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

As I mentioned in my first post about this book, many of these columns are in reference to tempests-in-teapots long-forgotten, but (of course) hugely important to those in the fray at the time. The fight for women to get the vote was violent and prolonged, and there were many different aspects to that struggle. Along with getting the vote, the sexism (although that word wasn’t used) had to be addressed. If women are seen as not capable, or – as extremely capable but only in certain areas – then those prejudices needed to be dismantled and attacked. There was ferocious resistance, not just from men but from women. Not so different then as it is now. There were the “parasite women”, as Rebecca West called them, the middle- and upper-class ladies who had never had to work a day in their lives, many of whom were heading up different aspects of the suffragist movement. There were also the reformers, usually Christian, but many not – who were devoted to easing the lives of the poor in England. A worthy goal. Of course. These communities were squalid and devastated. The Industrial Revolution had destroyed communities. Men and women worked themselves to the bone. The reformers would travel out into these devastated areas, and provide lectures and seminars and workshops – on different topics. Some were teetotalers warning against alcohol, others were religious/moral in nature, some were cultural. Basically, the gist of it all was to “improve” the lot of the poor, by improving their minds and morals.

Rebecca West

Rebecca West thought all of this was hogwash. Condescending nonsense. The problem was not that the poor were lazy and needed “improving.” Their minds and morals were just fine. The problem was that the system itself sucked. The system itself ground these people down. And the last thing they needed was some nice middle-class lady lecture them on improving themselves by going to church, staying away from alcohol, or the burlesque shows, or whatever it was. West rang this gong in article after article: Stop treating the working-class this way. They resent it. They are not lazy. They are exhausted. Fix the SYSTEM, not the PEOPLE.

This particular column from 1912 is part of an ongoing dialogue in print between a Mrs. Hobson and Rebecca West. Here’s what I gather (and again, footnotes would have been helpful): Mrs. Hobson was one of these do-gooders. She traveled around to poor areas, teaching the wonders of “domestic economy.” Basically: how to clean your house. Now, filth was a huge problem. Children were ill, and lice-ridden, and diseases have a way of spreading when the surroundings are squalid. Tackling that was of huge importance. But the “domestic economy” brigade had ulterior motives, as they often do. There was a Christian scolding component to it: Yes, you work outside the home, but you are also a wife and a mother and it is your job to keep the home clean and intact. Clean house, clean mind. Rebecca West called out this scheme for the nonsense that it was. These poor women worked in the factories and the mills. All day. Very long shifts. They came home at night, to squalling children, to husbands equally exhausted (also working in the mines or factories) with only an hour or so before bedtime, and then get up and do it again. There’s no TIME in the day to make your house sparkling clean. Also there were deeper systemic issues: bad landlords, terrible plumbing, not enough water. To put the burden on these exhausted women, to keep a happy sparkling home …

Well, well, well, Rebecca West went to TOWN on Mrs. Hobson. And in that initial article, she said that most people “hate housework like rat poison”. It’s drudgery, and everyone knows it. Mrs. Hobson replied to that article, in the snooty tone we still recognize today – the vicious condescending tone women reserve for other women – arguing that most women, if given the opportunity, love to keep a beautiful home, that that is how “happiness” is extended, how the soul is relieved from its burdens. It is “fortunate” that “the Miss Wests of the world” are not in the majority.

Arguing about housework may seem quaint and unimportant when there were real issues of the day. But I disagree with that. “Women’s work” was seen as in the home. That was the Ideal of the Victorian age. Rebecca West, though, was screaming from her print pulpit that the vast majority of people in England worked outside of the home – in factories, mines, mills. Women were in the work-force. To harangue them about how their tenement slums were filthy and their children had lice seemed unfair play to Rebecca. Pay them higher wages. How about THAT?

Mrs. Hobson’s reply was waving a red flag in front of a bull. Here’s an excerpt from Rebecca West’s reply.

Excerpt from The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17: “Correspondence Between Mrs. Hobson and Miss West”, by Rebecca West

I loathe these attempts to poke the sickly and exhausted poor into unspontaneous gambols. Surely everyone can see that a community must be sick unto death before its amusements have to be organized and imposed upon it. The whole of this home school scheme is an attempt to pay back the countryside in bad halfpence what the rich stole from it in good gold. Before the village life of England was wiped out in the latter half of the eighteenth century the villagers went out on the summer evenings and danced Laudnum Bunches and Constant Billy on the green till the moon came up. It is, of course, merely a matter of aesthetic perception whether you prefer them to sit docilely in a home school hall while the vicar’s wife sings Tosti’s “Goodbye.” Because you won’t get them to practice art now any more than domestic economy. They’re tired and cross and hungry, and they won’t play.

I take a keen interest in school hygiene, as it happens, and I cannot say that I am impressed by Mrs. Hobson’s remarks. I know that many teachers and inspectors feel that they are attacking the problem at the wrong end. But few of them are simple enough to suggest that the teaching of domestic economy is the right end. “More money and better housing” is the commoner suggestion. I doubt exceedingly that in the given case – the cleansed child recontaminated by a filthy home – a graduate of the home school would do much good. If she could keep the child clean when rearing six children on twenty-two shillings a week, and living in a house the walls and wood of which are rotten with bugs and the water supply of which is down three flights of stairs – well, I can only conclude that there will be a class in miracles, conducted by the vicar.

There seems to be no other point to be answered except the last paragraph, wherein Mrs. Hobson rebukes the “Miss Wests of the world” – ye gods! what a picture this calls up – for regarding domestic work as “rat-poison.” That simile has had a great success. It has been so widely quoted by a scandalized Press that I hope it will ultimately enter the language – one of those

jewels five words long,
That on the stretched forefinger of all time
Sparkle for ever.

Mrs. Hobson declares that the “Miss Wests of the world” – what is this new species to which I have given my name? – “are mistaken in believing that … any large number of women would share their view” as to the hatefulness of domestic work. She implies that I found it hateful because I did too much of it, and approached it with ignorance and dislike, unmitigated by ideals and the intelligence to plan for leisure. That is not so. I never had more than the usual amount. I was certainly not ignorant (having been exposed to the ponderous pedagogy of a school of domestic economy), and I had no reason to dislike it any more than any other kind of work. I don’t quite know what Mrs. Hobson means by “ideals.” I rather fancy she means conceit. Certainly I didn’t pretend when I was frying potatoes that I was doing anything as important or useful as my friend who was studying science in the laboratories of the neighboring university. So I surrender the claim to ideals. But as for intelligence! But – ah, well! it’s no use saying that – Mrs. Hobson wouldn’t believe me.

Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization. I deny absolutely Mrs. Hobson’s declaration that “the majority would probably always choose of their own accord to do this kind of work.” This is not true. The vast majority of women refuse to do domestic work. The working-class woman will turn her hand to anything rather than become a servant. The first thing a woman does when she gets a little money into her hands is to hire some other poor wretch to do her housework. The recent movement down the kitchen stairs – the last tumble of which is the King’s College home science course – has no support among the women who are alive: the working women. For heaven’s sake let us take this unpleasant job and give it over to the specialist to organize as a trade process.

I am not a materialist, so I cannot sympathize with Mrs. Hobson’s fear that the home – the relationship between a man and a woman and their children – will be broken up by the abolition of drudgery. I can only say that I love my mother none the less because we send our washing to a steam laundry.