Ulster's Forgotten Radical Isabella Tod Groundbreakers

In Victorian Belfast, one person did more than most

for the advancement of women's rights in modern times.

As the sleepy town transformed into an industrial city,

she was intent on transforming the role of women in society.

Yet today, she is largely forgotten.

Isabella Tod was born in Scotland,

but spent her adult life in Belfast and was one of the most

successful campaigners for social reform in the late 1800s.

But no statue exists to mark her achievements.

Now, former Apprentice star and Northern Ireland native

Margaret Mountford takes a step into the past to discover more about

Tod's remarkable life and the Victorian times in which she lived.

She was obviously a formidable character,

with masses of energy and drive.

She must have been a tough cookie.

On the way, she discovers how Isabella was respected

throughout Ireland and England as a radical thinker.

Isabella was active,

campaigning on what were the major issues of the day.

These were burning news topics.

But how much will we ever know about this lady,

who devoted her life to improving the position of women?

There are plenty of people who did less.

And I think it's a disgrace that we've been allowed to forget her.

At her home in London, Margaret is beginning her research on Isabella Tod.

I've only just heard of Isabella Tod.

And I'm intrigued.

In a strange way, I feel some connection with her because she

was of Ulster Scots background and was a Presbyterian, lived in Belfast.

And I'm of Ulster Scots background

and brought up as a Presbyterian in Holywood.

So there's not much difference there. But there's 100 years separating us.

I've printed out a list of just some of the organisations

with which Isabella Tod was involved, some of which she founded -

the Belfast Ladies' Institute,

Belfast Women's Temperance Association,

the London Women's Suffrage Society,

Prison Gate Mission in Belfast.

What strikes me from this list is how much of what she did

is still pertinent today.

We have the same social issues now as we had then.

And actually we're trying to tackle them in the same way.

This is the start of the journey to find out more about her,

because I think she deserves to be much better known than she is.

Margaret has arrived in Northern Ireland.

Her first stop is the vaults of the Ulster Museum,

to view a portrait of Isabella Tod.

Very few images of her exist,

so it's a chance for Margaret to get a better look at the campaigner.

You've got one painting here that I'm particularly interested in.

Isn't that right? Yes, this is the portrait of Isabella Tod.

It is indeed. Yes, I'm a great fan of Tod.

I would love to have met her in real life, you know.

So what do you think Isabella was really like?

I think she would have been a real busybody.

And whether I would have actually liked her, had I met her,

I'm not entirely sure.

Right!

Well, that's a very different impression from the picture

on the internet. She's got a pretty strong gaze, hasn't she?

Well, I see that gaze as very determined. She was a brick wall.

But certainly, history has forgotten about her.

There she is, a ghost from the past. She is a ghost from the past, yes.

Little is known about Tod's early life.

She left Edinburgh in the 1860s and travelled to Belfast,

a town with a rapidly growing Presbyterian population.

This area around Queens University in Belfast

represented the town's limit, and it's here that one of the most

influential Presbyterian congregations was to be founded in 1862.

Elmwood Presbyterian Church is now Elmwood Hall,

and owned by Queen's University.

Margaret's come to find out how this building and its people

were so influential in shaping Isabella Tod's political activism.

The church opened in 1862.

It was one of the wealthiest congregations in Belfast in its day.

And when it opened, it was right on that cusp

of the explosion of Presbyterianism in Belfast.

The city was growing and the denomination was growing.

We went from four churches at the start of the century

to 50 at the end of the century.

So are there any records that show Isabella Tod was here?

Yes, come and let's please have a look. Thank you.

These are very old books from the Presbyterian Historical Society.

Here she is, Miss Isabella Tod. Her attendance at Communion.

And this is May 1863. It's her first Communion.

She was pretty regular, wasn't she? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

As most people were. And she'd have been a contributor too, I suppose,

was she? She was indeed.

That's what this other extremely large ancient book is!

And there's a little record. There's several records of her here.

Gosh, couldn't people write well in those days? Now, here she is.

Pew number 23. Miss Isabella Tod.

And she paid the princely sum of one guinea - one pound,

one shilling per year. And she paid it in two instalments each year.

Gosh, I haven't seen ten and six written for a long time! Ah, well!

I don't know what it is! Well, I'll tell you!

So we're talking about a time when the Presbyterians

were the leading industrialists, the wealthy class in society.

The Presbyterians are traditionally the second-class citizens.

The Anglicans, or Protestants, are running the country -

12% of the population.

The Presbyterians, or dissenters, are the middle block -

12% of the population.

The Roman Catholics are very much third-class citizens.

But Belfast is growing and there's new wealth for Presbyterians.

They can't exploit it politically,

so their energies are diverted into worthy causes,

and, you know, building the Presbyterian society,

as they see it.

It's not just about preaching, it's not just about reading

the Bible and praying, it's about clean drains for the city,

it's about begging is banished because it's a sin

if Christians have beggars.

It's trying to raise the whole living standard of people

and the enjoyment of life and the quality of life,

looking after the dumb, looking after the blind,

looking after the downtrodden, fallen women, all of that,

and Isabella Tod played a full part.

That was fascinating.

I'd no idea that Presbyterianism was such an industrial powerhouse

and a force for change in the 19th century.

And I can see now the type of society that Isabella Tod lived in when she was here,

and the influences that were on her - very interesting.

The Custom House was at the heart of Belfast's prospering trade.

The dredging of Belfast Harbour in the 1840s allowed larger ships

to access the port for the first time.

With the creation of Queen's Island

and a burgeoning trade in shipbuilding, linen and tobacco,

Belfast quickly became the biggest and wealthiest port in Ireland.

The population soared

from 100,000 in the mid-1860s, when Isabella arrived,

to a third of a million by the turn of the century.

Belfast was officially recognised as a city in 1888.

This archive footage, dating from the late Victorian era,

shows a busy city centre.

There's people everywhere and lots of tram cars -

horse-drawn trams going along the lines

that I remember the trolleybuses going along.

Nearly all the women in these photos are smartly dressed,

and one wonders whether working-class women came into the city centre then.

Maybe the shops were too expensive for them.

It is a city on the move.

The rapid development brought wealth, but also many problems.

Slum housing, squalor, disease and poverty

were prevalent throughout the city.

Difficult working and living conditions led many to seek solace

in the public houses of Belfast.

In an attempt to counter this trend,

the temperance movement was gaining momentum.

It was a cause dear to Isabella Tod's heart

and her Presbyterian beliefs.

In 1874, she helped to set up

the Belfast Women's Temperance Association.

To be poor in Belfast when Isabella Tod was active

was to be absolutely at the bottom of the heap...

Margaret's come to Townsend Street Presbyterian Church in Belfast,

where the Irish Temperance League still meets.

Hello, Margaret. Welcome to our meeting. We're just in the middle...

The organisation is in the middle of a project tracing its own history.

It's part of Victorian beliefs

about women being much more frail and not able to manage and so forth,

so there's a number of ideas, and one of them is that

women physiologically are much more susceptible to alcohol

and become addicted very, very quickly.

For working-class women, it's that drink is part of a cycle,

and the cycle works on drink,

and getting yourself into situations possibly leading to immorality...

As an alternative to the pub,

the Irish Temperance League set up coffee stands,

and Isabella Tod was invited to open one of them.

This is from the Belfast Newsletter, I think, and the date was...

This was in 1881. 1881.

It records her opening speech. "For it is really frightful,

"a condition of life of many." This was a first temptation to drinking.

"Temperance people ought to rouse themselves

"and bring the matter to an immediate and practical issue,

"to clear away those abodes

"in which it is hardly possible for people to live human lives."

She speaks so terribly well

and it's very rare for women

to have spoken in big public meetings at that period.

They are still speaking out today.

LAUGHTER

But of course!

Shocked and distressed at the social conditions she was witnessing,

Tod began writing anonymously to newspapers, expressing her views.

She was passionate about improving access to education for women,

seeing it as a way to further their place in society.

Margaret's come to the Presbyterian Historical Society,

where archivist Valerie Adams

has unearthed Tod's first published pamphlet on education.

The pamphlet was presented at a social science congress

held in Belfast in 1867, but in a sign of the times,

it was presented by a male colleague rather than Isabella herself.

"Some have feared that college teaching

"and examinations would cause an excitement injurious to girls,

"but women have a heavy share in the infinitely more exciting cares

"and sorrows of life and are not incapacitated for duty by them.

"Besides, the sound judgment and quiet strength produced

by good training are the best preparation for all vicissitudes."

And this wasn't the sort of education that you'd get at a finishing school.

The girls were to study what one would call "proper subjects".

You had the junior level of study.

They were to go on to do Latin, mathematics

and the physical sciences. Very advanced to think of teaching girls

physical sciences when even now we have problems with

a lot of girls' schools not teaching science to the higher level.

Reading this paper, you would never think that Isabella

had had no formal education herself.

It's very well argued, it's clear, it's a chunky piece of work

and she makes her argument very succinctly and very well.

It's very impressive. I'm sure she was difficult to resist.

Tod now came to the attention of like-minded reformers in London.

Following in her footsteps,

Margaret's on her way to Parliament where Isabella was invited

to give evidence on a ground-breaking piece of legislation -

the Married Women's Property Bill.

At that time, married women couldn't own property

and their husbands had complete control over any wages they earned.

As changes to the law were being considered, Isabella Tod was

the only woman called to provide evidence to the committee of MPs.

Hello, Mari.

Hi. Very pleased to meet you. Nice to meet you.

You can see her name among the list of witnesses,

so we find her just there. The only woman?

She's the only woman out of a dozen or so people,

despite the fact that the subject was all about women.

She would have been quite unusual as a woman

giving evidence to a Select Committee in this period.

She says, "I know a number of cases in which the women are hardly

"able to maintain themselves and their families at all,

"because their husbands take their wages from them,

"or a very considerable proportion of them, when they receive them.

"More frequently, they run up debts at the public houses

"which the women must discharge,

"at least under the threat of having their furniture

"and other property taken to pay it.

"The consequences are very bad for all the family."

I think one of the things that strikes me here is that Isabella

is speaking from a lot of personal experience.

She's gone into the city,

she's talked to people who are working in the mills,

she's seen the conditions the families are living under,

and she's seen the problems that arise

because the women have to hand over their wages.

But nowadays it's hard to imagine that a woman would go out to work

and would have no right to retain ownership of what she'd earned.

When asked whether she's formed a strong opinion

as to the desirability of altering the law generally,

Isabella replies, "Yes, a very decided opinion."

One gets the impression that she was someone

who certainly knew her own mind.

Tod now found herself involved in other high-profile causes,

including a campaign for the repeal of the new Contagious Diseases Acts.

Under the Contagious Diseases Acts, the police had power

to arrest any woman suspected of being a prostitute.

Just somebody suspected of? Yeah, not convicted,

just suspected of being a prostitute,

in certain towns near military bases,

and the police could bring that woman before a justice of the peace

who could order her to undergo regular medical examinations

to see if she had a sexually transmitted disease.

I don't suppose people were picking soldiers off the street and testing them?

No. There's a fundamental sexual inequality at the heart of the act.

If a woman is diseased, she runs the risk of being locked up in hospital,

but diseased men were left completely untouched.

To spread it as they choose. Absolutely.

It's a massive infringement of women's civil liberties.

The Ladies National Association was formed to oppose the legislation.

Isabella Tod was one of the founding members

and signed a petition against the acts in 1870.

Was that quite a brave thing for a respectable Victorian lady to do?

Enormously brave. It was very, very shocking

that respectable ladies would speak out at public meetings

and lobby Parliament on subjects as unrespectable and distasteful

as sexually transmitted diseases and prostitution. Respectable wives

and daughters weren't supposed to know about these things,

which meant that people involved in the campaign were subjected to

a great deal of hostile commentary.

In 1886, the Contagious Diseases Acts were repealed.

Four years earlier the Married Women's Property Act

had been finally amended,

granting women the right to their own property and wages.

Isabella Tod had played a vital role in achieving both.

Thinking of her, a single woman, home educated,

coming across from Belfast, addressing Parliament,

prominent in all sort of reform movements -

it's breathtaking, actually.

Before Margaret leaves London, there's one final stop -

The Women's Library in the city's East End.

She's heard they hold a rare image of Isabella Tod

and is keen to take a look.

This is part of the archive of the Association of Moral and Social Hygiene,

and here we have a photograph of Miss Isabella Tod.

This photograph and all the photographs in this album

were, in fact, known as cartes de visite,

little visiting cards that the individuals would have taken

as they visited their friends and associates. And there she is.

She looks much more glamorous than I'd been expecting.

Looking very elegant, and it was taken in Belfast,

so I suppose she had her full wardrobe at hand.

Yes, I imagine so.

Well, she's a lovely face and she doesn't... You wouldn't

look at that face and think, "Ah, yes, here's a hardline protester."

No, she looks very ladylike, doesn't she? Hmm.

Isabella's experiences in London and success at Parliament convinced her

that in order to improve society, women needed the right to vote.

Inspired by this, she set up the first Women's Suffrage Society in Ireland.

In some parts of England, women had managed to secure the right

to vote on local acts specific to their borough.

Isabella was determined to implement a similar franchise in Belfast.

To find out more, Margaret's at the old town hall,

now part of the Court Service,

but where the local council was based at the time.

In the 1880s, one of the things the Belfast Corporation wanted to do

was to improve the drainage of the city,

and this was going to be extraordinary costly.

It was literally going to cost the equivalent of millions of pounds,

and a number of MPs decided that if the Belfast ratepayers,

as they existed at the time, were going to have to pay for this,

then it would be a good idea to actually extend the franchise

to ratepayers who were living in the city.

So this was local property legislation? Exactly.

So Isabella Tod spoke to her colleagues, her MP, friends,

and one of the things they did was,

they actually changed some of the wording in this franchise bill

and they changed the word "man" to "person",

and then to state explicitly that "person" included women,

just in case there was going to be any further argument about it,

which there might very well have been. Indeed.

And this meant that Belfast was ahead of the rest of Ireland?

It was. Belfast was the first city where women actually won the municipal vote.

Winning in England had had this from the 1860s,

but not women in Ireland. She writes to the Northern Whig

a couple of days after this act is actually passed,

and says how wonderful this piece of legislation is.

And we actually have an extract from the paper there.

"Miss Tod expresses the hope that the newly enfranchised women voters will

"care less for merely party politics than less enlightened men do

"and that they will care more for the great social and moral questions of the day."

Do you think she'd be disappointed if she saw what we've made of the vote?

She probably would be very disappointed that people don't vote,

because it was such an important thing to her

in terms of people's duty. I think it should be obligatory.

I think a lot of things should be obligatory.

Voting is one of them!

Despite her successful campaigns for voting

and property rights, Tod's passion

for the advancement of women's education never waned.

What an amazing room! Yes, it is, Margaret.

The old Museum Arts Centre here in Belfast

was home to the Belfast Ladies' Institute.

Isabella Tod was the secretary.

They held classes for young women who wanted a university education.

They taught girls in Latin, astronomy

and chemistry.

Those are pretty hard subjects, aren't they? They are.

It's quite hard to get girls to study these today. Yeah,

and they were not typical of middle-class girls'

education at the time -

that was in what the Ladies' Institute said were "showy,

"artificial accomplishments - music,

"and drawing" - there was real public objection

to academic education for girls.

When the Ladies' Institute was formed,

people thought that it would cause them to ignore their moral

and religious duties.

Presumably they didn't do practical work,

they'd have learnt from books here.

That was typical of education at the time.

But what was not typical was that

the Queen's College professors were teaching them here.

Queen's College is now Queen's University. Exactly.

Why did they have to come here to teach the girls?

Because unfortunately the Senate of Queen's University

decided that the lecture halls

were not open to girls.

She really motivated the other members

to start lobbying for equal admission of women

into Irish universities. She was a force

to be reckoned with as the petitions and the pamphlets show.

Margaret's come to the university's Special Collections archive

to view some of those petitions.

This is a meeting of the Senate...

..from...

the 4th November, 1873.

From the Belfast Ladies' Institute. Yes.

That would have been signed by Isabella Tod, among others.

Yes.

They're asking them to consider "the wisdom and desirableness

"of opening the Queen's University to women".

And they're flattering them.

"The Queen's University is less hampered by old rules

and traditions than others

"and is more in harmony with the ideas and the wants of our time."

It's funny... "We hope that someone of the Queen's Collegers

"will be found ready to make the necessary arrangements for ladies to be admitted as students.

"If medical classes should be formed, we wish to state

"our conviction that separate instruction in these subjects

"is absolutely necessary." So there was no

mingling over the cadavers, was there? Exactly.

Under mounting pressure, Queen's University

finally allowed women into classes in 1882.

"..by Professor Synge and resolved that the Council is disposed to sanction

"the admission of women to certain classes in the college

"if arrangements of a satisfactory character can be made

"and if it's found that a sufficient number of women

"be desirous of availing themselves of the privilege."

Her success in gaining local suffrage

and getting girls into Queen's

were the high points of Isabella's campaigns.

By the late 1880s, she was to be consumed by the big political debate

of the time - home rule.

When Gladstone introduced his first Home Rule bill

in 1886,

Isabella Tod, a staunch Ulster Presbyterian,

objected on all counts.

She began a vigorous campaign against the bill,

establishing the Belfast Women's Liberal Unionist Association.

She travelled throughout Ireland and England,

organising meetings and petitions against home rule.

Her commitment to the cause is evident in letters held here

at the Public Record Office in Belfast.

"I am anxious to have the meeting soon,

"for the weather is becoming cold and I shall soon have to shut myself up

"by the fireside for the winter.

"It's very kind of you to think of a meeting at Fivemiletown.

"Every meeting does good, in one way or another.

"I know very well the sort of sour Presbyterian farmers

"you allude to and I do think that wise Presbyterian ladies

"might help their ministers to rouse them out of their narrowness

"and make them comprehend how penny-wise

"and pound-foolish they are in politics."

This letter was written in October, 1892.

That's just four years before Isabella died

and despite the fact that possibly

she's referring to the fireside for the winter

because of failing health,

nothing's going to stop her sorting out these committees and meetings.

She's still very active.

Tod's campaigning against home rule took its toll

and she suffered from ill health for the last ten years of her life.

This building in Belfast's Botanic area,

now a cafe,

was her last address. It's here that she died

on December 8th, 1896.

Margaret's on her way to Balmoral Cemetery on the outskirts

of South Belfast

where Isabella Tod is buried.

Her funeral was a huge affair

with many of Belfast's most influential citizens in attendance.

I'd really like to know more about her private life

because apart from knowing that she looked after her mother,

and then lived with a companion for about 20 years,

we don't know anything else.

We don't really know what made her tick.

"Isabella MS Tod.

"May 1836 to December 1896.

"Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaketh.

"Many daughters have done virtuously, but though excellest them all."

I have here the text of a memorial speech

by her great friend Margaret Byers.

"Miss Tod's untiring interest in every cause

"for the promotion of the wellbeing of mankind

"and the immense trouble and pain she took by frequent journeys,

"by voice and pen, often in great bodily weakness,

"to advocate any measure for the good of mankind in general,

"has made all who know her, both men and women,

"feel themselves her debtors."

She was instrumental in changing the law in relation to women's

voting rights, Married Women's Property Acts,

she was one of the major movers behind getting the Contagious Diseases Act repealed,

and she was principally responsible, I feel,

for getting women admitted to take degrees in what is now

Queen's University, Belfast.

That's a huge range of achievements

and there are plenty of people who did less

and I'm very surprised that we've been allowed to forget her.

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