettlefold must also have resigned, for, in August 1917, the former became Assistant Commissioner for Enforcement for the Ministry of Food, Midlands Division, while the latter became a Deputy Assistant Secretary in the same organisation. The Ministry of Food was another wartime measure. Created in December 1916 to deal with food shortages, it took control of 85% of the country's food supplies and, in 1918, when an attempt at voluntary economising failed, instituted rationing which continued for some years after the end of the war."15 At Birmingham Miss Bebb was once again able to employ her legal skills in conducting prosecutions against black marketeers." 6 One of her colleagues was Sybil Campbell, another intending lawyer, who had also worked at the Board of Trade."' In recognition of her work with the Ministry of Food, which occupied her until August 1920, Gwyneth Bebb (by then Gwyneth Thomson) was awarded the OBE (Order of the British Empire)."' MARRIAGE AND MOTHERHOOD She was lucky to find a husband;" so many men had died in combat, as a result of their wounds or (later) in the influenza epidemic after the war, that many women of her generation missed out on marriage. The 1921 census revealed that the number of spinsters in the population was at its highest ever: over a million of them in the age group 15-44, twice the figure for 1911.120 Thomas Weldon Thomson, solicitor, was 44 years old and still a bachelor when he married Gwyneth Bebb on 26 April 1917 in the parish church at Kensington, St Mary Abbots. Gwyneth herself was 27, the same age her mother had been at her marriage. interesting, too, that the movement united people from across the political spectrum: Hills was a Conservative, Markham a Liberal, while Margaret Bondfield, another supporter, became a Labour MP. Markham and Hills were converted to the suffrage cause after the war. 114. Ibid, pp 150-153. Markham does not mention Miss Bebb in her autobiography, but she was close to Miss Nettlefold and remained friends for the rest of her life (p 153). See also H Jones 'Markham, Violet Rosa (1872-1959)' ODNB, above n 10. 115. G Braybon and P Summerfield Out of the Cage: Women's Experiences in Two World Wars

(London: Pandora, 1987) pp 99-103. 116. Daily Express 3 December 1919; NS, above n 20, vol 1, p 106. 117. Birmingham Mail 2 December 1922; CS, above n 71, vol 1, p 16. Sybil Campbell joined Middle Temple in 1920 and was one of the first women called to the Bar in 1922. She went on to become the first woman professional judge when she was appointed as a stipendiary magistrate in 1945. P Polden 'The Lady of Tower Bridge: Sybil Campbell, England's first woman judge' (1999) 8 Women's History Review 505 at 509-510; S Oldfield 'Campbell, Sybil (1889-1977)' ODNB, above n 10. 118. AW Thorpe (ed) Burke's Handbook to the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (London: Burke Publishing Company, 1921) pp 510-511. 119. 'Lucky' according to the ideology of the time: as Jane Lewis wrote, 'For all women marriage conferred a higher status than spinsterhood, which connoted failure': J Lewis Women in England 1870-1950 (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1984) p 3. 120. Ibid. 0 2010 The Author Legal Studies D 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars

220


No profession is given for her on the marriage certificate; probably the clerk assumed that, as a woman, she had none. Both bride and groom gave Kensington addresses, and they were married by the vicar of St Mark's, North Audley Street, the Rev HP Cronshaw. Her father having died in 1915, Miss Bebb's mother gave her away, and her brother Frank was best man.12 ' They went to live at Sherford House in Tewkesbury, where Thomson practised as a solicitor. On 23 December 1919, Alice Diana Broughton Thomson (known as Diana) was born at Kingsthorpe Nursing Home, 43 Wheeley's Road, Edgbaston. Sybil Campbell was her godmother.122

VICTORY AT LAST Throughout the war, the Misses Bebb, Nettlefold and Ingram (who had become honorary secretary of the Working Women's Legal Advice Bureau) kept the issue of women's admission to law before the public eye, with regular articles in the press.' 23 In 1917, Lord Buckmaster re-introduced the Solicitors (Qualification of Women) Bill into the House of Lords, with Jack Hills once again taking charge in the House of Commons. The Association drew up a Memorial Petition signed by a long list of women supporting the Bill, a copy of which is lodged in Nancy Nettlefold's scrapbook.124 The signatories read like a catalogue of prominent women, from the titled (Lady 26Aberconway at the top) through feminist activists,125 women in the professionsl and the arts,27 academics,128 future MPs,1 29 even Marie Stopes and Agnes Baden Powell, demonstrating (as Miss Nettlefold was to claim on a lecture tour of Australia) 'an overwhelming body of feminine opinion' in favour of the entry of women to the legal profession. 3 0 Right up to the last moment, however, there was opposition within the profession, as the cuttings in the scrapbook also show. The Law Journal of 13 January 1917 amusingly juxtaposed an article critical of the proposed legislation with two advertisements for Ladies' Detective Agencies - these were 3 clearly acceptable, but not women lawyers. '

121. M Bravington 'Oh, that glass ceiling .. . more of a bar than a gate' (2009) Criminal Law and Justice Weekly, 8 August, available at http://www.criminallawandjustice.co.uk. 122. Information from Gwyneth Thomson's granddaughter. 123. Eg Bebb's review of Wilfred Hooper's The Englishwoman's Legal Guide in Common Cause, 20 February 1914; NS, vol 1, p 8; Ingram's 'Why we want women solicitors: the woman's point of view' in the Evening News 14 March 1914; ibid, vol 1, p 17; Nettlefold's 'How soon will women be solicitors?' Votes for Women October 1917; ibid, vol 1, p 66. 124. Ibid, vol 2, p 35.

125. Eg Millicent Fawcett, Clementina Black and Eva Gore-Booth. 126. Eg Dr Louisa Garrett Anderson and Violet Markham. 127. Eg actresses Lena Ashwell and Clara Butt, writers Elizabeth Robins and Olive Schreiner. 128. Eg classical scholar Jane Harrison, as well as current, former and future college principals Emily Davies, Barbara Clough, Henrietta Jex-Blake, Emily Penrose, Eleanor Sidgwick and Katharine Stephen. 129. Eg Margaret Bondfield, Susan Lawrence, Mary Macarthur and Eleanor Rathbone. 130. Handwritten MS 'Women and the legal profession' p 4; NS, above n 20, vol 2, pp 35 and 49. 131. Ibid, vol 2, p 53. @ 2010 The Author Legal Studies O 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars


221

The Solicitors (Qualification of Women) Bill reached its third reading in March 1918132 before being overtaken by the broader government-sponsored measure that became the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919,133 passed in the same month as Diana Thomson's birth. While the breadth of its ambit may have taken feminists by surprise,' 34 the admission of women to the solicitors' profession had by then become inevitable."' In March 1919, the Law Society had passed a resolution (50 votes to 33) that, 'in view of the present economic and political position of women, it is in the opinion of this meeting expedient that the existing obstacles to their entry into the legal profession should be removed'. 36 The war had changed the legal landscape irrevocably. More than 5000 lawyers had gone to fight; many had not come back, and others were no longer fit to work. Daughters had helped out in family law firms during the war, and then stayed on, too valuable to lose. 137 The Daily News reported in 1921 that many of the female articled clerks were 'the daughters of country solicitors who have no sons or else have lost them in the war, and who have articled their girls instead, so as to keep the practice in the family' .13 They demonstrated beyond doubt that women could do the work; that no ill-effects resulted from the mixing of the sexes in the workplace; and that, in general, clients and counsel were prepared to take the women seriously, and neither refused female briefings nor were unduly influenced by a pretty face. It was clear, moreover, that women needed the work; wartime casualties meant that many of them would not now find a husband to support them.139 There is no indication that the Bar, on the other hand, would have accepted women had the legislature not forced their hand. Holford Knight's motion to admit women was lost in January 1917,140 and at its annual general meeting in 1918, members voted 178 to 22 against the admission of women. 14 ' When Gwyneth Thomson applied for entry to Lincoln's Inn in January 1919, she was refused. In April 1919, Middle Temple voted against the admission of women. Lord Buckmaster lamented: 'I thought it possible that the Inns might take what I regarded as the courageous course of saying that in the exercise of their unlimited and undoubted discretion they would admit women to the Inns without further delay'.14 Instead, the Inns set up a Joint Committee to look into the question. Only when legislation was inevitable did the Inns of Court withdraw their opposition.'43

132. With Lord Halsbury, moving rejection of the measure, still contending that women could not be lawyers because 'a woman had no recognition of any side but her own': Franz, above n 56, p 275. 133. 9 & 10 Geo Ch 71. 134. As claimed by Alberti, above n 68, p 7. But Miss Nettlefold says it was a weaker measure than Labour's proposed Emancipation Bill. Notes made by Miss George, p 5, above n 20. 135. R Adam A Woman's Place 1910-1975 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1975) pp 78-79. 136. Skordaki, above n 56, at 10. 137. Ibid. 138. 5 April 1921, quoted in Adam, above n 135, p 79. 139. Evening Mail 9 March 1920; NS, above n 20, vol 2, p 3. 140. Pall Mall Gazette 17 January 1927; ibid, vol 2, pp 38-39. 141. Wade, above n 5, p 39. 142. Polden, above n 68, at 294, quoting Lincoln's Inn Black Books 2001, p 7. 143. Bravington, above n 121; notes made by Miss George, above n 20, p 5. @ 2010 The Author Legal Studies 0 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars

222


The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 was short and to the point. Section 1 provided that 'A person shall not be disqualified by sex or marriage' from the exercise of any public, civil or judicial function or civil profession, admission to any incorporated society, or liability to serve as a juror. This did not outlaw discrimination, it simply removed the bar on women or married women in public life that had justified the decision in Bebb. Section 2 gave women the right to be admitted and enrolled as solicitors after fulfilling the conditions required of men. The cautiously worded s 3 declared that 'Nothing in the statutes or charter of any university shall be deemed to preclude the authorities of such university from making such provision as they shall think fit for the admission of women to membership thereof, or to any degree'. This section enabled Oxford to concede degrees and university membership to women in 1920, while at the same time permitting Cambridge to withhold them for a further 28 years. The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 had two important consequences for Gwyneth Thomson. First, and most importantly, she could now pursue her dream of a legal career. Curiously, perhaps, in view of her earlier suit against the Law Society, as well as her husband's profession, she chose to become a barrister. After the Act received royal assent on 24 December 1919, she applied immediately to join Lincoln's Inn; her application was accepted on 29 December.'" Recalling her earlier celebrity, her photograph appeared in the Daily Mail of 28 February 1920 leaving Lincoln's Inn the day before 'after completing the formalities essential to her admittance as a law student'.145 The second effect of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 was that Gwyneth Thomson was able to graduate with her Jurisprudence degree from Oxford. At the first degree ceremony open to women, in 1920, 40 years of higher education for women were represented in the long procession of female graduates at last able to wear academic dress and write letters after their names. Winifred Holtby (a Somerville student at the time) was present:146 'The Sheldonian was crowded with people - mostly women. The few men who received their degrees were quite in a minority and looked almost like interlopers. The most dramatic moment came when the doors at the end of the Sheldonian were thrown open and the principals of the five colleges came in and processed slowly up the central aisle, to the rousing applause of the spectators.' The five principals were granted honorary degrees. There is a photograph in the St Hugh's College archives of Gwyneth Thomson receiving her degree at that ceremony.

144. Bravington, above, n 121. Lincoln's Inn was Lord Buckmaster's Inn, which may account for Miss Bebb's choice. 145. NS, above n 20, vol 2, p 2. She was not the first woman to be admitted to Lincoln's Inn - that was Marjorie Powell, who was admitted on 27 January 1920. Presumably the delay was due to her recent accouchement. 146. Letter to Jean McWilliam, 20 October 1920 in W Holtby [A Holtby and J McWilliam (eds)] Letters to a Friend (London: Collins, 1937) p 20. The five colleges were Somerville, Lady Margaret Hall, St Hugh's, St Hilda's, and St Anne's, which had formerly been the Society of Home Students. @ 2010 The Author Legal Studies 0 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars


223

IN TRAINING FOR THE BAR Of the four Bebb litigants, only Gwyneth Thomson chose to join the Bar. The delay in opening the profession to women had caused two of the original four to enter other careers. Karin Costelloe decided to study medicine and became a psychiatrist.'47 Nancy Nettlefold never went back to the Lincoln's Inn firm of solicitors to which she had been unofficially articled, abandoning her plan to set up as a legal consultant until someone sued her for practising as an unqualified solicitor.'48 Instead, she became, in 1919, a Director and Company Secretary of her father's wholesale ironmongers and manufacturing business, ironically called Nettlefold and Sons.' 49 Maud Ingram became a solicitor, just as she had always planned. One of the first four women to pass the Law Society Finals,' she was the first to be officially articled (in 1920) and the first to obtain a practising certificate (in 1923)."' The admission of women to the legal profession gave the press a reason to resurrect their old files on Gwyneth Bebb from Bebb v The Law Society days, and photographs and drawings that had accompanied the newspaper coverage of the case were hunted out and re-used as journalists followed, for a few brief months, the progress of the new applicants to the Bar. It is clear from the cuttings assembled by Nancy Nettlefold for her scrapbook that Gwyneth Thomson was generally assumed to be destined to become the first woman called to the English Bar. An Evening News headline, for example, read 'First Woman Barrister? Graceful Compliment to Welsh Clergyman's Daughter', the text affirming that 'She is now likely to become the first woman member of the senior branch of the profession in England'.'52 It then emerged that Mrs Thomson had a rival for the honour of prospective 'first barrister'.' Helena Normanton had applied for membership of Middle Temple in February 1918;154

147. Her husband Adrian Stephen, a barrister, also re-trained as a psychiatrist. See M Milner 'Karin Stephen: 1889-1953' (1954) 35 International Journal of Psyoanalysis 432. 148. NS, above n 20, vol 2, p 33. 149. After her father's death in 1944 she became joint managing director with her brother until her retirement in 1948. Active in the British Federation of University Women, she went on to have a second career in public service and local government (as a Conservative), always with a focus on women's causes, and was a member of the Royal Commission on Equal Pay in 1945. She retired to South Africa, where she died in 1966: J Haynes, entry in Genesis Catalogueat the Women's Library, London. 150. DM Ford 'Women solicitors' Daily News 8 April 1921; Daily Graphic 2 December 1922. CS, above n 71, vol 1, pp 15 and 33. 151. After marriage to a fellow solicitor, John Crofts, she became a partner in the Westminster firm of Crofts, Ingram and Wyatt and Co. During the 1920s she was much in demand as a journalist, lecturer and broadcaster, commenting particularly on women's legal issues; she acted as legal adviser to feminist groups like Lady Rhondda's Six-Point Group, and wrote a wellreceived book, Women Under English Law (1925), with a foreword by Millicent Fawcett. Carrie Morrison was the first woman to be admitted as a solicitor. M Jervis 'Girl power: Focus Women Solicitors' (1997) December, Law Society Gazette 23. 152. 29 December 1919; NS, above n 20, vol 1, p 106. The Evening News and the DailyExpress made similar reports, the latter describing her as 'a clever and attractive young Welshwoman'. 30 December 1919; ibid, vol 1, p 107. 153. . Daily Sketch 30 December 1919; ibid. 154. Daily Graphic 16 February 1918; ibid, vol 1, pp 67-68; Lady's Pictorial27 July 1920; ibid, vol 2, p 19. 0 2010 The Author Legal Studies @ 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars

224


this application was allowed to stand, giving her priority over the other women applicants.'

The reports often presented a rather muddled account, for the arcane processes of entry into the barristers' profession were incomprehensible to most journalists. Both Helena Normanton and Gwyneth Thomson were described, for example, as having been admitted to the Bar in 1919. The Daily Sketch's photograph of Gwyneth Thomson with her tall, handsome husband was headed 'First Woman Barrister' ('She gave birth to a daughter a few days ago in Birmingham,' they rightly marvelled)."' The Record New Illustrated Weekly of 24 February 1920 featured another picture of 'Mrs G. Thomas [sic], of Tewkesbury, one of the first woman barristers'. The accompanying article made it clear, however, that the expression was used loosely, for it went on to state that Normanton and Thomson would 'automatically' become barristers in the next few years.' Eventually, the women themselves set the record right about the process of keeping terms (eating dinners and paying fees), passing examinations and finding a sponsor, all of which had to be accomplished before any of them could actually be called to the Bar.' On 11 January 1920, Mrs Thomson dined for the first time in Lincoln's Inn. She reported that she was treated kindly; at the other Inns, however, the women were ordered to sit separately from the men."' The women had their own robing-rooms and were careful to wear 'severely quiet attire' so as not to draw attention to themselves.'60 The meal consisted of soup, fish, joint, tart and cheese, washed down with half a bottle of wine per person.'"' Elsie Lang commented on the press coverage of the event:' 62 'They made quite a sensational event of the first dinner in hall, and when women introduced the revolutionary idea of washing their wigs, which had never occurred to men in all their centuries of contented wear, a note of admiration crept into their comments.'

THE CELEBRATION BANQUET On 8 March 1920 a banquet was held at the House of Commons to celebrate the admission of women to the legal profession. Organised by the Committee to Obtain the Opening of the Legal Profession to Women (as it was now called), with Ray (Mrs Oliver) Strachey as hostess and Jack Hills MP as Chair, it brought together feminists and men of law in an atmosphere of good will. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Birkenhead, 155. In the event, this honour went to neither of them. Ivy Williams, whose terms were shortened in recognition of her academic achievements, emerged as the first woman to be called to the English Bar, on 22 May 1922, though she never practised. Monica Geikie Cobb was the first woman to hold a brief (Sybil Campbell was the second) and Helena Normanton the first to hold a brief at the High Court. 'Women lawyers' Birmingham Mail 2 December 1922; CS, above n 71, vol 1, p 15; Lang, above n 56, p 166. 156. Nd; NS, above n 20, vol 1, p 106. 157. Ibid, vol 1, p 117. 158. 'Women and the law: the first students' Daily Telegraph nd [December 1919?]; ibid, vol 1, p 107. 159. Woman's Leader 12 March 1920, and reports in other papers; ibid, vol 1, pp 111 and 116. 160. Lang, above n 56, p 164.

161. See NS, above n 20, vol 1, p 108. 162. Lang, above n 56, pp 164-165. Q 2010 The Author Legal Studies @ 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars


225

was guest of honour. Also in attendance were the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Reading; the Attorney General, Sir Gordon Hewart; the Solicitor General, Sir Ernest Pollock; Viscount Haldane; the President of the Law Society, Mr Thomas Liddle; the President of the Divorce Court, Sir Henry Duke; Mr Cecil Chapman representing the London Magistrates; Mrs Henry (Millicent) Fawcett, Viscountess Rhondda, and 'other distinguished leaders of the women's movement';16 and many people associated with the campaign for women's admission to law, including Mr Withers of Withers, Benson, Birkett and Davies, the solicitors who had briefed Miss Bebb's barristers in both courts - as well as the four litigants themselves. The Lord Chancellor, who (as the Manchester Guardianput it) 'adroitly reconciled his opposition to the suffrage with his persistent advocacy of women's claims, to enter the legal profession','" nevertheless took the opportunity to congratulate Mrs Fawcett on the achievement of her life's work, votes for women, in the Representation of the People Act 1918. He went on to say that:'65 'His experience in the Law Courts of the great ability shown by women as clerks gave indication of what might be expected from women now that they were admitted to the legal profession. He said he had done his best to persuade his young daughter that the Law was the career for her, but she persisted in wanting to be a movie artist.' This must have raised a laugh. Gwyneth Thomson, chosen to propose the toast to the Bar, good-naturedly maintained the genial tone. She was reported as saying:'" 'if the women were instructed to wear wigs they would do their best to adapt their back hair so as to meet the requirement. When she desired to enter the profession, she was informed that unless she could drink at dinner a pint of ale and a bottle of port it was useless to expect to be admitted to the profession. But in practice she found that it only came out at nothing worse than ginger beer. (Laughter.)' The Attorney General responded, saying that he had always supported the women. Chrystal Macmillan spoke on behalf of the Lord Advocate and the Scottish Bar; and Nancy Nettlefold toasted the solicitors. Ray Strachey's closing speech, based on notes supplied by Nancy Nettlefold, recalled the history of the campaign. Major Hills announced the establishment of a loan fund to assist women to obtain their legal education, for which over £150 was raised on the spot.' Nancy Nettlefold kept her invitation and menu card (in handwritten French) as souvenirs of the evening; they were pasted into her scrapbook. It must have seemed ironic to the two officers of the Ministry of Food, fresh from administering a national programme of rationing, to sit down to a meal of oysters, trout, mutton with peas and croquette potatoes, chicken casserole, salad, poires belle Hil&ne, and dessert.168 The event was reported in a wide range of national papers and, although Mrs Thomson's maiden and married names were frequently misspelt (for example, 163. Scotsman 9 March 1920; NS, above n 20, vol 2, p 3. 164. Manchester Guardian9 March 1920; ibid.

165. 166. 167. 168.

Ibid. Ibid. Women's Leader 12 March 1920; ibid, vol 2, p 5. See also Lang, above n 56, pp 165-166. Menu in NS, ibid, vol 2, p 63. @ 2010 The Author Legal Studies 0 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars

226


as 'Bell' and 'Thompson'), coverage was entirely positive and celebratory. The Manchester Guardian perhaps best captured the significance of the occasion: 6 9 'Even Mrs Fawcett ... must have felt that the affair was almost incredible.... To-night the four young women pioneers of 1913, who were refused permission to start on their course ... were honoured guests - the symbols, indeed, of victory - at a dinner where the Lord Chancellor was the chief guest, and where the Chief Justice, the Attorney General, the Lord Advocate's representative, and the president [sic] of great Law Societies, joined with him in congratulating him [sic] and in predicting a fair future for their sisterhood.' The Manchester Guardianalso noted that none of the speakers used the occasion to suggest that particular legal specialisms might be appropriate for women, though someone indicated that 'the Lord Chancellor's new Land Bill, if carried, would provide plenty of work for many women lawyers'.170 The banquet provided an excuse for another round of media attention for Gwyneth Thomson. A silly article about barristers' wigs in the Daily Express juxtaposed a photograph of the Lord Chancellor in his wig and Mrs Thomson in a large hat. 'New "Portias" of the Inns', ran the headline (practically every article on women lawyers used the word 'Portias' somewhere). 'Will they acquire the legal face?' A clearly irritated feminist, when approached by the reporter, responded: 'Why should women lawyers be expected to look different from other women? .. . Women do not want to imitate, they prefer to retain their own individuality'."'

WHAT HAPPENED TO MISS BEBB? In early 1921, Gwyneth Thomson fell pregnant again. She had given up her job at the Ministry of Food in August 1920 and was now helping out in her husband's law firm and studying for her Bar exams. Who knows if she was pleased at this second pregnancy? Even if she had wanted to add to her family, it could hardly have come at a less convenient time. A new baby was bound to interfere with her progress to the Bar - a great shame, when she had waited for so long. She may well have felt as her contemporary Vera Brittain did when, with one child already and keen to have another at some point, she conceived the second just as she was embarking on an important

169. 9 March 1920; ibid, vol, 2 p 3. 170. Manchester Guardian 10 March 1920; ibid, vol 2, p 4. Although (perhaps on the basis of this report) it has been suggested that the campaigners avoided claiming a special role for women lawyers, in contrast to the special role identified for women doctors, in fact many of them did declare a need for women to assist women clients in particular fields (which did not include conveyancing) - for instance, divorce, sexual offences and domestic violence. Nettlefold, Handwritten MS, 'Women and the legal profession'; ibid, vol 2, p 51. Helena Normanton told the Ladies' Pictorialin 1918 that women's interests would be best protected by women lawyers, and even referred to the need to end the ludicrously lax treatment of men who killed their wives. 6 April 1912; ibid, vol 1, p 75. But these discussions tended to take place outside the legal environment; within it, the goal was plainly to win the debate on the gender-neutral

'legal' grounds acceptable to men. 171. Daily Express 10 March 1920; ibid, vol 2, p 2. 0 2010 The Author Legal Studies 0 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars


227

book project: 'I ought to have been delighted; actually, I felt as though I had fallen

downstairs'.172 It was not just the inconvenience that gave cause for anxiety. Middle-class women like Gwyneth Thomson and Vera Brittain would have had a nurse or nanny to help with the actual childcare. It was also the physical danger of childbirth. Despite feminist efforts to highlight the country's poor record of maternal and infant mortality, women's health had never been a high priority for the state. Pat Jalland notes that the high maternal mortality rate of Victorian and Edwardian England did not significantly improve until the 1930s, with the introduction of antibiotics."1 3 As late as 1932, Sylvia Anthony wrote in her book Women's Place in Industry and the Home that it was more

dangerous for a women to be pregnant than to engage in any other form of work.'74 This was not, moreover, simply a problem for working-class women with their restricted access to medical care. Jane Lewis points out that childbirth was just as painful and, if anything, more dangerous for middle-class than for working-class

women because 'the private nursing homes favoured by the middle class tended to have the worst mortality rates of all'."' She cites statistics for 1931 when the maternal mortality rate in middle-class Chelsea (west London) was 5.4 per 1000, while in working-class Hackney (east London) it was only 3.2."' All this was to be brought home starkly to Mr and Mrs Thomson when their second daughter, Marion Broughton Thomson, was born on 10 August 1921 in the same nursing home as her sister Diana. Marion (named for Gwyneth's mother) was born 2 months premature, and died 2 days later. With this second pregnancy, Gwyneth Thomson suffered from a condition called placenta praevia which was the indirect cause of her baby's death. In this condition the placenta is lodged across the lower end of the uterus, which can cause bleeding as the baby grows and the uterus stretches. It is the risk of haemorrhage rather than the birth obstruction that represents the main threat to mother and baby. If it is recognised in time, the baby will usually be delivered early (with all the risks attendant upon premature birth) and a caesarean section is almost always ordered. The trick is choosing the right moment: as one medical textbook puts it, 'A desire to secure a mature baby should not blind the obstetrician to the maternal risk of recurrent haemorrhage and often it is this which determines the timing of delivery'. Today, while '[m]odern management has produced good maternal and fetal results in placenta praevia', it 'still remains a major emergency and a potential cause of death'."

What happened in Gwyneth Thomson's case is that she suffered a serious haemorrhage before the birth and, perhaps in response to this, the diagnosis of placenta praevia was made and the baby was delivered early. The baby died. But worse was to follow. The mother suffered a post-partum haemorrhage, anaemia, thrombosis of the 172. V Brittain Testament of Experience (London: Gollancz, 1957) p 60. The baby was the future MP Shirley Williams. 173. P Jalland Women, Marriage and Politics 1840-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ch date) pp 159 and 171. 174. Quoted in C Dyhouse Feminism and the Family in England 1880-1939 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989) p 105. 175. Lewis, above n 119, pp 117-118. 176. Ibid. 177. J Willocks Essentials of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone, 1986) p 90. @ 2010 The Author Legal Studies 0 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars

228


pelvic veins, and a cardiac arrest. She lingered for almost two months, before dying (it seems of cardiac failure) on 9 October 1921.178 Her Scottish cousin Jessie Henderson, who was present, registered the death. A 1900 Manual of Midwifery makes it clear that what happened to Gwyneth Thomson, while tragic, was by no means rare. 'Haemorrhage from the placental site is ... regarded as ... one of the most dangerous complications ... [A] household may thus be unexpectedly plunged into grief by the sudden death of the patient'."' So what happened to Miss Bebb was that she died, in consequence of childbirth, at the age of 31, only four years into her marriage, leaving a grieving widower who never remarried and a little daughter still not two years old. She never had time to achieve her professional goal and was never called to the Bar. Gwyneth Thomson's death certificate is interesting for the note appended to the original entries. Under 'Occupation', Mrs Thomson is described as 'wife of Thomas Weldon Thomson a Solicitor'. The added note declares: 'Mrs Thomson's full description should have been: - O.B.E., M.A. Oxon, Barrister-at law, Manager of Bank of Sherford House etc.' It is an extraordinary correction, even if not quite accurate. Gwyneth Thomson was certainly entitled to the OBE and the MA Oxon, but she was not yet a barrister-at-law. The 'Manager of Bank' (at her husband's practice) is mystifying. But then so much mystery surrounds her life, even now. Who insisted on this amendment? Was it Jessie Henderson, proud of her cousin's achievements? Was it her grieving husband? Gwyneth Thomson's funeral took place at Tewkesbury Abbey."so She died intestate, leaving an estate of just under £1300. After his wife's death, Thomas Weldon Thomson wrote a new will, appointing his cousin Nancy Ward as his sole executrix and trustee and guardian of his surviving daughter, Diana. He left everything he owned to Nancy Ward in trust for Diana, giving her discretion to use both interest and capital for the child's benefit until she reached the age of 25, when the estate went to Diana absolutely. According to family memory, he was devastated by Gwyneth's death and never recovered from it."' He died eight years later in a hunting accident when his daughter was still only ten years old. Diana grew up with the Wards (who had a daughter of their own), married at the end of the war and had two children. None of them went into the legal profession.182

CONCLUSION I began this research wondering why Miss Bebb had disappeared from history, when she had been sufficiently central to the campaign to open the legal profession to women as to give her name to the only case associated with that campaign. I know now that there were three main reasons for her disappearance: her marriage (by changing her name she became harder to trace); her early death, which removed her from the legal scene before she had achieved her goal; and the conventions of legal 178. This is all detailed on her death certificate. 179. Dr AL Galabin A Manual of Midwifery (1900) pp 741 and 282, quoted in P Jalland and J Hooper (eds) Women from Birth to Death: The Female Life Cycle in Britain 1830-1914

(Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986) p 208. 180. Bravington, above n 121. 181. Information from Gwyneth Thomson's granddaughter. 182. Ibid. However, Gordon Bebb QC is the grandson of one of Miss Bebb's brothers. Q 2010 The Author Legal Studies © 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars


229

scholarship and institutional histories. While the first two posed some difficulties for the research, they were not insurmountable, as this article shows. It is the third reason I wish finally to address. Miss Bebb's story is typical of that of her sex in mainstream accounts of legal history, where women tend to be either ignored or mentioned only in disconnected bits and pieces. In the institutional histories, women make a cameo appearance with Bebb and one or two other landmarks and then disappear again. It is true that a coherent narrative is difficult to construct when the sources are patchy and elusive, but that is not the real problem. For traditional scholars writing about a historical era in which women were viewed as marginal to public life except insofar as their lives resembled men's, it is only too easy to overlook their separate experience or contribution - to marginalise them now as they were marginalised then. There is another reason. Miss Bebb's story poses a challenge to the complacent narrative that depicts the admission of women to law as a reform handed down by a benevolent legislature to an unresisting profession at the due time. Such interpretations paint institutions in the best possible light, as responsive to social change and capable of reforming themselves from within; they excuse the grudging and belated nature of the response and, crucially, they minimise - if possible, deny - any feminist agency in bringing about reform. For example:"I 'In opposing the admission of women to their ranks, solicitors were doing little more than following current ideas on the inequality of the sexes. This episode has left no mark on the profession and merely serves to illustrate the solicitors' cautious and sometimes hostile attitude to change.' Here, by reducing half a century of campaigning as an 'episode' - and one that had no discernible effect on the profession - Michael Birks belittled the lengthy, painful struggle I have described, normalised the male opposition (with its 'shabby, really underhand tactics', as Nellie Franz put it)," wrote feminist agency out of the picture, and suggested that professional equilibrium was hardly disturbed. In such accounts, claimants may be rewarded for exemplary behaviour (often after rising to the occasion in a crisis such as a war)' 5 but rarely for political campaigning on their own behalf; that, indeed, is usually decried as damaging the cause.1s6 Because she gave her name to a landmark case, however, Miss Bebb survived in symbolic form, serving both as a gesture to gender in history and as a feminist icon.' She endures as a staging post in the Whig histories that would have us believe that women have now achieved equality in the legal profession. What this article shows is that she deserves better: Miss Bebb was not just a symbol of change, she helped to bring about that change. Becoming a lawyer was not just a personal goal, it was a political one. She did not just dip in and out of history, with one starring role in her 183. Birks, above n 56, p 278. 184. Franz, above n 56, p 274. 185. Manchester, above n 2. 186. See comment on Christabel Pankhurst, above n 83. 187. Eg, in Jocelynne Scutt's fantasy about how the how the principle of equal pay found its way on to the Versailles Treaty. Miss Bebb plays a leading role in this fantasy, but it is clear that Scutt knew nothing about her beyond the fact that she figured in the Bebb case - not even her Christian name - and she wrongly describes her as 'the first woman to graduate in Law from Oxford University': JA Scutt 'Alarums and excursions: infiltrating at the Palace of Versailles' (2006) 75/6 Australian Rationalist 50 at 56. @ 2010 The Author Legal Studies @ 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars

230


eponymous case; rather, she played a vital part in the last decade of a campaign that lasted nearly 50 years. The case of Bebb was decided on perfectly sound legal grounds that nevertheless upheld, and camouflaged, the underlying 'prejudice and fear' that Miss Bebb had described'" of the majority of legal men who did not want women intruding upon their professional space. In other words, the delay was due less to a legal impediment than to deliberate resistance, and women's eventual success was due not simply to external factors such as women's role in the war but also to a long, tireless campaign by feminists - women and men - to change public attitudes, in which Miss Bebb played a central role. The case that bears her name (which, it should not be forgotten, the litigants did not expect to win) was essentially an important - and judging by the media responses, successful - element in that publicity campaign.' 89 Moreover, just as Miss Bebb has served to represent many feminist pioneers seeking to enter men's preserves, so too she was representative of women in the private sphere. She married, she had children, she tried to combine the demands of her work with family life. She faced the inconvenience of pregnancy and the risks of childbirth; and these, in the end, brought both work and life to an end. Her story shows that women's history is often going to be different from men's, because women have not found it so easy to escape the private dimension of their lives, or to rely on it to support the public dimension." This account of Miss Bebb's life raises a number of gender issues that are still relevant today - arguments about masculine and feminine roles and qualities, the 'choices' available to men and women, the political tactics adopted by feminist legal reformers (including alliances with sympathetic men) and, most tellingly, the defensive strategies employed by those whose privileges are under threat. Above all, it demonstrates the usefulness of history in reminding those involved in current struggles that women usually have to fight for their rights; that men will usually cling to their privileges (though there are always those exceptions without whose support and concrete assistance the women could not succeed); and that reason and justice are often irrelevant in the face of institutional power.

188. See above n 79. 189. Parry, above n 3, at 220. 190. Sincere thanks are due to researcher and genealogist Hilary Clare; the former archivist of St Hugh's College, Deborah Quare; and members of Miss Bebb's family Anne Tickell, Martin Tomlins and Gordon Bebb QC. @ 2010 The Author Legal Studies Q 2010 The Society of Legal Scholars