ONE of this summer’s few positive and heart-warming stories has been the England Lionesses winning the European Football Championship for the first time and beating men to the honour, despite several near-misses by the men over a much longer period of time.

When you research the history of Bradford’s development before and during the Industrial Revolution, you realise just how downtrodden almost all women’s lives were. By 1850, for example, very few women had been able to make any contribution to public life - a reflection of much lower expectations and fewer opportunities. It was not until the 1880s before the first Bradford-educated girl took a university degree.

Only the three Bronte sisters in Haworth were exceptions, achieving fame from the 1840s amongst the earliest great writers of English classic novels, although even they had to resort to male pseudonyms to get published. Just across the border in Halifax, their contemporary Anne Lister, too, can be said uniquely to hold her own as a landowner and businesswoman of substance, clever at outwitting and dominating menfolk.

This new series of mine about Bradford’s game-changers tells the stories of eight women who led the way with achievements that showed that women could match and exceed the achievements of men and act as strong role models to other women. They were not by any means all fervent campaigners for women’s causes, despite Bradford’s reputation for inspiring some prominent suffragettes. The pioneering women in this series preferred to make their mark by personal achievement against the odds in many different fields.

We start our series with the accident of a marriage in London.

September 6, 1851 marked a moment when things started to change, with the marriage of a German lady to an English yarn merchant. This brought to Bradford its first influential female educationalist who certainly made her mark.

Born into a Jewish family in Hanover, Fanny Hertz (1830-1908) came to London as a child when her father, a diamond merchant, moved there. Not yet 21, she married her cousin, William Hertz, at Westminster. He was a yarn merchant who owned a mill in Bradford, where they settled down and brought up a family. They were to live in Bradford for over 20 years.

Their home in Horton, then Vicar Lane, became a meeting place for writers, artists, and thinkers, and those with an interest in radical causes.

Fanny Hertz was a passionate feminist and proponent of women’s education, fighting what she called “the deeply rooted prejudice that woman has neither the same powers nor the same aspirations as man”. In particular, she championed the cause of working-class women who were not eligible to study in Mechanics’ Institutes that had been established for men from the 1820s. In 1857 she helped found Bradford’s Female Educational Institute. Within five years it had around 500 students attending its evening classes who almost all had already spent up to 12 hours working during the day. They included factory workers, nursemaids, domestic servants and others living at home. Many were totally illiterate, some could just about read but not write and only a few could do simple sums.

In 1859 she spoke at the third National Association for the Promotion of Social Science that met in Bradford. Here, she condemned the narrow and utilitarian perspective which saw the purpose of women’s education as preparation “for the duties of wives and mothers, of mistresses and servants”.

She became involved in a national movement to further the education of women and represent Bradford on the North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women. By 1871, she was a committee member of the National Union for Improving the Education of Women of All Classes, founded by Maria Grey.

She set up the Bradford Ladies’ Educational Association in 1868 with Jane Forster, the wife of WE Forster, Bradford MP, whose 1870 Elementary Education Act revolutionised state education. They organised for several years programmes of high standard lectures. They also helped to create Bradford Girls’ Grammar School on the same basis as the recently-reformed boys’ school. The new girls’ school opened in September 1875, after Hertz and others secured the £5,000 funding by donation for its new building in Hallfield Road off Westgate.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Fanny Hertz was ‘a member of that small band of 19th century feminists who worked indefatigably to improve the conditions of women’s lives, employment, and education’.

In her view a suitable education for working-class women included a wide range of subjects such as physical science, physiology, history, geography, poetry, choral singing, and drawing. She also condemned the common attitude that teaching was a matter of filling the mind with facts. What was required was lively and interesting teaching that could engage the attention of the exhausted women and girls who attended the classes after an extended and strenuous day’s work.

Looking back now at her important contribution to female education in mid-19th century Bradford, we can only respect and admire her passion, intelligence and commitment to improve the lives of women and girls far less fortunate than herself in a very challenging environment.

l Martin Greenwood’s book Every Day Bradford provides a story for each day of the year about people, places and events from Bradford’s history. It is available from online stores, including Amazon, and bookshops including Waterstones and Salts Mill.