Learn about the legacy of the historian who made pioneering contributions to history and feminism.
Rose Sidgwick would have likely died of Spanish flu aged just 41, but she made a pioneering contribution to the fields of foreign history and feminism. Here we analyze her legacy.
Located on a picturesque lawn behind the University of Birmingham Business School is an ornate birdbath carved from stone. Look closely and locate a commemorative inscription dedicated to a forgotten feminist pioneer, Rose Sidgwick.
When college history professor Mo Moulton first discovered Rose Sidgwick through her studies of crime novelist Dorothy L Sayers, the birdbath hidden in a warehouse.
It is now a staple of Moulton’s excursion, “a walk through queer history”, providing further insight into Sidgwick’s life, work and close relationships with fellow pioneer Margery Fry.
Rose was born into a circle of scholarly relatives. His father, Arthur Sidgwick, a renowned scholar of Greek history, used his findings to draw fashionable conclusions about the genre.
He was one of the first defenders of women’s rights, specifically in the field of education. When Rose was born in 1877, she soon followed in his footsteps, first attending Oxford High School for Girls and then reading history as a student at Oxford Home.
In 1904, at Somerville College, Rose first crossed paths with Margery Fry, a mathematics student and librarian. Both defended socialist values and a preference for protecting marginalized communities.
In “Scriptures,” a 1908 pamphlet on Rose’s paintings that is available at the Cadbury Research Library in Birmingham, there is a short poem called “Tongues in the Tree,” an ethical allegory that nods to the values of empathy and solidarity:
Don’t judge the people whose forest you enter until you fully understand their speech.
When Fry moved to Birmingham University in 1904 to take over as director of the women’s residence, Sidgwick accompanied her.
Soon after, Sidgwick earned the position of being the first to give a lecture on history at this sacred institution, so she moved into the women’s residence.
It is a desirable era in feminist history, the era of the so-called “New Woman. “Higher education was gradually opened up to women, but many had to make sacrifices to succeed, and those opportunities depended on points such as race and social class. .
According to researcher Carol Dyhouse, “between 79% and 85% of women with education at the beginning of the century ‘remained single all their lives'”, necessarily feeling obliged to alternate their career and domestic life. Moulton explains that Fry in particular expressed remorse for never having children.
However, especially in women’s history, the term “spinster” rarely tells a full story. In the archives of Margery Fry at Somerville College are huge piles of letters and poems written through Rose Sidgwick, some of which make amusing requests for privacy.
Moulton recalls a specific letter. On the envelope is a message: “For God’s sake, don’t let this sit around!
“There are questions about who will see the cards and whether they will be burned,” Moulton says.
There are more than a decade of letters exchanged between them, which bear witness to a loving, intimate and sensual relationship. In one letter, Sidgwick writes about swimming naked in the sea, taunting Fry by saying, “Wouldn’t you have liked to see it?”
Reframing stories through a queer lens is challenging; After all, there’s no guarantee that the pioneers of the afterlife would have welcomed or followed terms like “lesbian,” “bisexual,” or “gender nonconforming,” even if they had used them. Still, Fry and Sidgwick worked tirelessly to create a sense of network among the university’s female scholars, creating intimate networks of strangers.
Moulton remembers being moved by the words of scholar Sam Rutherford, a speaker at one of the queer history walks, who described the women’s apartment as a queer kinship, a circle of kin setting, or a way of life.
“We don’t want to reduce homosexuality to what other people used to do in bed,” Moulton says. “It’s a totally different way of building community and relationships; I like this as a reframing of what we look for when we’re hunting to recover queer stories.
During World War I, Fry traveled to France as part of his involvement with Friends’ War Victims Relief, where he played a major role in treating war victims and contributing to important relief efforts. Sidgwick’s letters become understandably melancholy during the war, charged with a sense of nostalgia and panic that Fry may not survive.
At the end of 1918, Sidgwick set out on his own mission. As a member of a foreign feminist network, she traveled to New York City, where she gave a memorable speech at the Women’s University Club.
Not only did she advocate for the inclusion of women in higher education, but she also spoke of a preference for “easy access to school for those who can’t. “
Tragically, Sidgwick contracted the flu during his trip. On December 28, 1918, he succumbed to the deadly virus.
Another clue that remains of Sidgwick in it is his inscription on a World War I memorial dedicated to the “sons of those who gave their lives in the Great War. “
Upon closer inspection, a small handful of them are inscribed on the monument. “I think it has to do with the way other roles and movements have been gendered in society,” Moulton theorizes.
“By going to the United States and representing Britain in this educational mission, [Sidgwick] served her country. Dying in this effort meant that she had died for her country, as had the soldiers.
One heartbreaking detail revealed in Margery Fry’s files is that she never reported Sidgwick’s illness. In Fry’s words, he never had the opportunity to send one last telegram, to write to him once about his wonderful love for Sidgwick before he died.
Margery Fry commissioned the memorial bird fountain, a sentimental resolution made to honor Sidgwick’s love of nature and specific birds. Fry moved to London after returning from France, leaving Birmingham and university to concentrate on penal reform.
In the early 1920s she was one of the country’s first female magistrates, speaking out against the death penalty and taking on the role of educational adviser at Holloway Prison.
However, when his life in Birmingham was a distant memory, he continued to send annual cheques for the maintenance of the memorial birdbath. “It looks like a chosen burial place,” says Moulton, who continues the bizarre walking tour in hopes of preserving Sidgwick’s obviously feminist character. legacy.
Further reading
Note that Rose Sidgwick was also one of the founders of the International Federation of University Women/FIDU, now Graduate Women International/GWI, which celebrated its 105th anniversary last July. I am Patrice Wellesley-Cole, the current president of GWI (my father Robert Wellesley-Cole is also on this blog from historic England), please GWI in its project to empower women through education. Professor Sidgwick leaves behind a wonderful legacy: GWI has 9,000 members in 47 countries, an umbrella organisation of affiliated organisations such as the British Federation of Graduate Women/BFWG.