Note 88 — Chapter III

Mr Rintoul was fortunate in being father to a devoted daughter who, from an early age, gave him valuable assistance in his editorial work. While still a young girl, and for the space of some few weeks when he was suffering from severe illness, she filled the editorial chair herself, and did so with ability. At the present day we are frequently assured by people who did not live in the times they criticise so freely that the “early Victorian” women were inferior to those of the present day. The assertion is devoid of truth. The women of half a century and more ago were bright, witty, unaffected, better mannered and perhaps better read than their descendants, often highly cultivated. They dressed simply, not extravagantly—happily for the bread-winning members of their family—did not gamble, were self-reliant, original-minded, and not, as has been asserted, absurdly deferential to their male relations. Indeed, it is probable that there were, proportionately, quite as many henpecked husbands in the land as there are now. If in some ways the Victorian women had less liberty than have the women of to-day and travelled less, may it not, as regards the former case, have been partly because the community was not so rich as it is at the present time, and because the facilities for travel were fewer and the conditions harder? In intellectual power and noble aims the women of half a century ago were not inferior to those of to-day. Certain it is that the former gave less time to pleasure and more to self-culture, etc. There are to-day many women who lead noble, useful lives, but their generation does not enjoy a monopoly of all the virtues. To take but a few instances from the past: has any woman of the present time excelled in true nobility of character or usefulness of career Elizabeth Fry, first among female prison reformers; Florence Nightingale, pioneer of the nursing sisterhood, and indefatigable setter to rights of muddle in Crimean War hospitals and stores; Caroline Herschel, distinguished astronomer; Mary Somerville, author and scientist—though three of these belong to a yet earlier generation—and Barbara L. S. Bodichon, artist, foundress of Girton College, and originator of the Married Women's Property Act? The modern woman is in many ways delightful, and is, as a rule, deservedly independent; but it is not necessary to accompany insistence on that fact by cheap and unmerited sneers at former generations of the sex. It is also not amiss to ask if it was not the women of the past age who won for the women of the present the liberties these latter enjoy.