The Sheila Variations

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

It’s been an interesting coincidence that Suffragette (which I didn’t like) would come out at around the time that I’ve been busy re-reading The Young Rebecca, essays by Rebecca West written about the suffrage movement (and other things) from the years 1911-1917 – the years when it all came to a head. I already know much of the history, but West gives an amazing contemporaneous view of the often fractious and chaotic events as they occurred on the ground. The push for suffrage was not a linear progression. There was also a lot of division in the ranks. There were serious ideological clashes, and factions broke off, and etc. West was ferocious in her demand for the vote and had been involved in violent protests since she was a teenager. But once she started working as a journalist at 18, 19, she really let loose. Her writing reminds me of H.L. Mencken’s on some level, with the same mix of humor, smarts, and contempt for arguments she thought were stupid. She was an iconoclast, an autodidact (only a couple of years formal schooling), and even in the heat of the moment her critical-thinking skills were on high alert. Despite her involvement in a couple of different “ism”s of the day, she wasn’t really a joiner. She was too independent for that. Similar to George Orwell too. Or Arthur Koestler. She deserves to be recognized as one of the greatest documenters of the 20th century ideological upheavals, and … almost the mass brainwashing that occurs when people line up on either side of that divide. So she was a feminist, but called out some of the silliness, and some of her annoyances with the movement. She was a Socialist, as many intellectuals were in the first decades of the 20th century, but then had the unblinkered attitude that allowed her to see the monstrous results of that ideology as it took form in Russia. (The Left experienced a gigantic split – or another one – over the whole Russia thing. Those who criticized Russia were seen as apostates, traitors, etc. because if you criticize Russia, you’re criticizing the dogma of Socialism, and on and on. It definitely took insiders – those who HAD “believed” in Socialism – like West, Orwell, Koestler – to become the most important voices of the 20th century in picking apart what a shit-storm the whole thing was. And they were NOT thanked for it. Not by their Leftist contemporaries anyway. Conservatives tend to love Orwell, West, Koestler for that very reason, despite the fact that these writers were once caught up in something that conservatives think shameful and evil. So, you know, it’s complicated.)

Rebecca West

West decimated her enemies’ arguments. She also went after what she saw as the silliness in some of the leadership in her own cause. When WWI broke out, and England got involved, many of the feminist leaders had what West thought were cowardly reactions. She thought pacifism was indefensible in the face of the destruction of Belgium. War was horrible, but there are worse things than war. But what made her even more crazy was the rhetoric coming from some of these lady-leaders, claiming that if women were in charge, the world would be all warm-fuzzy lollipops all the time, and also that women were gentler and kinder, in general. Outside of the ridiculousness of this claim (nobody can be more vicious to one another than a group of women), West thought that such attitudes were harkening back to the stultifying sexism of the Victorian era and backwards in time, when women were considered delicate, gentle, and not capable of leadership positions. Some of the feminists of the day were suddenly – weirdly, to West – claiming special privileges for their sex. West didn’t want special privileges. She wanted to be allowed “in the room where it happens” (to quote Aaron Burr’s number about political power in Hamilton). She wanted to have a SAY in her own destiny, by getting the vote, and by the world acknowledging that women were, you know, human, and capable of being decision-makers at a top level. But not to have special privileges, and definitely not to have women be seen as so “other” than men that they were yet again thrust outside of humanity. West was furious at the pacifism in feminism. She called it out. She would continue to do so. When feminism in those early decades retreated from political power and economic equality into a kind of domestic-private-citizen attitude (concerned with marriage, child-rearing, birth control, housework duties, whatever), West was so disappointed. In a 1981 interview with The Paris Review (near the end of West’s life), West looked back on that time, saying of the feminist leadership:

“I admired them enormously, but all that business about venereal disease, which was supposed to be round every corner, seemed to me excessive. I wasn’t in a position to judge, but it did seem a bit silly.”

Now, of course, people can believe what they want to believe, think what they want to think, based on their own context. But this is about Rebecca West, and her response to events, her context, and her disappointment at the focus on women being “other” (we’re kind and gentle, we would never commit war if we were in power, and since there is war going on right now, we will be pacifists because that’s more in line with woman’s natural nature) was extreme. West called such women, women who only cared about private personal matters, “idiots.” (Men didn’t get off easy either. West referred to men as “lunatics,” racing around and dragging the world into wars and conflicts and ridiculous situations because they couldn’t take a SECOND and work things out in a civilized manner.) All of this has to do with politics. West was a political animal. She always was. She did not have some “awakening” later in life, when she suddenly joined the picket lines. Her first published piece came in 1911 when she was only 12 years old, an angry feminist response to some article in the newspaper. Beautifully articulate, sharp as a knife, and thoughtful. Her tone can’t be ignored.

Emmeline Pankhurst

Of course West knew the Pankhursts: Emmeline Pankhurst, the mother, and Emmeline’s two daughters, Christabel and Sylvia. In general, West admired these women, although she was in opposition to Emmeline (and the daughters) on a pretty serious deal-breaking level. (And both Sylvia and Christabel differed with their own mother, breaking off into factions of their own.) West saw Emmeline’s limitations, and called out the suffrage movement for following her blindly. West was a Socialist and saw things more in terms of economics than politics. Emmeline was a do-gooder at heart, who saw things in terms of politics/equality. West thought the whole system needed an overhaul. Emmeline wanted to work WITHIN that system. (Every movement experiences similar disagreements along similar lines.) Christabel’s focus on STDs, and her declaration that women should abstain from sex entirely was seen by West as absolutely ridiculous, naive, silly, the epithets go on and on, but worst of all it was harmful to the movement, and THAT West could not forgive. Don’t these silly prudish ladies realize that a prudish movement will NEVER have wide appeal? could sum up West’s response. An attitude like Christabel Pankhurst’s would automatically exclude women who chose to still have sex with their husbands (because … well, because. It’s marriage. Not all men bring STDs home. West would say in her columns things along the lines of: “Well, you’re hanging out with the wrong kind of men if you think they’re all like that.” West could be brutally dismissive.) An anti-sex platform was narrow-minded and hysterical, in the classic sense. At the same time, later in life, West defended Christabel Pankhurst from various biographers, whom West thought got everything wrong. It was one of those situations where if you’re an insider (as West was), then criticism and disagreement was part of being in the movement. But just let an outsider come along and sneer about it, or point out “hypocrisies” or “inconsistencies” and then West was like: … what does this man in 1970 know about ANYthing and who is HE to criticize the great Christabel Pankhurst??

In the period 1911-17, Emmeline Pankhurst was at the forefront of the movement, its figurehead, but Emmeline’s activism reached back into the 19th century. (Her parents were political activists, her ancestors were abolitionists, she grew up in that kind of aware and motivated household). Her daughters were also leaders in the movement, and the Pankhursts were so associated with women’s suffrage that calling women “Panks” was the derogatory term of the day for “unwomanly” women who agitated for the vote.

Emmeline Pankhurst making a speech

When Emmeline Pankhurst, after multiple imprisonments, after watching the ranks of her followers disappear into prisons, after realizing that the men in power were not about to budge – even their so-called allies kept selling them out – Pankhurst advocated a stronger approach. “Stronger” being an understatement. And that was when the bombs started going off around England. A reign of terror began. These ladies blew up Lloyd George’s summer home, for example. Blew it to bits. They dropped bombs in post-office boxes. They rioted and broke windows.

Emmeline Pankhurst getting arrested

Another engrained attitude at the time was that women were seen as being under the umbrella of protection of men: whether it be a father or a husband. It was how society was set up. That was the social element of it, but that was extended into politics. The men in society were casting votes FOR the women underneath their umbrella. But again, and very important: that attitude emerged from the middle-class. It has middle-class written ALL over it. There were many many women who were not middle-class, who had to go out into the world and work, who had ZERO male protection, had NEVER had it, and never WOULD. West was one of those people. She HAD to work. She had a baby out of wedlock at age 20. She had to raise that child on her own, because the father – H.G. Wells – was a deadbeat. Nobody gave West anything. She had loving parents, but there was no “cushion” for West to fall back on. Very different outlook, and made West a very unique voice in the clamor of voices.) So the whole “umbrella of protection” thing was more outrageous to working-class women and women like West than it might have been to middle/upper-class ladies who actually emerged from that patriarchal environment.

In this 1933 essay called “Reed of Steel,” West gives a biographical account of the life of Emmeline Pankhurst (who had died in 1928.) 1933 was a devastating year in world-events. The mood of the time was bleak, and dangerous forces were again aligning, and West could feel which way the wind was blowing. The fight for suffrage back in the teens felt like a million years ago. Women had the vote now. And women could not prevent the events of the early 30s, which then dragged the world into war yet again. (West never thought women would eradicate war, she thought that was silly, but still: there was a hopelessness in the air then, a feeling that nothing could stop the world from plunging itself into the cataclysm yet again.)

By looking back at the life of Emmeline Pankhurst, its trajectory, its complexity, West found herself in awe at how much had changed, and how much had been forgotten. WWI wiped out the continuum with the past. Nobody could remember what the world was like before that war. And so Emmeline Pankhurst, who had fought for the vote, and died shortly after the vote for women was granted, was receding into the mists of history already. West was sad about that. The fight for suffrage was less than 20 years before but it might have been ancient history. (This attitude, borne out of the carnage of WWI, is what helped create “Modernism” in literature. A dissociation with the past. The 19th century killed outright. Writers baffled at how to describe their reality, their world. A new language was needed, a new form.)

West’s article on Emmeline Pankhurst is lengthy and detailed. There are so many excellent lines. (She’s the kind of writer who has an unforgettable sentence in almost every paragraph. H.L. Mencken comes to mind again. And no wonder Christopher Hitchens considered Rebecca West his “north star,” one of his major inspirations as a writer. He’s not alone.) You get a great background for the woman West referred to as a “reed of steel” (the line I quoted in my Suffragette review), but it’s not a hero-worship piece. West could see the good with the bad, the faults with the gifts. She was never an “either/or” person, which made her difficult to classify, and therefore difficult to analyze. Some current-day feminists (the ones who have brought a rigidity to the language that would have seemed, frankly, totally insane in 1911, and seems, #sorrynotsorry, insane to me now in 2015, and I’m a feminist!) very well might hate Rebecca West. Their loss. They may disagree with her, but they could certainly learn what successful rhetoric looks and sounds like. Conservative-leaning people, who, in general, love West’s vicious prophetic critique of Socialism’s end-result in Russia, tyranny, dictatorship, as well as her disdain for pacifism, especially with people like Hitler and Stalin running amok, have issues with some of her other stances, especially her staunch feminism. But if you love West, you have to take all of her. You don’t have to AGREE, but anyone who wants to read a writer and find 100% agreement is a propagandist, and would probably be happier reading poorly-written pamphlets espousing their particular cause. West can be difficult. It’s actually fun to argue with her when you read her. It’s fun to go, “Oh come ON now Rebecca, it’s not like THAT.” Or it’s fun to suddenly think, “Holy shit. She has a point and I HATE her for showing it to me.” She engages the brain. She makes that process FUN, somehow. (She also can be a laugh-out-loud funny writer, especially when she’s pointing out the absurdity of the arguments of the opposition.)

West’s whole essay on Emmeline Pankhurst should be read in its entirety, but I’ll quote from the bleak-ish summing-up paragraphs near the end. (And remember: West spent the movement in opposition to Pankhurst’s leadership, but this is not a hatchet piece. Far from it.)

West’s essay, and her thoughts, and creating a connection to this long-ago past is still important, maybe even more important, in today’s political environment when women’s worth/value as independent human beings is STILL, unbelievably, being argued about “in the room where it happens”. The fight’s not over.

Excerpt from The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17: “Reed of Steel”, by Rebecca West

It is all forgotten. We forget everything now. We have forgotten what came before the war. We have forgotten the war. There are so many newspapers so full of so much news, so many motor-cars, so many films, that image is superimposed on image and nothing is clearly seen. In an emptier age, which left more room for the essential, it would be remembered that Emmeline Pankhurst with all her limitations was glorious. Somehow, in her terse, austere way she was as physically glorious as Ellen Terry or Sarah Bernhardt. She was glorious in her physical courage, in her obstinacy, in her integrity. Her achievements have suffered in repute owing to the fashion of jeering at the parliamentary system. Women novelists who want to strike out a line as being specially broadminded declare they think we are no better for the vote; if they spent half an hour turning over pre-war newspapers and looking out references to women’s employment and legal and social status, they might come to a different opinion. Women who do not like working in offices and cannot get married write letters to the papers ascribing their plight to feminism. But even before women got the vote they had to work in offices, with the only difference that they received less money and worked under worse conditions, and then as now there existed no machinery to compel men to marry women they did not want. Few intelligent women in a position to compare the past with the present will deny that the vote brought with it substantial benefits of both a material and spiritual kind.

There were also incidental benefits arising out of the movement. The suffragettes’ indignant denunciation of the insanitary conditions in the jails meant an immense advance of public opinion regarding penal reform. In 1913 it suddenly came into Christabel Pankhurst’s head to write a series of articles regarding the prevalence of venereal disease. These were ill-informed and badly written, but they scattered like wind an age-long conspiracy of prudishness, and enabled society to own the existence of these diseases and set about exterminating them as had never been possible before. But Mrs. Pankhurst’s most valuable indirect contribution to her time was made in 1905; a dusty and obscure provincial, she sent in a threatening note to the Prime Minister, and spent the next years proving that the threat had thunder and lightning behind it. She thereby broke down the assumption of English politicians, which till then no legislative actions, no extensions of the franchise had been able to touch, that the only people who were politically important were those who were socially important; and all the democratic movements of her day shared in the benefits. It would be absurd to deny that the ultimate reason for the rise of the Labour Party was the devoted work of its adherents, but it would be equally absurd to deny that between 1905 and 1914 it found its path smoothed by an increasingly respectful attitude on the part of St. Stephen’s, the Press and the public.

But Mrs. Pankhurst’s chief and most poignant value to the historian will be her demonstration of what happens to a great human being of action in a transition period. She was the last popular leader to act on inspiration derived from the principles of the French Revolution; she put her body and soul at the service of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, and earned a triumph for them. Then doubt seized her, as it was to seize a generation. In the midst of her battle for democracy she was obliged, lest that battle should be lost, to become a dictator. Later we were all to debate whether the sacrifice of principle could be justified in the case of Russia. She trembled under the strain of conflict, and perhaps she trembled also because she foresaw that she was to gain a victory, and then confront a mystery. She had always said and felt she wanted the vote to feed the hungry. Enfranchised, she found herself aware that economic revolution was infinitely more difficult and drastic than the fiercest political revolution. With her childlike honesty, her hate of pretentiousness, she failed to put up a good show to cover her perplexity. She spoke the truth – she owned she saw it better to camp among the ruins of capitalism than to push out into the uncharted desert. With her whole personality she enacted our perplexity, as earlier she had enacted our revolt, a priestess of the people.