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 a couple of months since I’ve done my excerpt-thing, so I want to get back on that train. The Young Rebecca is a compilation of many of the op-ed columns, book reviews, and long-form essays written by the mighty Rebecca West in her earliest years as a journalist. I mean, she was 18, 19, 20 years old at the time of these essays, to make me feel even more bad about myself. Her writing! Her thought! Her political analysis! The sheer bravado of her prose. Not to mention its biting funniness (I often laugh out loud reading these essays). She had her pet obsessions. She hated Strindberg so much that she literally could not stop writing about him. She was so mean to him. (Whether or not you like Stridberg is irrelevant. Put aside your personal preferences and get into the prose itself. People miss so much good writing by just focusing on whether or not they “agree” with the content. It’s such a limited view. I like good writing, period.) Her book reviews could be vicious. She made fun of things she hated in a way that makes you think, “Wow. She is not just swiping at the thing she hates. She is knocking it over entirely.” It’s such a confident writing style, and that’s essential if you want to be a social/political/artistic critic.

Of course her main topics were feminism, socialism, and social reform. She was at the vanguard of all of these movements, and had been going to protests and rallies and political meetings ever since she was 12, 13 years old. Reading these essays is fascinating because you start to piece together her actual philosophy (which is already apparent if you have read her other great non-fiction books, especially the magnificent triumvirate of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, A Train of Powder, The New Meaning of Treason.)

Her feelings about feminism were wrapped up in her Socialist convictions. Right-wingers who throw that word around today as though it is equated with Evil do not really know their history. Yes, Socialism taken to its logical conclusions makes room for a Stalin figure. But Socialism arose because of the Industrial Revolution and the absolutely devastating effect it had on the lower classes (which then moved up into the upper classes). It created a completely hierarchical and rigid society and it happened in a generation or two. Radical change. It destroyed family life, it destroyed quality of life (poor people in a rural community at least could grow shit in their yards, and had the support of a small community of people if they fell on hard times. Not to Utopianize it – but the Industrial Revolution eradicated such protections.) The lower classes did the majority of the back-breaking work, and were paid next to nothing. Because the mills and factories and such were all clustered in cities – the lower classes moved to the cities and then were packed into squalid tenements and company housing where the conditions were deplorable. Men and women worked. Birth control was illegal and so everyone had a bazillion kids that they could not take care of (due to low wages and due to the fact that everyone needed to work. The fantasy of Daddy going to work and Mummy sitting home having tea parties was a Victorian invention and only occurred in the middle/upper classes). And if the Industrial Revolution was terrible to the lower classes it was also brutal to the upper classes although in a less-obvious way. It created a stratum of human beings who made their money off the work of others. Which is bad for everyone involved (spiritually). And in terms of the women question, it also created a population of totally useless women, women who did nothing, contributed nothing (except for having babies, but anyone can do that), lived in the protection of her husband’s money, “kept house” (which West did not value – anyone can keep house. You dust, you clean, you wax floors, get over yourself if you think any of that is difficult, and besides: once women reached a certain level of financial stability they promptly out-sourced the housekeeping/child-rearing anyway to nannies and maids – therefore making themselves even more useless.) West referred to these women as parasites. It wasn’t their FAULT, the world was just set up that way, but in West’s view: it was an unsustainable situation. The economic system was starting to break down and these women were going to have to go to work. And so what Socialism was trying to combat was the unfairness of all of this. Everything could be boiled down to: citizens deserved protection, citizens deserved to paid better for the work they did, and everyone needed to have a CHANCE to make a good life for their families.

For West, and for many others, all of this was tied up in feminism. Men were too much in charge. Women just went along for the ride, whether it was marriage, economics or war. It was not right that men should have so much power over women. Get women into politics. Get women into the work-force. Pay them appropriately. It was only right and fair. Women were capable enough to take leadership roles, to have SOME say over their own destinies, especially when the men had botched it up so completely.

Here is where she eventually started to break with mainstream feminism. I’m generalizing but here is the gist of it: the “stars” of the feminist world began their agitation for the vote. There were centuries of tradition behind that ban on women voting and that tradition was what the feminists were up against. Women were seen as too emotional, not politically savvy, too personal to be trusted with the vote. West conceded that that may be true to some degree: you ban an entire group of people from participation for centuries then of COURSE they won’t be politically savvy. You haven’t allowed them to stretch those muscles. Women were relegated to the home, they didn’t even circulate all that much as young single women – they were holed up in their parents’ homes. (This was, as always, not so much the case with the lower classes.) And so where exactly would women gain experience? West got that. But by the early 20th century, as the economic situation started to fracture, as a huge war started to become inevitable, West knew that there was no longer any excuse. The Victorian fantasy was over. The system was broken. Women needed to stop being parasites. And men needed to get over themselves. (It’s funny to think that women were supposed to be the more emotional sex, and yet the men around this time, holding onto their power, sound like frightened panicked over-emotional ninnies in comparison.)

Mainstream feminism’s focus on the vote was important and West was a part of that, but she was dismayed at the lack of general interest in economic reform, which went hand in hand with feminism. She wondered, in print, if it was because feminism was started by middle-class ladies, those who came out of the “parasite” class. She writes a lot about it. She wondered why the lower-classes didn’t jump on the band-wagon and start their own agitations, and she realized that it’s because they working-class women flat out could not relate to the middle-class woman’s concerns and entitled attitude. Working-class women were too busy working, and burying their babies, and hauling clean water from the well downstairs up 6 flights of stairs. You know? Totally different experience So West was like, “Yes. Let’s get the vote. But let us not ignore the reality of what women’s lives are like. The vote is not going to change that.” (She was right.) But mainstream feminism didn’t listen. One thing at a time was the attitude.

And later, as feminism developed, West was REALLY dismayed at where it went, into the personal lives and sexual lives of women, which she frankly thought irrelevant. And man-hating. It was divorced from the reality of most women’s lives, who lived with men, loved men, etc. Maybe man-hating is also a somewhat natural end-result of strong feminism (not to sound like an MRA advocate, I’m just talking about the potential for that – which we can see in some brands of feminism.) But West thought that that was NOT the way to go with feminism, that that would alienate the lower-classes even more. (West’s family once had money, but no longer did. She couldn’t go to school because they couldn’t afford it. She was pretty much self-educated except for a couple of years of formal education, which makes her erudition and vast frames of reference that much more extraordinary. Granted, she did not live in a tenement and work in an unsanitary dangerous factory, but she did not come from a cushy protected existence, her parents did not give a hoot if she got married or not, she was out having sex and having a baby out of wedlock – H.G. Wells the father – by the time she was 20, and I think that goes a long way towards explaining her singular outlook on economics and women. She was an Outsider.) So the leaders of the feminist movement (many of them anyway) began serious campaigns against STDs. Of course STDs were a huge issue – especially before there was medicine to combat it. And women, who had been kept in the dark about sexual realities, were completely unable to take car of themselves and protect themselves. Add to that the shame, and you had a lot of women who got very very sick because their husbands were tomcatting around and bringing diseases home. West wanted women to be treated like adults, not children, so women taking responsibility for their sexual health was important and they needed society’s help in that. HOWEVER: it became an obsession with the feminist leadership, and West thought that was unhealthy and stupid, especially when there were still major economic and political inequalities to be addressed. As happened in the 1970s too (just ask a woman of color about mainstream 1970s feminism, you’ll get an ear-full about the bull-shit), the feminist movement began to focus on the small and the personal, ignoring the economic inequalities, racism, sheer oppression that many of their fellow women suffered under. Instead, these middle-class ladies burned their bras and talked about how husbands don’t do enough housework and how they wanted to have more orgasms. (I know. I’m generalizing. They also focused on equal pay. So kudos for that, they got real change instituted. But still, there’s some truth in the criticism that the obsession with the personal is NOT helpful and can become AS bossy as the conservative interest in limiting women’s freedom.) You can certainly see why poor women and working-class blue-collar women and minority women would want nothing to do with such a movement, focused as it was on the tiny house-bound issues. You want to have orgasms? When most of us are paid 2 cents on the dollar? When women of color are virtually non-existent in certain professions? It starts to seem ridiculous, what the movement focused on – and it was a huge disappointment to those who wanted real radical political change. The same thing happened in the 1910s, 20s, and West was one of those who critiqued mainstream feminism for 1. focusing ONLY on getting the vote and then 2. turning their eyes onto domestic issues, and ignoring the political. “The personal is political” has some truth in it, especially when you consider that “the woman question” (what to do with the ladies?) is always on the table in politics, in war, in society. Women, who make up half of the population, are seen as “other,” a minority. It’s, frankly, insane. So of course, what we do with our personal lives is ALSO political. However, “the personal is political” was also an excuse for focusing on the unfairness of bra-wearing as opposed to economic/political injustice. There is a prudish strain in feminism, then and now, and the focus on sexual relations galled West when there were so many actually serious issues at hand.

West wrote a lot about the prudish-ness and asceticism of much “charity” work at the time. West was infuriated by the busybody attitude towards women’s lives. Pay them better, institute some kind of fairness in the work-place, improve conditions – don’t teach them how to clean better or mother better or how to be single in an appropriate way. YOU try to be a better mother when you have 8 kids, you live in 2 rooms, and you work 10, 12 hours a day at a back-breaking factory job. Much of the charity-work was Christian-based, and so it focused on living a clean life, going to church, and being “good.” West thought it was bullshit (this is the topic of the essay I’ll excerpt – eventually – today.) She wanted women to be free. She wanted women to have the freedom to have fun, even poor women. There was a high premium in Christian charity placed on never being “idle.” Busy your day with good works, with clean thoughts, with having a clean house, with working hard. She didn’t want the poor to be JUDGED for going to shows, or splurging on a pretty hat. West was not a “joiner,” despite her devotion to the big “isms” of the day. She had a very specific outlook, rooted in the details.

Why did single women have to live such upstanding perfect lives? Why was it required that they be invisible? That they live in a strict collective in a YWCA where their every move was monitored? Why couldn’t they go out by themselves? Why did they have to live such spare lives? Why was “fun” looked down upon? Why was “fun” seen as something evil, or leading to ruin? Yes, much of this is indicative of a different time and place, but it is worthwhile to remember that it is BECAUSE of the dedication of women like Rebecca West that true social reform started to occur. Some of the lead feminists at the time, the famous ones, eventually counseled celibacy and abstinence, since men were, on the whole, such monsters. In a lot of ways, West did think men were terrible (she called them “lunatics” because of their propensity to start huge catastrophic wars), but that was mainly in the political realm, because they were barring women from seats at the table. But out there in the real world, women fell in love with men, lived with men, slept with men, and to advise all women to reject normalcy like that … was totally counter-productive to the feminist cause.

Obviously I agree with her, and this may be due to my own circumstances. The personal is political, right? I do not participate in mainstream culture, or the “norms” of my age/gender. This is not because I abstain, it’s just the way it worked out. So a lot of the concerns expressed by the mainstreamer-s are not my concerns. I can sympathize, and of course I have friends who are in these positions, but who speaks for me? The clamor of voices tends to ignore me (and those like me) completely. Literally: completely. I’m not complaining. Nobody’s putting a gun to my head and saying “Live this way” (although the omnipresent bombardment of messages about what life SHOULD look like for women is, honestly, like living in a totalitarian state, complete with overwhelming 24/7 propaganda. You have to be really strong to withstand it and go your own way. You have to become comfortable with being an outlaw. That’s the term I prefer.)

West’s voice was a radical one. You will notice below that she focuses on bad food served to working women in boarding houses at YWCAs. This may seem trivial. It is not. It was part and parcel of a culture that enforced asceticism upon women “for their own good”, that infantilized women. And that was a political situation. The infantilization had centuries behind it as well, and came from the conservative judgmental “traditional” voices in politics, but it also came her own side. You can see this now, too, in some of the protests about sexual harassment or cat-calls in the street, and how women shouldn’t have to deal with that. Yes, it is annoying, but honestly? Grow up. There are real issues in the world, and your desire to be comfortable/safe every minute of the day is bizarre. Don’t cringe with shame when someone shouts something rude. Don’t go home and write on your blog that you were “triggered.” (Okay, now I’m being mean.) Shout “Fuck off” and keep on walking, head held high. Or, better yet, flip them the bird. Or even BETTER, shout, “Thank you so much!” Take a self-defense course. Second guessing women’s reactions to things is a huge issue, and infuriating (not to mention infantilizing), but when My Inalienable Right To Never Be Cat-Called becomes a hot topic, I gotta speak up, yo. This is Victorian-era bull-shit, wanting to protect women from the rough realities of the world. I want women to have a core self, a self not created FOR them by an unjust society that does not have their best interests at heart. People have varying degrees of sensitivities based on life experiences and I get that, but it’s reaching a lunatic stage at the moment. My opinions are hard-won from my own rough experience. Society ignores me anyway: I am not advertised to, catered to, or acknowledged. So fuck ’em. I’m not a joiner either.

West rejected the “help” from others when it came with such strong strings attached (be somber, live in a YWCA, don’t stay out past curfew, don’t run around with men – regardless of your age, don’t have fun because it could lead to ruin – these strictures were coming at women from all sides. It’s similar to the weird-ness of right-wingers being on the same side as radical feminists in their interest in censorship and control of language. Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin’s campaigns against porn alienated a lot of us, who were, in general, on their side in other things. They sounded exactly like right-wing Christians. These people value ideology over freedom of thought. Read Diane Ravitch’s The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, a truth-telling bombshell about the educational system and the making of textbooks, with a disheartening look at the joining-of-hands of right-wing Christians and left-wing pressure groups in their desire to control how we speak. And as George Orwell showed in 1984 and his essays, limiting speech limits THOUGHT. I take this very very seriously. Ravitch’s book is truly dismaying to those of us who value freedom of speech/thought, even of our opponents – or, especially of our opponents, because that’s the only real way that freedom of speech can work. Engaging with opponents helps us sharpen our rhetorical skills, sorely missed in our culture, in trying to take on our opponents’ arguments. Ravitch’s book is one of the only books I have actually thrown across the room in outrage. That book came out a while ago and the situation has now worsened to such a degree that college students are demanding that Ovid come with a trigger warning and people are AFRAID to speak on college campuses because the language-rules have become so rigid and unforgiving that people literally can’t speak anymore without fucking up and “offending” someone. This is insane, people. It’s anti-democratic.)

West, in looking at the situation for working women, for single women, for women in general, decided that what the suffragettes needed was to inject a little “riotous” fun into their protests. Be bold. Be loud. Be free. REFUSE to participate in the society that infantilizes you. Make them obey. West gets quite funny when she imagines a world where women started being “riotous.” The shotgun over the beefsteak!!

And now, finally, West.

Excerpt from The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17: “A New Woman’s Movement: The Need for Riotous Living”, by Rebecca West

The schoolmistress is an example of this enforced asceticism. She does work of the highest importance, requiring not only a brain, but a heart. For the work she has done in the elementary schools in connection with the Free Meals and Medical Inspection of schoolchildren she can claim to be among the most efficient and humane public officials we have. We ought almost to allow her special privileges. But instead we bully her into an elaborate presence that she is not a human being at all, but some undecorative kind of vegetable. We impose on her a tradition that she ought to dress dowdily. We turn her out of her school if she takes any prominent part in political affairs, although we are worse than foolish if we want our children to be brought up by a mind so vacuous that it has no political opinions. If we are well-to-do, we object to her continuing to teach after she has proved herself human by marrying. And we underpay her miserably, so that she wastes half her efficiency in trying to make ends meet, as one tires oneself out trying to hold on a large hat in a gale. When she is in training at college she is underfed. But then, of course, wherever women are gathered together for the purpose of work their spirits are tamed by partial starvation. The students at Newnham and Girton are weakened (some of them for life) by underdone joints and rice puddings. In YWCAs the boiled egg is of more importance than it ought to be, and there seems far too much bread-and-butter in the world. Nurses in hospital usually enjoy a diet much too unpalatable and restricted for any better-class child of ten. The air of extreme solemnity possessed by many professional and business women is largely due to over-familiarity with milk puddings.

Another aspect of the artificial asceticism of women is the sacrifice of personal liberty she has to make before she can get a respectable roof over her head. If she is sufficiently prosperous to avoid the slums she must go to a YWCA and whatever her private convictions may be, step into an evangelical mise-en-scene. She may be fortunate enough to find a comfortable branch, but she may chance on one where the founders – although the YWCA is not run at a loss, and the inmates owe nothing to charity – gratify their appetite for vicarious piety. They rip phrases from the Gospels and hang them on the walls in the starkness of black print, unmitigated by the presence of other pictures. They insist on public prayer at certain hours. Public prayer at half-past eight in the morning, with the cold light falling through a basement window on to the dirty cups and saucers on the breakfast table, promotes asceticism more effectively than all the publications of the rationalist Press. And those of us with passions for going to suffrage meetings and music-halls – both excellent enthusiasms – must restrain ourselves, for we must not stay out later than half-past ten. But there we are in the same position as the inmates of ‘philanthropic’ institutions such as Hopkinson House (which pays a sleek five per cent), who, although they may be women of forty holding responsible educational positions, must not dare to stay out a moment longer.

Decidedly what we need is a militant movement for more riotous living. Schoolmistresses must go to their work wearing suffrage badges and waving the red flag. The ladies of Hopkinson House must stay out till tow in the morning, and then come back and sing outside till the doors are opened. And we must make a fuss about our food. ‘The milk pudding must go’ shall be our party cry. I can see in the future militant food raids of the most desperate character. I see the inmates of the YWCA inflamed with text-burning on Hampstead Heath, pelting the central offices with bread-and-butter and threatening a general massacre of hens if the boiled egg persists in prominence. Armies of nurses would visit the homes of the hospital governors and forcibly feed them with that horrid breakfast dish, porridge and treacle. And in Simpson’s some day the blenching stockbroker shall look down the muzzle of the rifle and hand over his nice red-and-black beefsteak to his pale typist … Wages would go up then.

But that is a dream. But not an unromantic one. The modern psychological theory of insanity states that impulses can never be killed, but only scotched; and if one denies an impulse its natural outlet, it will find an unnatural outlet. It may be that the repression of the animal in women, with its desires for food and freedom and comfort, accounts for her greater liability to nervous irritability and hysteria. If so, then what has always been a racial danger is becoming more and more dangerous every day, as women take more and more part in the world’s business. Many of the evils of our social system spring from perversities that arose when all education and much of the land was in the hands of monks and nuns who were professedly leading unnatural lives of repression. And in the same way the lady – who is simply the well-repressed woman – may be a source of danger to the State. So that though the doormat type of anti-suffragist is disgusted by the women who struggle for material comfort for themselves, we are doing sound service to the State by our selfishness.