The Books: The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West 1911-17; “An Orgy of Disorder and Cruelty: The Beginnings of Sex Antagonism”

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

The fight for women’s enfranchisement was bitter, protracted and violent. The suffragettes of England had organized themselves to such a degree that they would show up at various political meetings, where the men were discussing Important Things (usually leaving out the issue of votes for women), and demand rowdily from the back or from the galleries that they address their concerns. Riots broke out, with women being thrown down stairwells and beaten to a pulp (as today’s excerpt, an article in The Clarion from 1912, describes.) Rebecca West herself was present at many of these events, from when she was a teenager, witnessing the callousness with which polite requests were treated. No wonder women resorted to more violent means. If you could be thrown into the bushes just for shouting “Votes for Women,” then that was a clear signal of how threatened/closed-off the power structure really was. The press, both Tory and Liberal, did not comport themselves particularly well, which is why the feminists started their own newspapers (which is how Rebecca West got her start as a journalist).

The power structure was so set in stone, and very few people give up or share power willingly. That’s how seductive power is. This should not be a surprise, or a revelation. I think it was Napoleon who observed, from afar, George Washington’s second term as President, and remarked, “If he walks away from office, he will be the greatest man who ever lived.” And of course, Washington did walk away. Napoleon could never do it. Because once you have a taste of Rule, you want more. And more. History is full of examples. So the men, who owned all of the arms of power, did not want to give it up. The fight for enfranchisement was like lancing a boil or something: all this nasty shit started coming out, shit that was always there in the patriarchal system, and yet hidden from view before women started saying, “We don’t want this.” Now that really was a revelation for many of the women, fighting the fight: Look at how much they HATE us. They had sensed that hatred and contempt, but it had been hidden from view in a veil of politeness and deference, required by the Victorian patriarchal system which put women on a pedestal. Once that pedestal crashed, out came this roaring rambunctious hatred, and for many it was upsetting, sure, but for many others it was the force that drove them on. As in: Okay, now we know the truth, now we have confirmation: they despise us. So we will be DAMNED if we let men who are so small-minded, so hateful, rule over our lives and destinies.

Rebecca West, who enjoyed men a lot, who always was ready to point out that “sex antagonism” (men hating women, politics favoring men over women, etc.) could work both ways, and she wanted men to understand that. As she wrote later in this essay:

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.

There was a lot of rage-boy whining going on, which we all should be familiar with today. Witness GamerGate. Or John Oliver’s recent rant about the Internet and women. Go to any article that discusses John Oliver’s rant, and then read the comments. Sex antagonism is alive and well. These boys are like, “Yes, women should be equal. I should be able to punch a woman in the face, and not be judged for it. If I can punch a man, why can’t I punch a woman?” Oh boo-hoo, baby wants a bottle. How about we stop punching altogether and start talking and listening? This just goes to show you that a sense of entitlement is very engrained – it is somehow encouraged, by osmosis, and so when something comes along that threatens that, people flip OUT. I read some of the vicious misogyny and think: Who raised these monsters? Shame on Mom and Dad both: You both did a terrible job. Well, that’s one thought. The other one is: My goodness, I am glad I hang around men who like women. Jeez Louise, boys, it’s just so much easier in life when you like women. So much else starts to make sense then. (The opposite is true as well, ladies.) The last one is: Do these people not know ANY women they like? Mothers? Grandmothers? Sisters? Daughters? A 2nd grade teacher who praised your drawings? Nobody? How can you generalize about women so? It is so revealing of your intellectual limitations and you are not even AWARE of it. I can’t generalize with total certainty about men because I know far too many men who have ZERO to do with the stereotype.

Anyway, reading Rebecca West’s pieces about the violent fight for enfranchisement is a bummer because so much of that shit is still going on AND it is my point of view that it is definitely worse now than it was back when I was coming of age. I think it’s because every bozo now has a microphone on the Internet, whereas once upon a time, the bozos had to write out their manifestos in long-hand on a legal pad, like every other crazy person, and none of us had to hear any of it.

The article excerpted below describes “an orgy of disorder and cruelty” that followed a bunch of suffragettes breaking up a speech made by Lloyd George (soon to be a national hero, but West had no use for him) in his home town of Llanystumdwy, where he was opening up a village school. He portrayed himself as a paragon of a family man, wife and kids, the ultimate politician with his smiling brood around him, and West thought it was all bullshit (as the opening paragraph below expresses. I love it when Rebecca West does not pull her punches.) Lloyd George was a Liberal, and, famously, one of the engineers of the modern welfare state, as many would call it. Rebecca West despised the Liberals, almost more than the Tories, because of the hypocrisy and “littleness” on display in much of their politics and attitude. She continued to be relentlessly logical, pointing out the fallacies in the arguments propping up “sex antagonism”. She was unwilling to give the Liberals a pass, because they were for the “right” things, like health care and education and blah-dee-blah. She saw it all as a bunch of windy rhetoric: these guys wanted a pat on the head for being less awful towards women than the Tory party.

And so, the riot that broke out at Lloyd George’s speech-making day in his home town, was a symbol to West, a warning to other suffragettes who put their hope in the Liberal party, who were willing to compromise/wait/forgive.

West was never afraid to “take on” a sacred cow. Lloyd George was something of a sacred cow (and would be even more so throughout World War I, when he served as Prime Minister). In 1912, he presided over a riot, throwing up his hands helplessly at the sight of women being punched in the face, when he just as easily could have done something. West did not forgive or forget. Mind like a steep trap, if you’ll forgive the cliche.

One of her most famous quotes (which she used a couple of times, both in her masterpiece Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, and also in one of her earlier articles) was the following:

A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.

I tend to agree with her. She never forgot her various hatreds, and was able to pull them out when she needed them. “Yes, he may have done much good in this sector, but let us never forget his appalling behavior HERE.” People have short memories. West did not.

I am piecing together the event that prompted the following article based only on West’s description and my own vague knowledge of Lloyd George. The book Young Rebecca suffers from a total lack of explanatory footnotes, or explanatory contextualized opening paragraphs. There was so much wrestling back-and-forth going on, in print, with journalists arguing it out in their columns, and West is responding to a pious “Liberals patting themselves on the back” article about the “orgy of disorder and cruelty”.

Here’s the excerpt.

Excerpt from The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17: “An Orgy of Disorder and Cruelty: The Beginnings of Sex Antagonism”, by Rebecca West

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. Mastermind MP, who was presented with a golden key for that purpose, and upon reaching the institute, the door of the 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 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 honorable 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 honorably.

The right honorable gentleman broke the chain of his argument for another distinguished son of Llanstumdwy. Seeing a suffragette pinioned by this fellow, who was pummeling 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.