The Books: The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West 1911-17; “The Future of the Middle Classes: Women Who Are Parasites”

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17

Here, in this Nov. 1912 essay published in The Clarion, Rebecca West takes the gloves off. On second thought, I don’t think she ever had her gloves ON. The fight for enfranchisement was important. Rebecca West believed women needed to be full participants in the culture, and did not need men to protect them. Especially since the men who fought to block women voting ended up showing their real colors, their small-minded vicious natures. I am going to let such bozos decide my fate? Her life was punctuated by assassinations of world leaders, which she gets into at great length in her masterpiece Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. And as nations organized themselves into war machines, she resented it on a profound level. The world of men (politics, leadership) was in charge, but women were dragged along in the wake of these catastrophes, having no “say” in any of it because they couldn’t vote or lead. Rebecca West was not stupid and did not believe that if women were in charge things would go much better. But she certainly wanted to participate, fully, so that she felt somewhat in charge of her own fate. Voting is powerful that way. It may be somewhat illusory, but it gives you a sense of agency, and if your country is going to drag itself into war, and women’s husbands and brothers and fathers would march off to be slaughtered, then, yes, women had an interest in that. It affected them personally. And to have such gigantic events occur, repeatedly, without participation in the ballot box … was outrageous.

But West was always interested in multiple things at the same time. She was not a one-issue kind of person, and her “take” on things often differed from her suffragist sisters. When the suffragette movement moved in an anti-sex way, she balked. When the suffragettes focused only on domestic things, she clocked it as the middle-class bullshit that it was. There were real problems in working-class England, and the suffragette movement was mostly a middle-class one, with middle-class concerns. West burst onto the scene, guns blazing, with a Socialist mindset. She wasn’t just interested in getting the vote. She wanted the entire system to be changed, so that people got paid a decent wage, people had clean water to drink, people weren’t ground down by poverty. The vote was just a PART of the struggle and it was disheartening to her to see suffragettes focus only on the vote. Her columns were always a cry for MORE change.

And here, she takes on the middle-class woman, what she called – repeatedly – “parasite women.” Society was set up in a certain way, with certain assumptions. Victorian culture was a monolith, and its values were omnipresent and engrained. The middle-class woman was born and bred to be a “parasite” on society – far more than working-class women, who may have needed help from the larger culture, but were out there participating in the economy. Middle-class women sat at home, and organized church mission societies, and lived off the wealth of others. They did nothing. They had babies and kept a nice home and were never expected to work for a living. West could be vicious towards the parasite woman, although she understood why they had become parasites – the entire culture had a vested interest in keeping women out of the public sphere. But that time was over. Revolution was coming – social and economic – and women needed to walk out their front doors, put on their big-girl pants, and try to make it out there in the world, without protection of husband/father/whatever. The economic situation of England was too dire. Girls in that economic class may still have been raised with the expectation that they would marry someday, and be taken care of for the rest of their lives – but real world situations was making that an old-fashioned fantasy.

The working-class was suffering. The middle-class was shattering, and also finding it hard to support itself in the way that they thought they would be accustomed to. Certainties were breaking up, falling apart. The year is 1912. Just two years before Gavrilo Princip stepped out of the crowd in Sarajevo, his action cracking apart the entire edifice of the world, the final nail in the coffin to Victorian certainty about itself. West sensed something was coming. She didn’t know what it would be. But things were ending and it was not going to be pretty. Women needed to participate, fully. Society could no longer support them or protect them. That type of life was done. Middle-class women (and men) were, of course, the last ones to understand this, and they held on tightly to what they were accustomed to. West went after them, and after them hard, in column after column.

For her, suffrage was just one teeny part of the puzzle. The much bigger element was economic and social reform, and because she was educated and understood world history, she knew that that “reform” probably would not march forward in an orderly manner. She knew that bad times were coming and she was deeply concerned about the fact that middle-class women put their hands over their ears and eyes and refused to acknowledge it. She did not understand such passivity – she had always had to work for a living (and remember, she’s only about 19, 20 years old here). Whatever was coming was going to be huge, and she wanted women to gear up, be ready for it, throw themselves into the fray. All of them. Working-class women were already doing the lion’s share of the work. They had been working for generations. The fantasy of “little wife at home” was purely middle-class in origin. That world was about to end. West sensed it. And she sensed revolution of some kind would follow. Economic strife/change often lead to revolution. I mean witness the panic going on in Greece at this very moment!

Her piece here is a long one, but I’ll excerpt the opening bit. I love her analogy about the railyard at the bottom of the hill.

Excerpt from The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17: “The Future of the Middle Classes: Women Who Are Parasites”, by Rebecca West

Life ought not to be divided into watertight compartments. Apparently feminism seems a simple matter to many suffragettes, like floating a patent medicine. One advertises the principle of the equality of the sexes with immense vigor and publicity until the public begins to swallow it. As to the effect it has on the public the suffragette cares as little as the patent-medicine vendor. Indeed it is often explained at suffrage meetings that the women’s vote will have no appreciable effect on the social structure, and will simply act as a police des mouers to suppress the White Slave Traffic. It is strange that the middle-class woman, who forms the backbone of the suffrage societies, should believe that one can superimpose the emancipation of women on the social system as one sticks a halfpenny stamp on a postcard. For in the social developments consequent upon the emancipation of women she will probably play a great and decisive part.

For the middle-class woman comes of a class that is in a state of chaos. The present position of the middle classes may be symbolized by certain distracting disturbance of the residents of Hampstead. On a hillside starting at Church Row and extending down to the Finchley Road there is an area of immensely valuable house property. Those who dwell in Fitzjohn’s Avenue and the surrounding parts have arrived at the summit of the middle classes. After that they can only soar upwards to Park Lane. They have everything that money can reasonably be expected to buy, and certainly more than is good for them.

Yet at the bottom of the hillside there is a railways goods yard. That means a persistent and uproarious disturbance of the middle classes every night in the year. Engine whistles shriek, trains puff and rattle, men shout, and there is that particularly maddening reverberation of buffers all night long. Up in Fitzjohn’s Avenue members of the middle classes may be dying, and members of the middle classes may be being born – these last in the minority, for birth-rate is very low in such parts – but this infuriating disturbance goes on. There is also the uncomfortable circumstance that every now and then a shunter gets crushed or a boy gets mauled to death by a runaway capstan, but these things rarely come within the cognizance of Fitzjohn’s Avenue. Even without that the night is made hideous.

Now the people in Fitzjohn’s Avenue are the railway shareholders and directors. It was entirely on their shoulders to organize the railway system so that the good yards and sidings were at some distance from human habitation. It was their business to discover that all those vans that are shifted about are not really necessary: most of them work about six months out of a life of seventeen years, and spend the rest of the time wilting in sidings and being repaired. But they did not take the trouble. So now the world of work, which they refused to organize economically and justly, has its revenge on them by destroying their night’s rest.

There you get the position of the middle classes today. It used to be imagined in Victorian days that to be a member of the middle classes was to be in a position of perfect security. One rose from the working classes by the practice of what one Samuel Smiles called “self-help”; that consisted of practicing the baser Christian virtues in order to steal the job of the man above you. Thus one attained in the middle classes, and after an unexciting life, died, leaving a large middle-class family, perfectly confident that they, too, would have large middle-class families. There would, please God, always be a sufficient residuum of the self-helpless, idle, thriftless and drunken to do the work.

But now there is no such feeling of security. The special circumstances which helped the middle classes to this prosperity do not now operate. The wealth that flowed into England at the beginning of the last century was largely due to the fact that after the industrial revolution the manufacturer found himself in power over a vast reservoir of amenable labor. Trade unions were still illegal combinations, so the adult worker was cheap indeed, and cheaper still the labor of little children. Out of this slavery England sweated enough wealth to enable herself to resist Napoleon without unduly feeling the financial strain. Thus she was able to pursue her commercial way unruffled at the time her European rivals were hopelessly overcome by the Napoleonic Wars. Again, we see that the poor, in asking for a greater share of the national wealth, are neither thieves nor beggars, but simply workers presenting an account for services rendered.

But England has outlived these advantages. The European countries have recovered and, with wits sharpened by adversity, are formidable rivals. The middle-class man is hard hit by this readjustment of things. Moreover, his two errors of judgement are coming home to roost. First of these is the idea about the thriftlessness and worthlessness of the working classes. The working classes have rebelled against him; and they are so clever and so fit that they have got a good deal out of him already and they are going to get a lot more. Free education, free libraries, the Workmen’s Compensation Act – all such things as those come out of the middle-class man’s right-hand pocket. His other error of judgement, snobbishness, which makes him love all loves as one should only love the Lord, makes him feel deeply surprised when the rich and great do not assist him in his hour of need, but pick his left-hand pocket with their demands for rent for their overpriced and capriciously disposed-of land. Between them he is plucked very clean. That is, of course, only from his own point of view. But it is perfectly true that there is a very black future for the middle-class man. There is not the slightest prospect of his being able to live up to his present standard of comfort for more than one generation.

That means all hands to the pumps. The middle-class woman will have to come out and work for her living. Not as the exception, as it was ten to twenty years ago; not in the minority, as it is now; but as the general rule. The middle-class woman will have to stop being a parasite.

There is no question that she will be able to compete equally with men. But what will happen next? What will be the effect on the labor market?