Influence and Inheritance in Feminist English Studies

C. Jones, E. Hogg, C. Jones, E. Hogg

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137497499
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137497505
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection explores how new directions in feminist literary study might be informed by the work of the past. It offers a snapshot view of new feminist research in the field today and traces the influence of the substantial feminist inheritance in English Studies through six distinct, individual pieces of rigorous and innovative new work.

1

Old Feminism, New Feminism

Marion Shaw

Abstract: I am 80 this year and my feminism goes back about 70 years when I was upset at the treatment given to my aunt, my father’s sister, whose life had been one of servitude and bullying as a single daughter left at home to care for ageing parents. Not long afterwards she committed suicide. My chapter here, which was given as an introductory talk as an ‘old feminist’ at the conference this volume commemorates, records in outline my life as it moved through four phases of feminist engagement.

Keywords: English studies; history of feminism; Six Point Group; third wave feminism; Winifred Holtby

Hogg, Emily J. and Clara Jones, eds. Influence and Inheritance in Feminist English Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137497505.0005.

I was almost born a feminist, as well as becoming one. My father died when I was two and I lived with my mother, grandmother and great grandmother in a village in north Yorkshire. My home was a matriarchy, where everything was done by women, or to be more precise, one woman, my mother. Although there was some lamentation in my home about our lost leaders (men), it seemed the norm to be lone women, and although in my teens and early twenties I desperately wanted men, as I grew older I came to relish a woman-only existence, in fact now a lone-woman existence.

When I became a university lecturer, in the early 1960s, it was in the halcyon days when one didn’t even have to have a PhD, there was no such thing as the REF and the long vacation was exactly that. But there was an uncomfortableness about my undoubted good luck in being in an English department. Apart from an elderly Anglo-Saxonist, all the other staff were men and I found myself playing a deferential, slightly flirtatious, easily patronized and sometimes mildly sexually harassed role. And then I suffered a consciousness shift. I remember being on the top of a bus going home, and thinking my life is ruined, I shall probably never be happy again and certainly never innocent again. I was reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and realizing that I was guilty of bad faith, that my life was a performance mainly for men. Soon afterwards I read John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and its memorable comment that when a woman ‘sees’ herself, either in a mirror or in her self-imaging, she is doing so as if she were a man, looking through a man’s eyes.¹ Into this awakening, of particular relevance to my life as an English lecturer, must be slotted Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, in which both the absence of women writers in the literary canon and their need for privacy and financial independence are brilliantly addressed. At this point, round about 1965, I had begun to become a feminist and to call myself one.

My first active engagement with feminism was as a member of the Hull Equal Rights Group which met, during the 1960s, mostly to talk, but also to try to engage with some of the women trade unionists in the area. I suppose this was at a time when socialism seemed to be a means to equality for women. Hull had a long tradition of women working on the fish docks and there was an upsurge of resentment among them that their pay was much inferior to men’s. The fishing industry was highly differentiated between men’s and women’s work – the men went to sea and the women did the filleting, packing, freezing and other work that went on in the fish houses. The women did not expect equal pay but at least better pay, approaching that of the men. The context to this, what some have seen as the start of second wave feminism, was the strike of women machinists at the Ford factory in Dagenham in 1968 (romanticized in the film ‘Made in Dagenham’) and the subsequent foundation of the National Joint Action Campaign for Women’s Equal Rights.

During the early 1970s I became involved in establishing a women’s aid centre. These were the days of Erin Pizzey and her famous centre at Chiswick. A small group of us decided to buy a little house in a run-down, working-class area of Hull. The funds came from the mother of one of us, a sum in the region of £300. This area of Hull had been the centre of the fishing industry but by the time we bought our house, it was very impoverished and disadvantaged. It has now all been demolished. We advertised our services to social workers, the police and in clinics of various kinds but we had to be circumspect about this because we did not want to attract vengeful husbands and boyfriends. I can’t claim the refuge was a complete success; it was disorganized, squalid, crowded and unprofessional but it was certainly used. We did a lot of fundraising and eventually we employed a worker, and managed to buy a larger house we thought of as a second-stage refuge, for women and their children who needed to stay for a longer time, with the first house as an emergency refuge. Eventually, the local authority took over the whole project and developed purpose-built accommodation.

Like many British students of my generation, I received a literary education which was almost entirely formalist. My tutor had been taught by F. R. Leavis and gave us a Leavisite training. In the 1960s, ‘the words on the page’ could and should, we were told, be interpreted without reference to the author’s life or the historical context. Close reading was all important; syntax, structure, metrics, irony, patterns of imagery were our proper study. The context to this was the struggle to establish English itself as an academic discipline, distinct from Classics and History. And it also relates to the dominance of women students in the subject. It was regarded from its earliest days as a poor-man’s Classics and also as a kind of woman’s Classics and a woman’s History and something of a sop to women clamouring for entry into higher education. As the 1921 Newbolt Commission on The Teaching of English in England stated, English studies should be encouraged as a means of creating national identity and blending the classes together, but it should not allow itself to be made into mere branch of History.² Its approach should be rigorous, using analytical techniques to guard against it becoming gossip about who died of TB or committed suicide. With the professionalization of the discipline and its presence in universities, it had to be not only toughened up, made more difficult and pseudo-scientific, but it also had to be taught by men, to men students as well as women students. The formalist literary education I received was designed to convince university authorities and male students and staff that it was not a soft option, and that we were being trained to read and write like men.

Although close reading is valuable, I began to think it was not enough and that there should be an overt political dimension to my teaching. At this time I was friendly with an ex-student who taught in a College of Education in London with students who came from families where higher education was not a routine passage into adulthood. In order to engage these mostly female students she introduced a course on women writers in contemporary fiction. When she talked to me about this, it was another epiphany: why shouldn’t I do something like that? There was a parallel example in some of the Marxist criticism of this period. So in the early 1970s I began to persuade my department at Hull that I should develop a special subject, for third year students, limited in number, on a module entitled ‘Women in Literature and Society from 1837 to the present day’. It now seems embarrassingly naive and crude, both as a title and in practice, in the light of what was to develop in the next two decades. There was some opposition to the idea but eventually I was allowed to teach it but as an extra to my normal teaching load. When it was advertised to students the uptake was overwhelming. I couldn’t teach all those who wanted to do it. Fortunately I soon had two colleagues, Patsy Stoneman and Angela Leighton, who wanted to do it, and so three parallel modules ran and almost all students who wanted to do it could do so. And so it went on, and in the 1980s we introduced a master’s programme, and by means of an Erasmus programme we drew in staff and students from Italy, Spain, Germany and later Portugal, Greece, Hungary and Poland. We grew as the European Union grew. All through, it was the most rewarding teaching I have ever done. In later years this feminist activity developed into a Centre for Gender Studies and a part-time degree, along with the Journal of Gender Studies, which is still in existence. By this time feminist criticism had increased in sophistication and difficulty and this gave it an increased academic respectability. Just think of all the books that came into being in the late 1960s, the 1970s and onwards. From Elaine Showalter to Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, Melanie Klein and Nancy Armstrong, feminist criticism toughened its sinews and became a respected, even feared, departmental presence.

But I want to do a kind of loop backwards and think about my title for this chapter. When I was a young lecturer Hull University’s Extra-Mural department asked me to do a session on Winifred Holtby who was born in a village near Bridlington in 1898, dying in 1935. I’d read only her most famous novel, South Riding, published posthumously in 1936, and had to read more of her work to give my talk, which was attended by my mother, the only lecture she ever heard me give. As she had liked South Riding and urged me to read it, as she was herself a Yorkshire woman of indomitable spirit and as she died not long afterwards, this occasion came to have particular poignancy for me. After a number of delays, I went on to write Holtby’s biography, which I called The Clear Stream, a phrase she had used about herself when she said that ‘I never feel I’ve really had a life of my own. My existence seems like a clear stream which has simply reflected other people’s stories and problems.’³

Writing this biography took me into the feminist politics of the interwar period, the period when women had got the vote in 1918 on partial basis of equality with men, and were to get it fully ten years later. Holtby became involved in the feminist journal Time and Tide, largely run by Lady Margaret Rhondda, and its activist organization the Six Point Group, which called itself ‘an equality society’. It had six precise campaign points, one of which was equal pay for men and women teachers. When one point was won, another would be substituted. These later evolved into six general points of equality for women: political, occupational, moral, social, economic and legal. The Six Point Group went into abeyance in 1980 and was dissolved in 1983.⁴

The feminists of the Six Point Group considered (and called) themselves equalitarians who believed that legislation on rights for women was of primary importance and that once this was achieved everything would fall into place. This position brought the Group into conflict with those who thought that women as wives and particularly as mothers should receive the most urgent attention. In practical programmes there was little difference between the two groups but there were underlying differences of principle which led to sharp exchanges. The groups became known as Old Feminists and New Feminists. Holtby, as an Old Feminist, resisted the New Feminist approach, saying that we don’t know what we mean as feminine characteristics, or masculine ones. Instead ‘we might allow individual ability rather than social tradition to determine what vocation each member of our community should follow’.⁵ She doesn’t use the term but what Holtby was resisting was any essentialist idea of what constitutes either male or female, or feminine or masculine. ‘The New Feminism emphasizes the importance of the “women’s point of view”, the Old Feminism believes in the primary importance of the human being.’⁶

The issue was highlighted by what became known as the Rhondda Peerage Claim in which Margaret Rhondda, citing the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act, took action against the House of Lords on grounds of its exclusion of her as a peeress in her own right. To the New Feminists this was an elitist cause but to the Old Feminists it was a test case which would impact on all kinds of discriminatory practices, such as the dismissal of women from teaching, the civil service, nursing and the police force when they married, the reluctance of Cambridge University to grant degrees to women and the refusal of the London Hospitals to increase the quota of women medical students. A rearguard action by the Lord Chancellor, Birkenhead, ensured that the claim was not successful.

Holtby’s most powerful opponents among the New Feminists were trade union women, particularly Eleanor Rathbone, whose view was that political equality ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Old Feminism, New Feminism
• 2  Virginia Woolfs A Room of Ones Own and the Problem of Inherited Wealth
• 3  Amazons and Afterwards: Correspondence as Feminist Practice
• 4  Progress and Feminist Literary Criticism: The New Eras of Nadine Gordimer
• 5  The Inheritance of Irony and Development of Flippancy
• 6  Roger Scrutons Daughters: Feminism and Parasitism in the Idea of a University
• Index