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
lest_180
199..230
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 continuing prejudice and inequality. The
article argues that women’s lives need to be properly examined to produce a more
complete and truthful explanation of how things were, and how they are now.
INTRODUCTION
Bebb v The Law Society1 (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 Modern Legal History (London: Butterworths, 1980)
pp 70–71.
© 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
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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.5
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.
5. As Joanna Wade put it, ‘the misogyny of both lawyers and the law was to continue pretty
much unabated’ after the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919. J Wade ‘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.
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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 née 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 children8 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/The_College/History_of_The_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.
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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’10 whose families could
not afford the fees of her own college; daughters of clergymen like Gwyneth Bebb
were particularly envisaged.11 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.12 By Miss Bebb’s time, all the men’s colleges accepted women
students into their lectures – Magdalen, the last, had capitulated in 190613 – 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.
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Association for the Education of Women arranged supplementary ‘coachings’ if
necessary.14
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 Modern History in 1872 – it had
fewer than 100 students; but when Miss Bebb joined in 1908, there were almost 400.15
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.17
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.18 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.
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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;19 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,21 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.23
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 modern studies in the arts’ in J Prest (ed) The Illustrated
History of Oxford University (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) p 207.
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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 between1874 and1910; 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 (1871–
1944) 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 £500’ to the library of the Association for the Education of Women at Oxford.31 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 Somerville for Women: An Oxford College 1879–1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) p 62; Rogers, above n 13, p 131.
32. EC Lodge Terms and Vacations (London: Oxford University Press, 1938) p 111. 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.
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other reminiscences that this was a prominent and valuable part of student life before
1914’.33
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.35 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 £70 a year’.36
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.37 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 11, 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.
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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’.40 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 (née 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 . . .’.44 ‘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: intellectual freedom. 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. West, above n 36, pp 75 and 81.
40. Ibid, p 77.
41. Hartnoll, above n 10, p 2.
42. EC Lodge ‘Growth, 1890–1922’ in Lady Margaret Hall: A Short History (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1923) p 48.
43. S Leonardi Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College Novelists (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.
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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:49
‘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.50
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.51 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 célèbre 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’s Nightshade (London: Chatto & Windus, 1937) p 183. Her sister was
an academic.
49. FM Wilson Rebel Daughter of 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.
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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. ‘I am certain that they were perfectly genuine,
whatever recent critics may say,’ Miss Wallace recalled in old age.53
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 point54 – 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’.55
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,
Christabel Pankhurst and Ivy Williams to join the Bar in 1903, led to rejection.56
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’
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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.57
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,58 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’.61 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 Portrait of 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 Comparative Study
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’s Claim [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.
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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).64 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 1875–
1914, 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, Marriage and 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 1885–
1914 (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.
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fourth-class honours,66 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.67 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.68 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.69 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.70
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 1860–
1948 (London: Woburn Press, 2004); Hutchins, above n 63, pp 131–133; MD McFeely Lady
Inspectors: The Campaign for 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.
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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.71
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,73 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.75 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 11 January 1913). Maud Crofts Scrapbook (CS) vol 1, p 1 (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, Pernel, 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.
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The forthcoming trial was announced at a dinner for women law graduates at the
Lyceum Club on 10 March 1913.77 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.78 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?’81 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.82 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 in philosophy 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.
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Suffrage Club on ‘Professions Barred to Women’ (the other was the Church),84
and Miss Costelloe and Miss Nettlefold spoke about the case at the Cambridge
Federation of University Women the following month.85 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 KC86 appeared for Miss Bebb before a hostile Joyce J,87 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.88
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’.89 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.90 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. Queen 24 May 1913; NS, above n 20, vol 1, p 2.
86. 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.
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civilisation – the respect and honour with which women are held’, Miss Nettlefold has
scrawled ‘Ugh!’,91 while one of the judge’s remarks attracts the comment ‘Fool!’92
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.98
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 modern 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
91. Ibid, p 20.
92. Ibid, p 27.
93. Eastern Morning News 9 October 1913, NS, above n 20, vol 1, p 5.
94. Eg ‘Women and the legal profession’, Holy Trinity Parish Hall, Eltham, December 1913,
ibid, vol 1, p 8.
95. 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
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.
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the judges for not doing so: legislation, he insisted, was not needed.100 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?’,101 while
the Christian Commonwealth 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.103 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):104
‘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.105 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.106
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.
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the impregnable defence of immemorial custom’107 – a view evidenced by the overwhelming defeat of a motion to admit women at the Bar’s annual meeting that year,108
and reiterated by Sir Frederick Pollock in his address to the annual gathering of the
Women Law Graduates in January 1914109 – 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.110 Miss Nettlefold’s scrapbook reveals heated
debate in the press over the following months.111
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.112 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.113 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. Ibid, 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
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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.114 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.115 At Birmingham Miss
Bebb was once again able to employ her legal skills in conducting prosecutions
against black marketeers.116 One of her colleagues was Sybil Campbell, another
intending lawyer, who had also worked at the Board of Trade.117 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).118
MARRIAGE AND MOTHERHOOD
She was lucky to find a husband;119 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.
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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.121
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.123
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 Aberconway at the top) through feminist activists,125 women in the professions126 and the arts,127 academics,128 future MPs,129 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.130 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
clearly acceptable, but not women lawyers.131
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.
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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,134 the admission of women to the solicitors’
profession had by then become inevitable.135 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’.136
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’.138 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.141 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’.142 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.143
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.
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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.144 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.
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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.147
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.148 Instead, she became, in
1919, a Director and Company Secretary of her father’s wholesale ironmongers and
manufacturing business, ironically called Nettlefold and Sons.149 Maud Ingram
became a solicitor, just as she had always planned. One of the first four women to pass
the Law Society Finals,150 she was the first to be officially articled (in 1920) and the
first to obtain a practising certificate (in 1923).151
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’.152 It then emerged
that Mrs Thomson had a rival for the honour of prospective ‘first barrister’.153 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 Catalogue at 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 Daily Express
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 Pictorial 27 July 1920;
ibid, vol 2, p 19.
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this application was allowed to stand, giving her priority over the other women
applicants.155
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).156
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.157 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.158
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.159 The women had their own robing-rooms and
were careful to wear ‘severely quiet attire’ so as not to draw attention to themselves.160
The meal consisted of soup, fish, joint, tart and cheese, washed down with half a bottle
of wine per person.161 Elsie Lang commented on the press coverage of the event:162
‘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.
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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’;163 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 Guardian put it) ‘adroitly reconciled
his opposition to the suffrage with his persistent advocacy of women’s claims, to enter
the legal profession’,164 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:165
‘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:166
‘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.167
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 Hélène, 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.
164.
165.
166.
167.
168.
Scotsman 9 March 1920; NS, above n 20, vol 2, p 3.
Manchester Guardian 9 March 1920; ibid.
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.
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as ‘Bell’ and ‘Thompson’), coverage was entirely positive and celebratory. The
Manchester Guardian perhaps best captured the significance of the occasion:169
‘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 Guardian also 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’.171
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’ Pictorial in 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.
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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.173 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.174
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’.175 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 3.2.176 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’.177
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.
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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’.179 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.180 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.181 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.
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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:183
‘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),184 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)185 but rarely for political campaigning on their own behalf;
that, indeed, is usually decried as damaging the cause.186
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.187
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.
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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
described188 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.189
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.190
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
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