Indian suffragettes on the Women’s Coronation Procession of 17 June 1911. The small Indian contingent was organised by Mrs Jane Fisher Unwin (the daughter of Richard Cobden). She and other representatives of the WSPU contacted Indian women living in the UK in the weeks leading up to the procession, whilst organising the decorations and the collection of subscriptions for the elephant banner that cost between £4 & £5. The India procession was part of the ‘Imperial Contingent’ and was intended to show the strength of support for women’s suffrage throughout the Empire. All corners of the empire were represented and divided into 6 sections – New Zealand, Australia, Canada, South Africa, India and Crown Colonies & Protectorates. Annie Besant also took part in the India procession.

- Museum of London

Though Indian (Parsi) and a woman, Cornelia Sorabji accomplished the unimaginable in becoming the first woman to practice law in India and Britain. Sorabji was born into a large family of nine children, her father, Reverend Sorabji Karsedji, a Parsi Christian, and her mother, Francina Ford, an Indian who had been adopted and raised by a British couple. Sorabji’s mother was devoted to the cause of women’s education, and made her mark upon Indian society with the establishment of several girls’ schools in Puna (then known as Poona). It was through her mother’s contacts that opened the door for Sorabji to become the first woman to take the Bachelor of Civil Laws exam at Oxford University in 1892.

Upon her return to India in 1894, Sorabji dedicated her time to the rights and education of women and children. Her first cases involved the women of the purdahnashins. Many of these women held considerable property, but Hindu law forbade them from communicating with the outside male world. Sorabji could enter pleas for these women in the courts, but she could not defend the cases because she lacked professional standing in the Indian legal system. She quickly rectified this, standing for the LLB examination of Bombay University in 1897 and pleader’s examination of Allahabad high court in 1899. Despite her success in these examinations, she would not be recognized as a barrister until women were legally permitted to be called to the bar in 1924.

In the meantime, Sorabji petitioned the India Office for legal advisers to women and minors in the provincial courts, and was appointed Lady Assistant to the Court of Wards of Bengal in 1904. By 1907, the need for such representation called her to all parts of India, and over a twenty year period, it was estimated that Sorabji helped over 600 women and orphans fight legal battles, sometimes at no charge. In the 1920s, she was legally able to practice law and opened a firm in Calcutta; however, male prejudice confined her to the preparation of cases, and she never set foot in a court as a barrister. Nevertheless, Sorabji–a woman, an Indian, and a Christian–led an interesting and intriguing life, “which spanned two extremes of the Raj: its zenith under a queen who ruled over a quarter of the world’s population, and its ultimate dissolution with India’s independence.”

Further Reading:

An Indian Portia: Selected Writings of Cornelia Sorabji, 1866-1954, ed. Kusoom Vadgama
Cornelia Sorabji: India’s Pioneering Woman by Suparna Gooptu
Opening Doors: The Untold Story of Cornelia Sorabji, Reformer, Lawyer and Champion of Women’s Rights in India by Richard Sorabji
Cornelia Sorabji’s Wikipedia entry

During the late Victorian era, the name of Mrs. A. B. Marshall could be found fixed over the door of her large cooking school and employment agency on Mortimer Street, in culinary magazines, on cooking utensils, cookbooks, food products, supplies, and cross-country lectures. By the time of her death in 1905, she had sunk into obscurity and the destruction of her papers and ephemera in a fire in the 1950s further buried the legacy of a woman who, at one time, was considered as indispensable to English housewives and cooks as Mrs. Beeton.

Born Agnes Bertha Smith on August 24, 1855, at Walthamstow, Essex, she learned “to cook from home experience and work under skilled Parisian and Viennese chefs.” In 1883, she moved to London, where she purchased the National Training School of Cookery from its owners, and promptly set about building the school’s clientele and reputation. The 1880s and 1890s witnessed the beginnings of the domestic science movement, and the charismatic and determined Mrs. Marshall fit into this female-oriented movement, boosting the school’s pupils from forty within two years of purchasing the school to thousands for day-, month-, semester-, or year-long courses. Her pupils included cooks wanting to increase their skills (or, cooks dispatched hastily by their employers to learn how to prepare edible meals), middle class women desiring to run a tip-top household, and even aristocratic women picking up a unique hobby. The curriculum “offered specialty instruction in cooking, including lessons in curry from an English colonel who had served in India and classes in French haute cuisine taught by a Cordon Bleu graduate.”

Over the following ten years, Mrs. Marshall expanded her empire adding an employment agency and registrar for cooks, a kitchen shop where food prepared by students was sold to the public, cookbooks, a weekly newspaper called The Table, and “specialty foods, utensils, cutlery, cast-iron equipment, and cooking supplies including baking powder, flavorings, vegetable food colorants, leaf gelatin, and in 1888, an edible cornet à la crème (ice cream cone) made with ground almonds.” This last item, and her ice cream molds which ran up to a thousand shapes and varieties, earned Mrs. Marshall the moniker “Queen of Ices” in response to her passionate devotion to ices, ice creams, and frozen desserts.

With so many things to juggle, it was amazing that Mrs. Marshall had the time to lecture, but she did, scheduling six talks per week in Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester, and Newcastle, and a second tour went to twelve additional cities. Her live demonstrations, held on consecutive Saturdays in London, drew rave reviews and even more fame, though oddly enough, she found little success in the United States (her nearest rival there was Maria Parloa).

She began to wind her career down a notch by the mid-1890s, turning from lecturing, cooking, and writing, to charity, initiating Yule dinners for the poor and maintaining winter soup kitchens. After writing one more cookbook, Fancy Ices, Mrs. Marshall retired to Pinner, her estate on the River Pinn, where she lived until her death from a riding accident in 1905, just a month short of her fiftieth birthday. Mrs. Marshall and her empire faded from view and memory as the twentieth century wore on, “but her influence and opinions endured even longer. She denounced canned food and the substandard meals served in railway cars and depots. She campaigned for the availability of fresh produce and trained kitchen staff. Her prognostications foresaw the acceptance of dishwashers, the expansion of automobile travel, the advent of supermarkets, fad diets, chemical purification of water, refrigerated trucks, and the popularization of the ice cream freezer.”

Further Reading:
Mrs Marshall, the Greatest Victorian Ice Cream Maker, with a facsimile of the Book of Ices 1885 by Robin Weir
BookRags biography
Wikipedia entry

Even though I was not wild about The Wild Rose by Jennifer Donnelly, I was interested in the presence of women mountaineers in the Edwardian era, and came upon Fanny Bullock Workman. Workman was born in 1859 to a prominent Massachusetts family, and embarked upon a lifetime of exploration after her marriage to Dr. William Hunter Workman, who was ten years her senior. They began with amazing cycling tours across the globe, and they collaborated on three books–Algerian Memories, Sketches Awheel in fin de siecle Iberia, and Through Town and Jungle–which were notable for their shared credit as “Fanny Bullock Workman and William Hunter Workman.”

Fanny first encountered The Himalayas in 1898, and in 1899 they proceeded to climb and name a series a peaks, “foremost among them 21,000 foot Koser Gunge.” At age forty, Workman’s ascent was high enough to claim the women’s altitude level, and she pushed on to climb even higher. In 1906, she climbed the Nun Kun Range of India, with an ascension of the 22,810 ft Pinnacle Peak. The Nun Kun Peak in the Himalayas, reached an altitude of 23,394 feet, and “during this climb the camp of the party was pitched for two nights at an altitude of 21,000 feet, although previous explorers had reckoned 21,500 feet as the limit at which men could live.”

This achievement was marred by a slight dispute between Workman and rival mountaineer Annie Peck, who claimed to have climbed higher, when she scaled the Huascarán in the Andes in 1904. The tenacious Workman sent a survey party to calculate the Peck’s highest point, which ended up 1,000 feet lower than Pinnacle Peak. As the undisputed champion of the women’s altitude level, Workman was in high demand as a lecturer and writer, addressing such groups as the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society, and writing books and articles, and planning further expeditions.

Though Workman worked in tandem with her husband, she was the driving force behind their explorations, and her forthright personality and successes challenged her male peers, and offended many of them. Nevertheless, Workman and her husband conducted eight Himalayan expeditions between 1898 and 1912, and earned medals of honor from an additional ten European geographical societies. Their daughter Rachel followed in her mother’s footsteps, becoming a geologist and wife of Sir Alexander Mar-Robert. The Workmans moved to the South of France in 1917, where she suffered from a longtime illness until her death in 1925.

Further Reading:
Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Explorers by Dea Birkett
Victorian Lady Travelers by Dorothy Middleton
American Travel Writers, 1850-1915. Ed. Donald Ross and James J. Schramer
Mountaineering women: stories by early climbers By David Mazel