Good afternoon and welcome to episode 21 of A Cuppa Tea with the DBE.
It’s March and across the States, the U.K., and Australia, that means it’s Women’s History Month so I have prepared for you some brief biographies of women from Britain and across the Commonwealth who have made history, who have dedicated their lives to their cause, in some cases even given their lives for it. Some you might know all about and some you may have never heard of but I hope they spark inspiration within you.
So, pour yourself a cup of tea and get comfortable…
I want to start back in 1759 when English writer and feminist philospher, Mary Wollstonecraft, was born. She is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Women, which was published in 1792, and argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, rather it just seems that way because of their limited access to education. She continues that women can and should be treated as rational beings and given the same educational opportunities. She is still cited today by feminists and philosophers alike for her “unconventional” beliefs.
Mary Wollstonecraft died in 1797 after contracting septicemia caused by complications during the birth of her second child, Mary Shelley, who went on to change the world in her own way, writing what is now often called the first sci-fi novel, Frankenstein. Wollstonecraft’s husband, John Goodwin, wrote after her death, “I firmly believe there does not exist her equal in the world.” Mary Wollstonecraft is the namesake of a DBE chapter in Colorado.
Not two decades after Wollstonecraft’s death, Lord Byron (who was friends with Mary Shelley, by the way), Lord Byron’s only legitimate child, was born to his wife in 1815. A daughter who is now considered by many to be the world’s first computer programmer. This woman was Ada Lovelace who, whilst working with Charles Babbage on the world’s first automatic digital computer, recognized that the machine had applications beyond calculation and wrote the first ever computer algorithm.
Today, women in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and maths are profiled annually on the second Tuesday of October in an attempt to create new role models for women and girls in stem fields and commemorate the memory of Ada Lovelace.
Meanwhile, Florence Nightingale was seeing the horrible conditions for wounded soldiers during the Crimean War. She worked to sanitize the hospital and visited soldiers throughout the night earning the nickname “the lady with the lamp.” She worked to improve healthcare for tiers of British society and, of course, knew the importance of sanitation before germ theory was understood, as well as expanding the acceptable ways women could participate in the workforce, and in 1860 she established the first secular nursing school in the world, now part of King’s College London.
She is remembered every year on her birthday, May 12, and it is honored by also being recognized as International Nurses Day. New nurses take the Nightingale pledge, and the Nightingale Medal is the highest international distinction a nurse can receive. She is also the namesake of a DBE chapter in Arizona.
In Australia, Fanny Cochrane Smith, known as the last fluent speaker of Flinders Island lingua franca, an indigenous Tasmanian language, recorded both oral histories and Aboriginal songs on wax cylinders forever preserving her cultural knowledge and the language itself. She is considered Australia’s first Aboriginal recording artist and the wax cylinders were inducted into the UNESCO Australian ‘Memory of the World’ Register in 2017.
Back in the U.K, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson’s admittance to be educated at Middlesex hospital was protested by fellow male students. She then applied to several medical schools including Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and St Andrews, all of which also denied her admittance. Through private tutelage and the discovery of a loophole, she was able to obtain a license to practice medicine, the first woman in Britain to openly do so, though she was still not allowed to take a medical post at a hospital so she opened her own practice in London and within a year, she had opened a clinic for women and children seeing 3000 patients in its first year.
Over the course of her career, she became the first woman to qualify as a physician and surgeon, she co-founded the London School of Medicine in 1874 (the only teaching hospital in Britain, at the time, to offer courses to women), which is now part of University College London’s medical school, AND she became the first female mayor in Britain in the town of Aldeburgh (Awl-bruh). She is also the namesake of a DBE chapter in Missouri.
Around the same time, Edith Cavell was training to be a nurse in London and went on to take the position of Matron at Belgium’s first training hospital for nurses, which led to her being known as Belgium’s founder of modern nursing. In 1914, she was back in Norfolk visiting her mother when news of war reached her. With Belgium under threat from German troops, she considered it her duty to return to the nursing school which had been turned into a Red Cross hospital treating casualties from both sides. By August, Belgium was occupied and in September, Edith was asked to help two wounded British soldiers that had gotten trapped behind enemy lines. They were treated in her hospital and she made arrangements for them to be smuggled out of Belgium. This introduced her to a network that sheltered Allied soldiers and helped them escape. In less than one year, she helped around 200 British, French, and Belgian soldiers.
She was arrested in August of 1915 and held in solitary confinement until October when she tried at court martial alongside 34 other members of the network, and was executed. She became a symbol of the allied cause and after the war, her body was exhumed and reinterred at Norwich Cathedral after a memorial service at Westminster. She is also the namesake of a DBE chapter in Texas.
Meanwhile, Emmaline Pankhurst was working to illustrate women’s contributions to the war effort through the WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union) which she had founded in 1903. After World War I, the WSPU was dissolved and became the Women’s Party, dedicated to bringing women’s equality. By 1918, the vote was extended to all men over the age of 21 and women over the age of 30 largely to ensure that men did not become the minority vote as a result of the massive death tolls during the war. Unfortunately, Pankhurst died in 1928, mere weeks before the vote was given to all women over 21. She is the namesake of a DBE chapter in New Jersey.
Tasmanian-born Louise Mack who, like Edith Cavell, spent World War I in Belgium, became the first female war correspondent working for both the Daily Mail and the Evening News. She survived 36 hours of shell fire in Antwerp to break through the German lines and get into Brussels so she could study the Axis forces closely. The following year, she published her account, A Woman’s Experience in the Great War.
Following the war, she returned to Australia and gave public lectures about her experiences in order to raise money for the Australian Red Cross Society. She lived the rest of her life rather quietly, though she was thought to be missing for three days while mountain climbing in New Zealand.
Another Australian, Elizabeth Kenny, a self-trained bush nurse, served on “dark ships” during the Great War. These “dark ships” were dangerous transports that ran with no lights carrying supplies and soldiers - she did a total of 16 round trips this way. After the War, she set up a temporary hospital during the 1918 flu pandemic, then went on to develop her own unconventional technique for treating polio patients, exercising and massaging the affected areas instead of immobilizing them as was typical at the time. Her treatments became the foundation for physical therapy and are still used today.
The last woman I want to mention today is Dame Whina Cooper of New Zealand. She became the first president of the Maori Women’s Welfare League, which sought to improve the quality of life for Maori women through healthcare, housing, education, and welfare. She dedicated her life to activism for Maori women and for this she was appointed to the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, as well as to the Order of New Zealand, and she received the New Zealand Suffrage Centennial Medal.
These women from across the Commonwealth accomplished so many great things that paved a way forward that we might have the opportunities we do today. And, though women have come a long way, we still have progress to make. Next week I’ll be talking about some of the women who are working to make that progress.
So, until then… not ourselves but the cause.