The Books: The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West 1911-17; “On Mentioning the Unmentionable: An Exhortation to Miss Pankhurst”

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

In the last excerpt from this collection of Rebecca West’s early journalism, I talked a lot about her feminism, and the form it took: where it came from and how she coincided with and then differed from the mainstream movement, led by women like Christabel Pankhurst. West, despite her involvement with the “ism”s of the day, was not a joiner. She did not subscribe to groupthink, she did not go with the flow.

Here, in the 1913 essay from The Clarion, Rebecca West sets her sights on Christabel Pankhurst’s relatively new crusade against syphilis, a scourge of the day and certainly a huge problem, but West balked at it being lumped in with the feminist movement (it’s something she returns to again and again). STDs could be, literally, a death sentence in those days, and the shame of it kept women (and men, West reminds her readers) from getting help. Much of West’s feminism had to do with economics, but a lot of it had to do with the social status of the single woman, how she was infantilized and condescended to. She couldn’t go out alone, she couldn’t go out with men, she would be branded a whore … and so what the hell then? It put women in a double/triple bind.

However: Pankhurst’s obsession with sex, STDs, seemed unseemly to West, especially since it started to take the turn towards prudishness, celibacy, and a general hatred of the monsters that were men. This, to West’s clear and analytical and yet emotional mind, seemed unrealistic. Also, not TRUE. If you knew men, then you knew that not all of them were terrible. If you had sex, then you knew that not all sex was a power-play. Many men were looking for love too, and yes, in all the wrong places. They went with prostitutes because “nice girls didn’t” and the whole culture was both sex-crazy and sex-phobic and it made people literally insane. West saw the whole thing.

Pankhurst seemed to be removing herself from the important field of action and retreating into an ideological fortress, and West thought that was bad for feminism. It made them all look like lunatics, and it made them the embodiment of the judgments of their opponents (that they were all man-hating unwomanly women). West fought back. To go against the grain, then and now, is a daunting prospect. If you go against the party-line, you are treated as an apostate, a traitor. I know this will ruffle feathers, but I actually agree with some of Chrissie Hynde’s recent statements. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look it up. And now she is being excoriated left and right, people saying, “I like her music, hate her views” and it’s all so predictable I want to stab myself. Chrissie Hynde was raped. If these social justice people want to demand that people do not have contempt for their “lived experience” then why are they doing the same thing to Hynde? Can’t we at least consider the possibility that her views also come from a personal place, that her motivations are not somehow sinister? What is so dangerous/threatening about considering that what she says is a practical and grown-up way to look at the dangers women face? Nope. You just label it as “blaming the victim”, and the argument is seemingly over. Honestly. And to say, “I should be able to walk down the street in my underwear and be totally safe” seems to me to be living in La-La Land. This attitude is not keeping women safe. It is making women believe in some Utopia instead of realizing they need to step up and take care of themselves. I used to dress extremely proactively when I was young. It was the era of the Kinder-Whore. I loved that style. I was harassed all the time. I was attacked as well. I had some very hairy moments. (And I didn’t DESERVE these things. NOBODY “deserves” these things. But to say that there was zero correlation between my outfit and the harassment is ludicrous. And to say that removes me from responsibility. It turns me into a victim and that I won’t have. It also is a reversion to the Victorian era when even a glimpse of ankle was seen as provoking and dangerous. Fuck THAT. So I will dress how I like, but not be an idiot about it. Be cunning, make good choices, read Gavin de Becker’s Gift of Fear. We live in a dangerous and unfair world as women. Be smart.) My cop friends, back in my Kinder-Whore days, gave me self-defense tips, wrestling me to the ground and telling me what to do if I was in a tough spot. They didn’t say “Well maybe don’t wear a corset and a tiny kilt and ripped fishnets at 11 o’clock at night when you’re out by yourself.” They said, “Go for the eyes, Sheila. Don’t go for the nuts. Go for the eyes.” Their attitude became my attitude: Dress however you want. And be ready to defend yourself. But mentioning how a woman is dressed is so “not done” now (and yes, I get it, for good reasons) that it’s hard to even discuss it. The issue is not monolithic. There are varying degrees, shadings, complexity. See what happens when you limit language? You stop being able to discuss things at all and so when Chrissie Hynde strolls in and says the “wrong” thing, everyone’s heads explode with outrage. It is never a good sign when you are AFRAID to speak your mind. I get afraid to say, “Yeah, actually, I think Chrissie has a point, guys.” And here I am: saying it on my site. What are you going to do? Arrest me? Shun me? I understand the enemies of women are everywhere, and looking for ANYTHING to keep us down and back. And I don’t want to “give them anything” to help them. But honestly, misogynists are stupid people. They see things in black-and-white. They are uninterested in subtlety (or, worse – they can’t even perceive subtlety) and so an in-depth conversation is impossible. I feel like saying, “Okay, boys. Back off and let the grown-ups talk now.” So I understand why the battle lines are drawn. But the commentary about Hynde is a perfect example of how this whole thing works, and has always worked. Mainstreamers set the agenda, outsiders speak up, they are shouted down if they are not “in line” with the main agenda, they are sidelined, scorned. I mean, look at Camille Paglia. Only in the La-La Land of Ideology could she be described as “dangerous” and a “reactionary,” (words Gloria Steinem used in an interview to sum up Paglia).

West felt Pankhurst’s focus on sex was harmful to the movement, it was limiting it, it was dialing it down to the personal. West also took issue with the prudishness of it, as well as the vicious anti-male attitudes. It alarmed her. She writes early in her article: “One must love humanity before one can save it.” She sensed Pankhurst slipping off into hatred of man, and that was a dead-end street. West’s bag was economics and the Industrial Revolution had destroyed the quality of life for both women AND men. Adjust the economic disparity and life would be better, freer, for everyone. Working-class men were just as held down as working-class women, although working-class women were often blamed for more (the disintegration of the family, etc.) But Pankhurst blamed ALL men, and West had to say, “Now, now, venereal disease is ALSO a social and economic problem, not a male problem.” In an earlier article she wrote plainly, “I deplore rancor against men”, quite a thing to say when the men in power were imprisoning her suffragette sisters and throwing them down flights of stairs. But West was smart. She was only 20 years old, but she was smart.

This article is a response to an article about venereal disease by Christabel Pankhurst called “The Dangers of Marriage.” (Pankhurst, by the way, was not married. Neither was West.)

Excerpt from The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17: “On Mentioning the Unmentionable: An Exhortation to Miss Pankhurst”, by Rebecca West

But the real crime in Miss Pankhurst’s article is her attitude towards those who suffer from sexual disease. She begins splendidly with the sweeping statement: “Men before marriage and often while they are married contract sexual disease from prostitutes and give this disease to their wives.” With a sharp pang one will see Miss Pankhurst on the Day of Judgement, sweeping all our fathers and husbands and sons down amongst the goats. She elaborates her point of view with vehemence:

Never again must young women enter into marriage blindfolded. From now onwards they must be warned of the fact that marriage is intensely dangerous, until such time as men’s moral standards are completely unchanged and they have become as chaste and clean-living as women.

These consequences are not only suffered by the persons who wantonly contract syphilis in the course of immoral living. They are suffered by innocent wives … and numbers of women who have inherited from their forebears the terrible legacy of suffering … and there are men who also suffer, though they have learned so little by it that they seek in immoral intercourse new infection, which they in turn transmit to generations yet to come.

Enough has surely been said to prove the dangers of marriage under existing conditions; to show the injury done to women by the low standards and immoral conduct of men.

Dear lady, behind whom I have been proud to walk in suffrage processions, this is rather a partial view. If we take it that your statements are literally true, have you no pity for the immoral men? We must be sorry for the man who loses the bright glory of love on the streets. He lives in a city and leads a tame life till he becomes tame and loses the wild thing’s scorn for a pleasure that is stale, unecstatic, grimy. All the time he is invited to brood on sex by us, by women. For there is the army of rich parasite women who have nothing to do and no outlet for the force in them except to play with sex and make life its gaudy circus. And there is the other army of women who will beseech him to buy their sex because it is the only thing they have that will fetch money. The fallen man may be something that quite certainly no woman wants as a lover and he becomes very soon something too cheap and dirty to have much to do with, but he is as much a victim of social conditions as the fallen woman. Moreover, had Miss Pankhurst studied the subject for more than three weeks she would have known that disease strikes down for the most part the young; that most of its victims are mere youths, sometimes perilously ignorant, who are bewitched by tawdry lures before their maturity has shown them the difference between the white, flashing thing of passion and the shabby substitute sold by gaslight.

But this scolding attitude of Miss Pankhurst is not only ununderstanding, it is also a positive incentive to keep these diseases the secret, spreading things they are. Doctors who were studying this matter long before Miss Pankhurst or I were born have complained bitterly that their efforts will come to nothing so long as sufferers are intimidated by a hostile social atmosphere into being afraid to acknowledge the nature of their illness and thus to seek advice as the best way of treatment. As the great Duclaux said: “The struggle against syphilis is only possible if we agree to regard its victims as unfortunate and not as guilty …” Only so will sufferers be encouraged to come forward and acknowledge themselves centers of infection. Let Miss Pankhurst ask herself: Would any of these hundreds of thousands of people who have innocently contracted such diseases – who have inherited it, who caught it while attending to the sick, who have been infected by the use of a cup or a towel that had previously been used by an infected person – be likely to be frank about their malady in a social atmosphere influenced by “The Dangers of Marriage”?

The strange uses to which we put our new-found liberty! There was a long and desperate struggle before it became possible for women to write candidly on subjects such as these. That this power should be used to express views that would be old-fashioned and uncharitable in the pastor of a Little Bethel is a matter for scalding tears.