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
Along with her tireless writing for the suffragette journal The Clarion, West wrote book reviews (mainly) for the Daily News. Her book reviews are amazing and I wish they would be compiled in their own collection. Her mind! The things she liked! The things she didn’t! She had minimal formal schooling (her family didn’t have enough money). Whatever reading she did, she did mostly on her own. Therefore, she didn’t automatically respect “the canon.” She made up her own mind. She did not consider sacred cows to be sacred. She dismissed Tolstoy, for example. She had no use for him. (And when Rebecca dismisses, she REALLY dismisses.) Because of her iconoclastic education, her taste is unexpected and always fascinating. There is no “received” wisdom there. This really comes out in her responses to current books in these reviews. Some of the books are very of-the-moment (books about the women’s movement, about current politics), some have since become classics (her review of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier is incredible. At one point she says, “This book is better than we deserve.” Classic Rebecca. A compliment with a huge swipe in it.)
She despised Strindberg. There are 5 (maybe?) articles about Strindberg in this collection. He drove her crazy. She couldn’t let it go. She thought he was mentally ill and had nothing to say about anything. She thought he was a terrible writer. He was an unrepentant misogynist – (his plays are challenges to put on today for that reason. They are not feminist manifestos about trapped women in unfair societies. No. His plays blame uppity women for everything wrong in society. Strindberg was a vicious impotent MRA activist, basically. “Miss Julie” must be made to PAY for crossing the class lines, but also for wanting to be happy. I’ve seen productions that try to avoid the misogyny. They don’t work. Hatred of women are what the plays are all about. Take it or leave it, friends. I like Strindberg although I can see West’s point. The recent film of Miss Julie, directed by Liv Ullmann, starring Jessica Chastain, Colin Farrell, and Samantha Morton, is actually really good at walking that line: sympathy with Miss Julie, and blaming her for everything. I covered that in my review for Rogerebert.com.) So any time anything from Strindberg crossed Rebecca West’s desk, she went to WORK tearing him apart.
Naturally she reviewed books about her own movement, women’s rights. She trashed books that were condescending and critical of women’s desires to be equal. But she had an equally keen eye towards her own allies. Nobody got a pass.
The following book review from 1916 is interesting (and gratifying, to me, as an American. Sue me.) The book is called Women’s Work in Municipalities, by Mary Ritter Beard. Never read it. Apparently it was an exploration of the work of American women in their own communities, how they organized themselves, how they got the men in power to get off their duffs and do some damn work on their behalf and on the behalf of the community. Rebecca West was so impressed. Not just at the gumption of these humble women, but at their wide focus. They weren’t just focused on themselves: give us the vote, give us equal pay. They wanted their communities to work, pick up the garbage, fix the roads. English women in West’s movement, as she criticized them for often, had more “lofty” goals. The ephemera of political and social power, a prudish obsession with the dangers of sex (West thought the obsession with sex, the calls for abstinence, etc., was completely silly, unrealistic, and damaging to the cause. She loved pleasure. She did not think all men were evil. She thought that outlook was stupid. – she wrote about it often) – All of the critiques of her own movement were West’s way of commenting on women’s privileged status ALREADY in society. (She referred to such women as “parasite women.” Ouch.) There was a reason that working-class women were not attracted to the feminist movement in England, and this was something West was sad and pissed about. Those were the women who needed power. As long as it was strictly a middle/upper-class movement, they would never do any REAL good. West was a critic of the entire capitalist system, how it ground down the weak. Any problem in society could be pointed back to that unfairness. West was a Socialist, not in the Utopia sense, but in the sense that working people, the so-called “masses,” were under the thumb of a brutal system with no way out. The issue was ECONOMIC as well as political. Or maybe it was MORE economic than political. And that was something that protected middle-class “parasite” women who had never had to work would never understand. Rebecca West came from a family that had economic hardships, at least in her generation. There was not money for her to finish school and she had to go to work, which she did, along with her agitating for the vote when she was a teenager. Her perspective as someone who HAD to work — she was a single mother who had a baby out of wedlock (with H.G. Wells as somewhat deadbeat dad) — helped her see the imbalances and some of the ridiculous aspects of the feminist movement with more clarity. (Working class women and women of color had the same criticism of the women’s movement in the 70s, and have the same criticism now about the sidelining of voices once a movement starts to gain a little momentum.)
West read the book about how American women tackled problems and she was very very impressed. Here are the opening paragraphs. Great stuff.
Excerpt from The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17
This is the barbaric yawp of social reform. In this country municipal advance is wrung from the hands of established persons with paunches by earnest people with spectacles. But over in America it seems to be carried out by pioneer mothers who have run out into the yard, with flour on their aprons and frying-pans in their hands, to tell the male that lounges against the gate-post that if he doesn’t do that chore he has been told about there will be trouble. They are violent, they are sometimes incredibly naive and even blatantly ignorant – they extend their blessing to that Dr. Mabel McCoy Irwin who got the Post Office to suppress Man and Superman in the mails – but they have the strong right arm and the short, invigorating temper of the housewife.
They get things done. “In Woonsocket, in the dry region of South Dakota, the women of a club requested the Town Fathers to supply them with pure and more abundant water.” The Fathers were unenthusiastic. “The women, nothing daunted, organized an Improvement Association, collected money and hired an expert to drill an artesian well.” In Pasadena, California, a women’s club is collecting a fund (to which, we are glad to hear, “the Pasadena Elks have donated a lot”) for the establishment of a free public market under sanitary conditions. The Women’s Town Improvement Association of Westport, Connecticut, laid 2,000 feet of sidewalk. The Women’s City Club of Chicago campaigned for a modern method of garbage disposal.
Those American activities may strike the ignorant as teaching no lesson to the Englishwomen; in our established country, it may seem to them, all these things have been done already. Yet innumerable Medical Officers of Health of English districts complain every year in their reports that there can be no reduction of the deaths due to pulmonary disorders until the roads have been improved. And our government reports show again and again that one of the most conspicuous causes behind a high rate of infant mortality is an antiquated system of refuse destruction, particularly when associated with bad housing conditions. These American agitations, which seem no more statesmanlike than the flapping of dust, protect the State at its roots.
