The Young Rebecca

Writings of Rebecca West 1911-17

Rebecca West

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781453207338
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Collezioni letterarie di autrici

A collection of Rebecca West's early journalistic writings reveals her clarity of mind, severity of wit, and relevancy in today's modern world In this collection of early writings, beginning when Rebecca West was just eighteen years old, Jane Marcus sheds light on one of the foremost feminist and political thinkers of our time. West's essays, reviews, and public correspondence tackle many subjects, including politics, suffrage, education, morality and ethics, the arts, and social figures of the day. Her writings offer a glimpse of the real Rebecca—not some stuffy suffragette, but a vibrant, funny, provocative, and brilliant woman whose determined pen strokes outwit her contemporaries and remain inspiring today. A feminist to the core, West parried with her readers, other writers, and a culture slow to accept change. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Rebecca West featuring rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the Department of Special Collections and University Archives, McFarlin Library, at the University of Tulsa.

II
Battle-Axe and Scalping Knife

Essays (complete) from The Clarion,
September 1912 – December 1913

An Orgy of Disorder and Cruelty
The Beginnings of Sex-Antagonism

WITH THE MODESTY FOR which he is notorious, Mr Lloyd George celebrated his birthday last Saturday by presenting, far from anonymously, to Llanystumdwy, the home of his boyhood, what the Daily News called ‘a village university’. It was a village institute. He found himself unable to perform the act of generosity without the support of his wife and family and five MPs. ‘In the absence of Mr Winston Churchill, the ceremony of opening the outer entrance was performed by Mr Masterman MP, who was presented with a golden key for that purpose, and upon reaching the institute, the door of that building was opened by Mrs Lloyd George, to whom another key had been presented.’ The whole George family was present in ecstasies over the noble deed. Miss Megan Lloyd George, that unremarkable child whose bare legs twinkle across the stage of English politics, was photographed all day, playing with daddy or pushing a go-cart in the garden. The festivity was as characteristic of Mr Lloyd George’s generosity as of his modesty. The institute was built with £1,000 which was awarded to Mr Lloyd George in a libel action. We may receive the statement without rapture if we reflect that he charges his unhappy country £5,000 a year for his services in hatching addled Insurance Acts. It was a debauch of vulgarity. And there was something sinister about it. No one would mind if the George family went to Blackpool for the day and ended up by changing hats and singing comic songs on the promenade. But this brandishing of the simple pieties and Christian virtues under the camera’s eye is false and dangerous. So no one need have been surprised when the celebration suddenly turned into an orgy of disorder and cruelty, a letting loose of Hell.

Some suffragettes turned up at the opening ceremony. They reminded Mr Lloyd George that the question of the enfranchisement of women had not been settled. They were tactful. They did not point out the plain truth – that it is galling for women to be cheated out of their citizenship by such an inefficient person as Mr Lloyd George.

They made remarks such as ‘Votes for Women’, and expressed disagreement with various challenging statements that he made. Nothing they said could have aroused the fury with which they were received. A gentleman named Mr P. W. Wilson, who occupies a confidential position in the Liberal world, claims to have made a protest.

‘Remember,’ he exclaimed, when he saw a fellow-Liberal scratching a suffragette, ‘she is a woman!’

He was thereupon hustled, and quite rightly, too, for making such a silly remark. The questions were not in the least provocative of scratching; and had the questioner been a man, there was not the slightest reason why he should be scratched any more than a woman.

To prove that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, Mr Wilson tells us that afterwards one of the men who had hustled him came up to him and, touching his hat, begged his pardon. How like the vanity and littleness of liberalism to record solemnly a triviality like that when describing a scene as brutal and perilous as a battlefield!

The population of Llanystumdwy showed clearly that, though it had been given a village institute, what it really wanted was a village shambles.

Think of a mob of screaming, shrieking men, convulsed with liberalism, throwing themselves on singlehanded women, beating them with sticks and stones, tearing out their hair in handfuls, and stripping them down to the waist! Think of them dragging the bleeding bodies of their captives towards the village pump, pitching them over hedges, and trying unsuccessfully to dip them in the river!

Then listen to the speech with which Mr Lloyd George was leading their hearts heavenwards:

There is no country where political warfare is fought under stricter and more honourable rules of fair play and personal chivalry than in Great Britain. That is a worthy pride and boast for this land, and they fight all the more effectively because they fight honourably.

The right honourable gentleman broke the chain of his argument for another distinguished son of Llanystumdwy. Seeing a suffragette pinioned by this fellow, who was pummelling her face with his fist, ‘I am sorry in my heart,’ he complained, picturesquely. ‘I would do my best to protect their lives, but I cannot be responsible any longer.’ It was only by a miracle that his fellow countrymen did not take the hint.

It is impossible to take this scene as a mere bit of rowdyism. It happened under the auspices of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and it was performed by the supporters of the present Government without fear of arrest. It is an event of profound significance.

One quite obvious lesson that women may learn from it is to be seen in the attitude of the Press. Things like this have often happened before. It has long been the custom of stewards at Cabinet Ministers’ meetings to commit vindictive and often indecent assaults on suffragette interrupters. There have been attacks on the lives of many suffragettes – sometimes unsuccessful, as when a young Liberal of Dundee demonstrated his enthusiasm for retrenchment and reform by winding Miss Adela Pankhurst’s scarf round and round her throat until she nearly choked; sometimes successful, as when, a stone’s throw from the Mother of Parliaments, Cecilia Haig was kicked so that, after a lingering illness, she died. Of these things the Press has been silent. Now for the first time it has begun to recognise and speak about them. But not from any sympathy with the women’s cause.

They have their own axes to grind. The Tory papers want to discredit Lloyd George, and to this end they use the pain women have suffered for their principles as coolly and calculatingly as they use his blunders over the Insurance Act. The Liberal Press use it to show what women must expect if they go in for militancy of the Dublin variety. Partisan Liberals neither think nor remember: they simply see that scratching and stripping women is a possible way of revenging an insult to their great god, and give the suffragettes fair warning.

This callousness should teach suffragettes two lessons. Firstly, that they cannot win their cause by mere virtuosic exhibitions of courage. Courage requires an audience of heroes. If Gladys Evans dies in Mountjoy Prison as a result of being forcibly fed, the public would stand it. There is no limit to what the public – the great mass of tired, weak souls, broken and killed by the capitalist struggle – will stand. It might make a certain amount of stir if that bloodthirsty stutterer, Mr J. L. Garvin, could so far subdue his natural loathing for suffragettes as to use them as a weapon against the Liberals. And the perception of this callousness should make us the more determined, if the more calm, to take a share in government. Since men take the assault of women so calmly we may judge that their self-sought task of the legislative protection of women will be done without zeal.

The second lesson is one for men. It never seems to strike men that a party which renounced the principle of liberty, when dealing with women, might renounce them when dealing with men. When Lewis Harcourt told the working women of Rossendale Valley that he would not give them votes because he did not believe they were as fit for self-government as his wife, it never struck the voters of Rossendale Valley that their member had confessed his disbelief in democracy.

It never struck them when the Government insulted women, gave them false promises, and shut them up in prison on faked charges and forcibly fed them, that this was not a firm with which an honest man would deal.

Then one morning the working men of England are dumb with amazement when they find that the Insurance Act is a fraud and the instrument of fraudulent societies, and a very ugly and deliberate device to break trade-unionism. Even since then they have voted for the Liberal at Crewe and Hanley and Cardiff and Midlothian. Perhaps now it will seem to them that a party led by a gentleman who turns his eyes up and thinks beautiful thoughts while his supporters light-heartedly hurl women over hedges can’t be much good.

But this incident is of more than political interest. It is typical in the bitter thoughts which it must arouse in every woman of the disturbance in the relationship between men and women which this repression of the suffragette movement has brought about. It is a fact, minimised by the good nature of everyone concerned, that the present structure of society automatically compels women to be oppressed by men. The social liberty of a respectable woman is circumscribed by the vices of men. A woman who wishes to go about London alone by night or to look into shop windows in Bond Street in the afternoon encounters unpleasantness due to the accidents of the man-made social system. There is even an idea that women should regulate their dress according to men’s lack of self-control rather than their own comfort. The Vicar of Lee, for instance, is always hoisting distress signals in the parish magazine (I presume, at the spiritual state of his male parishioners) begging women not to wear tight skirts because of their effect on men. He abstains from considering the fact that it is more comfortable for a woman to walk with two and a half yards of stuff hanging from her hips than with five.

And at the back of these little, worrying interferences there is the great economic grievance of women: that they are not given equal pay for equal work, that they are not allowed equal opportunities of education and profession.

But these were difficulties which women understood quite well arose out of the accident incident to a changing civilisation; some of them she felt she had brought on herself by the parasitic part she played in past ages. So she was perfectly willing to do her part in clearing up the muddle. That this was going to be tedious, onerous work she quite well understood. That is why being thrown over a hedge when she had offered to do her part seemed so unkind. It makes women doubt the Russian saying that the heart of man seems more like a menagerie. And that is the beginning of sex-antagonism.

And the worst of sex-antagonism is that there is such a lot of admissible evidence. If, for instance, some sentimental person like the Bishop of London, who likes talking about that sort of thing, had met those battered suffragettes on Saturday and said: ‘My dear ladies, you are neglecting the true destiny of womanhood; you ought to be the mothers of men.’ The suffragettes would be quite reasonable if they answered: ‘Men? Ha! Those were men that tore the clothes off our backs and the hair off our heads. There seems quite enough of them to go on with without bringing any more into the world.’

And that’s a very sensible point of view. Like all terrible and wicked things, sex-antagonism has a sound logical basis. So let’s solve this business of votes before the populace of Llanystumdwy have time to give any more demonstrations of the beastliness of men.

And in the meantime Mr Lloyd George must be made to put his pious reflections into practice. A nice way of doing it would be to disenfranchise Llanystumdwy for the next two elections. That would give them something to talk about in the long winter evenings at the ‘Village University’.

The Clarion, 27 September 1912

Women and Wages
Blacklegging and Timidity

In the Daily Citizen of 9 October there was a sentimental quotation, seemingly of feminist import, from The Shipping World. A new Act in the States has decreed that every vessel navigating on the American coast or the great lakes must carry a wireless operator; and it furthermore provides that women are eligible to qualify as operators.

And why not? [asks The Shipping World]. The invention opens out a new career for women, in which their special abilities can be used to the best advantage. If acuteness of hearing, rapidity of decision and suppleness of wrist and fingers count for anything, then, surely, the Marconi house on the bridge deck seems to be the natural goal for a self-reliant woman with cool nerves and efficient brain.

It is an alluring picture, and one flattering to women. In the mind’s eye one sees the Marconi operator sitting gracefully at her work, with a rose in her hair, surrounded by votive offerings from passengers, operating much, much better than any mere man ever did. And, apart from The Shipping World’s idealisation of the prospects, it does seem an interesting new occupation for women. Women have had to settle down to occupations which were too tame for men and in which there are few opportunities for the adventurous-minded. The young woman who wants to see over the edge of the world would probably love the life of a wireless operator.

Yet, ‘I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts,’ said the one wise Trojan, when he saw his fellow-Trojans dragging the wooden horse into Troy. I fear the Marconi Company even when they bring gifts.

Ah! Here we have it. Here is the powder in the jam, the snake in the grass, the wolf in feminist’s clothing. I thought there must be some reason for this sudden lyric outburst of feminist enthusiasm. ‘Probably she will be less expensive to the shipowner than the male operator, and quite as reliable.’ One might have remembered that the capitalist respects woman in only one capacity; not as the worker or the wife or the mother, but as the blackleg. That takes the pride out of the working woman. If she becomes a Marconi operator on these terms, no matter how efficient and plucky she may be, she is living on the wages of dishonour. She has bought her job with the flesh and blood of her fellow man.

Though it is galling for the woman worker to know that she is not loved for herself alone, she may get a good deal of satisfaction out of the encouraging words that are let fall by the capitalist on the make. For instance, there was that remarkable wave of feminism that passed over local authorities four years ago, when they became obliged to appoint school medical officers. All over the country councillors enthusiastically declared to one another that it was imperative that children should be attended to by women; that men were far too coarse and tactless to deal with them; that every woman (even though she be a doctor) is a mother at heart… and that while men doctors were asking £250 a year they could probably get women for £150. The wiles of the municipal seducers were in vain. Women doctors, being in the main middle-class women, had savings and homes to fall back on; so they stood loyally by their male colleagues and refused to blackleg. Not one woman doctor in Great Britain applied for a £150 post. And there was an abrupt subsidence in the wave of feminism among local authorities.

What reason is there that women should play the part of blacklegs?

The underpayment of women is one of those ‘ninepence for four-pence’ tricks that capitalists have ever loved to play on the people whenever they had the chance. Capitalists have said to women: ‘We deduct fourpence from your wages so that we can pay men larger wages, and then they can support you as their wives. So in the end you will make at least ninepence out of it.’ It is only an excuse for sweating more money out of the people. It pretends that women have no dependants. A woman, according to the capitalist, is an air-bubble blown between earth and sky, with no human ties of any sort. True it is that man recognises that first imperative necessity which is plain to the lowest savage, the duty to provide for the next generation. But there is another duty which is patent only to the more civilised (if one was a really bitter feminist, one might say that that was why it fell to the women), and that is the duty to provide for the old. Miss Grace Neal, of the Domestic Workers’ Union, states that it is the rule and not the exception for the members of her Union to send money home to support their parents. And sometimes widowhood lays the burden of both generations on a woman.

Women ought to understand that in submitting themselves to this swindle of underpayment, they are not only insulting themselves, but doing a deadly injury to the community. The capitalist sucks strength out of an exploited class which enables him to exploit other classes. An example of the infectiousness of poverty and the persistence of disease is the terrible economic condition of Edinburgh, which is directly due to the Battle of Flodden Field in 1513. Most of the able-bodied men were killed off and their widows had to set about earning a living for their fatherless children. They got ‘woman’s wages’. That meant that wages all round were depressed, and capitalism in Edinburgh got a good hold over labour by planting its feet on a solid substratum of the blackest and most helpless poverty. Labour has never shaken itself free.

How can women bear to be willing instruments of this crime against themselves and the community? The industrial women seem to consent to the indignity without resentment. Every woman who has risen from the floral stage of political activity (that is, the Primrose League), or the vegetable stage (that is, the Women’s Liberal Association), must admire the suffragettes. Yet we may wish that they had spared a little of their dear irreverence and blessed pluck to stir up the industrial women to revolt. We have clever Miss Pankhurst trying to get the vote and earnest Miss Macarthur trying to organise trade unions; but seemingly we have no women who have read the signs of the times, who have discovered that political power and trade unionism are pin-pricks in the hide of the capitalist monster. Where are our women syndicalists?

Ladies of Great Britain, we are clever, we are efficient, we are trustworthy, we are twice the women that our grandmothers were, but we have not enough devil in us. We are afraid of going back to first causes. We want to earn good wages. But we try to do it by being amenable and competent wage-slaves, and thus pleasing the capitalist. We never try to do it by fighting the capitalist and turning him out of the workshop. The other day Mr Ramsay MacDonald complained that women do not make good enough socialists for him. The whole trouble is that women make socialists which are just good enough for Mr Ramsay MacDonald. They accept as doles from the capitalist class what they should take as rights. Wherever one gets a gathering of women socialists, one gets a programme of such charity gifts from the State as free meals and school clinics for children: excellent things, but dangerous unless taken discontentedly as niggardly instalments of a long-due debt. They should watch such things critically lest their children grow up in servitude. A slave is more of a slave when he is well fed than when he is hungry.

It is strange that women who are independent and fearless in private life should not introduce their independence and fearlessness into their public life. This occurs to me especially in connection with elementary-schoolteachers. The cheerfulness with which they have shouldered the responsibilities thrown on them by the free meals and medical examination of schoolchildren explains why the children love their school and their teachers. Yet they submit to being paid salaries of from one-half to two-thirds the amount paid to men for similar work. They submit in spite of the fact that they could end the injustice in a week by a strike. What could the Government do if women teachers struck? There are no hungry teachers walking the streets, so degraded by poverty that – God forgive them and punish the capitalists – they will help to drag their fellows down to poverty, too, by blacklegging. The women teachers of England have their remedy in their own hands.

Yet not only do they not use it, but they consent to remain members of a quaint body called the National Union of Teachers, which, although it exacts an equal subscription from men and women alike, maintains this principle of unequal payment. The scale which it suggests for certificated class-teachers is quite a humorous little effort. Apparently the male class-teacher is intended to get married at once, as his minimum salary is higher than the female’s. True the difference is but £10, but the maintenance of a family can be the only excuse for any difference at all. His maximum salary is £200 against the female’s £160. Puzzle: If the NUT thinks a class-teacher can keep a wife on the £10 surplus, how many children does it expect him to rear on the £40 surplus? Surely the birth-rate can’t be going down!

I am no teacher, but I don’t think much of that Union. I like to get value for my money, and a union that takes my money and does not give me equal benefits with my fellow-unionist is no use to me. Decidedly the women members of the NUT ought to withdraw their support from their ungracious colleagues and form a union of their own.

But what is the explanation of the meekness which makes such impositions on women possible? It is perhaps nothing disgraceful to ourselves, nothing that need make us doubt our worthiness as citizens of the ideal State. Nietzsche says that a man who is aiming at Supermanhood passes through three phases: the camel, the lion and the child. At first the soul becomes mastered by the idea of duty and self-sacrifice. It desires to be a preserver of life. Thus far have women gone. They have no tim...