Fighters for Freedom

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 474, 23 July 1948, Page 8

Fighters for Freedom

CE upon a time there were three little girls, and their names were Emmy, Lizzie, and Millie, and they lived at the bottom of a well of treacly mid-Victorian genteelism. The story of their escape from the well (the diet of treacle was making them very ill) is being told in three Sunday morning programmes from 2YA under the arresting title Queen Victoria Was Furious. I heard the first last week, which told the story of Elizabeth Garrett, the first Englishwoman to qualify’ as a doctor. Next week is, I think, Emily Davis, the founder of Girton College, and the week after comes Millie, Elizabeth’s young sister, who grew up to take a leading part in the struggle for the vote. Elizabeth’s story was told wittily yet

weightily, the brightness of the presentation not being allowed to detract from the audience’s horror at the unnecessary humiliations and disappointments of Elizabeth’s struggle. (Incidentally, it did happen here-the first women medical students at Otago suffered much as Elizabeth Garrett suffered, and this is a country where the vote was. given early.) So Victorian girlhood, in spite of being "strangled by ropes of beads, and crushed beneath. the weight of waxed fruit,’ was finally rescued from the well, and the three little girls who had once lived at the -bottom , of it played John Stout to those still remaining. An excellent programme, I thought, apart from the title. If we are to believe the programme (and history) others beside the Good Queen were furious.