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Bessie Rayner Parkes. Folha. Negativo de desenho fotogénico, 1848, Courtesy of
Hans P. Kraus Jr. Fine Photographs, NY.
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Bessie
Rayner Parkes Belloc (16 June 1829-
23 March 1925) was one of the most prominent English feminists and campaigners
for women’s rights in Victorian times and also a poet, essayist and journalist.
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Retrato fotográfico de Bessie Rayner Parkes, fotografo desconhecido, s. data.
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1. Early Life
A
great-grandchild of the eminent scientist and Unitarian minister Joseph
Priestley, Bessie Rayner Parkes was born
to loving, well-off parents, in a household interested in people and ideas. Her
father was Joseph Parkes, (1796-1865) a prosperous solicitor and a liberal with
Radical sympathies. His support for his daughter’s aspirations were mitigated.
Her mother, Elizabeth Rayner Priestley (1797-1877), usually called Eliza, was a
wife and mother, who always considered herself an American, having been born in
Northumberland, Pennsylvania. She remembered her grandfather with admiration
and love. Although not in great sympathy
with her daughter over her strong wish to make changes in the status of women,
she nevertheless loved her dearly and did not actively oppose her. Unusually
for girls of her background, Bessie was well educated at a progressive
Unitarian boarding school, a period of her life which she enjoyed.
2. Activist
Bessie
became gradually aware of the unjust, contradictory and even absurd situation
of women in Great-Britain, though there were many differences according to the
social class they belonged to. The first endeavour that Bessie and her friend
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon took on was to try and change the restrictive
property laws that applied to married women. Bessie was also indignant about
the distinction made between ‘ladies’ and ‘women’. ‘Ladies’, that is to say
middle-class women, lost social status if they earned money, the only
acceptable exceptions being writing, painting or teaching, which for the most
part meant ‘governessing’. Due in part to her efforts, by the close of the
century, it became acceptable for a middle-class woman to acquire a proper
education and train to do paid work. Working-class women had always belonged to
the work-force, whether they wanted to or not. BRP and her friends interacted with women in other countries of
Europe and in the USA, adding a very considerable international dimension to
their efforts. In the 1860’s she was to
belong to the first women’s group which set out to obtain voting rights.
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Barbara Bodichon (grande amiga de Bessie), "The New Generation". Segundo Pam
Hirsh as quatro mulheres representadas são: Barbara Bodichon, Bessie Rayner
Parkes, Jane Benham e
Anna Maria Howitt.
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3. Friendships
Bessie
Rayner Parkes’ wide circle of literary and political friends included George
Eliot, Harriet Martineau, Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert
Browning, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Elizabeth Blackwell, Lord Shaftesbury,
Herbert Spencer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Thackeray,
Elizabeth Garret Anderson, John Ruskin, Henry W. Longfellow and Dante Gabriel
Rossetti. Her most fruitful friendship was with Barbara Bodichon for, out of
their efforts, grew the first organized women’s movement in Britain.
4.
The English Woman’s Journal
BRP
became the principal editor of the first feminist British periodical – The English Woman’s Journal - published
monthly in London between 1858 and 1864. Its closure was due both to financial
reasons and to the conflicts that arose among its sponsors and chief
contributors. The offshoots that sprang from it were many and varied, such as
the Society for the Promotion of the Employment of Women, the Victoria Printing
Press (entirely staffed by women), the Law-Copying Office, and the Langham
Place Group, where women gathered informally to discuss their lives or simply
have a rest.
5. Conversion to the Roman Catholic
Church
Another
part of her life story was her slow but determined path to the Roman Catholic
Church (1864). She took in all the debate around the Oxford Movement but what
really impressed her was the immense amount of social work carried out by nuns.
She knew the three famous English Cardinals personally and recalled them in her
writings.
6. Marriage
Aged
38, BRP fell in love with a Frenchman of delicate health, called Louis Belloc,
himself the son of a notable woman, Louise Swanton-Belloc. Their five-year long
marriage, spent in France, she described as Arcadia. The family lived through
the Franco-Prussian war and was deeply hit by it on a material level. She never
got over her husband’s sudden death in 1872.
7. Children
Their
children, Marie Belloc Lowndes (1868-1947) and Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) went
on to become renowned writers in their different ways.
8. Widowhood and after
BRP herself continued to write until late in
life, and to be a keen observer of politics and society. However, after her
marriage and the death of her husband, her active involvement in the organized
women’s movements abated. Anguish over the stupidity of war and pride in her
country coloured her feelings during the First World War. Almost at its close,
her eldest grandchild, a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Air Force, went
missing. He was shot down and killed near Cambrai, in France.
9. Published work
Bessie
Rayner Parkes published fourteen books: poetry, essays, biography, memoirs,
travel, and literature for children and young people, as well as a very
effective booklet on women’s rights and dozens of articles. A lot of her
literary work was well received during her lifetime and her poetry was admired
by Ruskin and Longfellow.
10. Further reading
Anderson, Bonnie S., Joyous Greetings, The International Women’s
Movement, 1830-1860, (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Belloc
Lowndes, Mrs., I, too, have lived in
Arcadia, (London: Macmillan, 1941).
Fulmer, Constance M.,
“Bessie Rayner Parkes”, Dictionary of
Literary Biography, Volume 240: Late
19th Century and Early 20th Century British Women Poets, (Detroit:
Gale Group, 2001).
Herstein, Sheila R., A Mid-Victorian Feminist, Barbara Leigh
Smith Bodichon, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985).
Hirsch, Pam, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1998).
Lowndes, Susan (ed.), Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes,
1911-1947, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1971).
Rendall, Jane, “‘A Moral
Engine’? Feminism, Liberalism and the English
Woman’s Journal”, in Jane Rendall (ed.), Equal or Different: Women’s Politics 1800-1914, (Oxford: Blackwell,
1987).
-----, Jane, Friendship and Politics: Barbara Leigh Smith
Bodichon (1827-91) and Bessie Rayner Parkes (1829-1925), in Mendus, Susan
& Rendall, Jane (ed.), Sexuality and
Subordination, (London: Routledge, 1989).
Ana Vicente (1943-2015), bisneta de
Bessie Rayner Parkes.
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