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The amazing women forgotten by Britain's Blue Plaque scheme

For centuries, recording history was overwhelmingly carried out by men, about men, for men - Blue plaque rebellion
For centuries, recording history was overwhelmingly carried out by men, about men, for men - Blue plaque rebellion

The Blue Plaque scheme, set up in 1866 to pinpoint key locations where Londoners of note made their names, currently features 111 women on its roster - just 13 per cent of the list. How can it be that so few of us have made our mark on history?

The act of recording history - rather than creating it - seems to be at the heart of this crisis of fair recognition. For centuries, this was overwhelmingly carried out by men, about men, for men; women’s contributions were largely absent from the record. Keep that up long enough and people inevitably come to regard progress as something driven and engineered by men, while their womenfolk sat at home quietly, making sure their fella’s socks were darned and bellies filled.

Perhaps part of the reason for this omission lies in the ebb and flow of the lives women led; the circuitous routes they were forced to take in order to achieve success, or bring about change. Often, women excelled throughout their lives across a wide array of fields and so left a different kind of paper trail - one which was messier for early modern historians to document than the linear career paths of many prominent men.

Take Barbara Bodichon, who lived at 5 Blandford Square in Marylebone from 1827 (an address largely lost in 1899 to the construction of Marylebone station). Bodichon was born into an unconventional though privileged family; a celebrated watercolour artist, friend of William Morris, George Eliot and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and first cousin to Florence Nightingale, her is legacy considerable.

She co-founded the country’s first feminist movement, the Langham Place Group, which championed four rights they regarded as fundamental to gender equality: the right to vote; to access education; to work and keep one’s wages, and to retain one’s legal identity within marriage. She founded a remarkable school in Paddington in 1852, progressive beyond the age, which opened its doors to all, irrespective of faith, gender or class. She was instrumental in the establishment of Girton College, Cambridge, the country’s first residential college offering degree-level studies for women.

Barbara Bodichon
Barbara Bodichon founded the country's first feminist group

She wrote extensively on the issue of women’s legal rights within marriage, responsible for a ground-swell campaign which prompted the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870, establishing in British law for the first time a married woman’s right to her own property and private income. She wrote passionately in support of the need for women to work, to avoid financial dependence on a man and in 1866, spearheaded the first women’s suffrage movement in Britain.

Bodichon was by no means exceptional in living her life with vision and conviction. In 1932, 27-year-old Una Marson arrived in London from Jamaica and took up lodgings at the home of a Jamaican doctor named Harold Moody at 164 Queen’s Road, Peckham. Marson had already proved her love of the written word, with two published collections of poetry and a successful journalism career back in Jamaica, where she had launched the first magazine written by a woman, urging the women of Jamaica to politicise themselves.

In London, she would continue her career of firsts. Within a year of her arrival, her play At What Price was the first all-black production in the capital. She went on to become the first black woman employed at the BBC and then, the first black woman broadcaster in British history, ensuring as she did that Caribbean voices read Caribbean poetry over the airwaves for the first time.

Una Marson - Credit: Felix Man/Picture Post/Getty
Una Marson, the Jamaican journalist and author, having lunch at the BBC canteen in 1943 Credit: Felix Man/Picture Post/Getty

Her energy too was directed towards global feminism: she joined the International Alliance of Women for Equal Suffrage and Citizenship. In 1935, she was sole black delegate at the Alliance’s conference in Istanbul. She became private secretary to Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, working to highlight the extent of atrocities inflicted on the country's women during the Italian occupation.

Marson’s arrival in London in 1932 had confronted her with both a gender and colour bar, triggering a gear-shift in her remarkable life and career.

Disadvantage was a formative factor in the early years of another remarkable Londoner, Helena Normanton. After her father was killed in a violent assault in a London railway tunnel in 1886 when Normanton was just four years old, she was raised by a single mother, without privilege, family connections or a university education. Orphaned in adolescence, Normanton reached adulthood driven by the belief that women must work so as to achieve financial independence, no matter what their marital status. Signing the lease on her home at Bloomsbury’s 20 Mecklenburgh Square in 1919 in her own name (rather than that of her husband) saw a life goal achieved.

Helena Normanton and Rose Heilbron - Credit:  Douglas Miller/Keystone/Getty
Helena Normanton and Rose Heilbron, the first two women to be appointed a KC Credit: Douglas Miller/Keystone/Getty

Normanton fought for gender equality within the legal profession and in 1922, she was the second woman in the country to be called to the bar, and the first to practice. She was the first woman to represent clients at both the High Court and at the Old Bailey; the first to conduct a trial in America; the first to obtain a divorce for her client; the first to lead the prosecution on a murder case and in 1949, she was one of two women who were the first to be made King’s Counsel.

Normanton believed passionately in a woman’s capacity to be as successful and valuable in all fields as a man. As early as 1914 she was making the same stand as Carrie Gracie, who recently left the BBC over the disparity in her remuneration compared to male colleagues, calling for equal pay for equal work in her pamphlet Sex Differentiation in Salary.

Progress has been made, but there’s still a way to go. Redressing the gender imbalance in the historical record is vital if we are to see progress for what it is: the work of generations of brilliant, fearless minds, men and women, of every social class, every religion, every race.

About English Heritage blue plaques
About English Heritage blue plaques

A Woman Lived Here by Allison Vale is published by Robinson (£12.99). To order your copy for £10.99 plus p&p call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk