Photograph: Handout/National Portrait Gallery
In 1894, a respectable and apparently meek woman did something many contemporaries would have regarded as astonishing, if not deplorable. She stood for election to the district council against two male candidates, including a vicar. When Lady Laura Ridding, wife of a bishop, won an election in which women had no vote, she became the first female guardian of the local workhouse, Southwell in Nottinghamshire.
“She was a remarkable woman, our Laura, and having got herself elected she really was a force for change,” said Jan Overfield Shaw, a community officer at the Victorian workhouse. “She did what none of the male guardians did: she saw what could really make a difference to the lives of the women here – including better food and proper underwear.
“The bishop was much older than her, and he looks a bit dry in official portraits – but he supported her work for women’s rights.”
Southwell is one of the best-preserved workhouses in the country and is now owned by the National Trust.
Ridding’s photograph, which shows her gazing up at her fiance, has just gone on display among portraits of the suffragists and suffragettes she joined in the campaign for votes for women. The exhibition, created by the National Trust and the National Portrait Gallery, is in the former committee room of the workhouse, where between 1894 and 1905 Ridding worked with the other guardians.
Ridding, an author whose works include three volumes of her husband’s biography, was already a founder member of the National Union of Women Workers, an umbrella organisation for voluntary philanthropy. The exhibition reflects divisions at the time. Octavia Hill, the co-founder of the National Trust, wrote to the Times in 1910 saying “a serious loss to our country would arise if women entered political life”.
She shares the walls with the Pankhursts; Mary Raleigh Richardson, who slashed Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery to publicise the campaign; and the actor Ellen Terry, who supported votes for women but wrote: “The Suffragettes are a magnificent lot of women but I think perhaps their ardour carries them away at times.”
Ridding, though never a window-smashing militant, would ardently support the campaign after her own small victory in the local election. Newly transcribed diaries show her worrying about small details that could make the everyday life of the inmates wretched or relatively content: the meat she tasted one day was stringy and unpleasant, she noted, and the pudding was “great lumpy suet with treacle”. She repeatedly presses the other guardians until they approve better quality bedding, takes three old ladies out for a drive, brings the children home to tea, and brings grapes and sits with a dying girl – and when she was shocked to learn the women had no drawers, and no night gowns, she loaned money to the matron to buy material to make them.
“The miseries we can’t help there are so sad,” she wrote. “The poor miserable old women in the infirmary who grumble because they are so unhappy and rub each other up, who look on it like a prison, who are in a raw against forgetful relations who clap them in there against their will or by fraud.”
“She’s a trooper, our hero,” Overfield Shaw said fondly.
- Faces of Change - Votes for Women, is at Southwell Workhouse until 22 July, and then at National Trust properties Killerton in Devon, and Mount Stewart in County Down.
