THE VOICE OF REBECCA WEST

...The wiles of the municipal seducers were in vain...

...So that together men and women may be transformed for the last time into the child, who, untroubled with the consciousness of material things, is concerned only with love and happiness...

...A woman, according to the capitalist, is an air bubble blown between earth and sky, with no human ties of any sort...

...To this stage have men come...

...The other day Mr...

...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...

...I can see in the future militant food raids of the most desperate character...

...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...

...Capitalists have said to women: "We deduct fourpence from your wages so that we can pay men larger wages, and then they can support you as their wives...

...If Driver Knox had caught measles, the company would have remained calm...

...They submit in spite of the fact that they could end the injustice in a week by a strike...

...But that is a dream...

...I thought there must be some reason for this sudden lyric outburst of feminist enthusiasm...

...Most of the able-bodied men were killed off and their widows had to set about earning a living for their fatherless children...

...When she is in training at college she is underfed...

...The young woman who wants to see over the edge of the world would probably love the life of a wireless operator...

...If acuteness of hearing, rapidity of decision and suppleness of wrist and fingers count for anything, then, surely, the Marconi house on the bridge deck seems to be the natural goal for a self-reliant woman with cool nerves and efficient brain...

...This anxiety can very often be detected in the relationship between masters and men, and is a curious form of penitence...

...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...

...We print here two essays she wrote for the socialist publication The Clarion in 1912: they are as fresh, I think, as if they had been written yesterday, indeed, a good deal fresher than some things that were written yesterday...

...What could the government do if women teachers struck...

...If we are well-to-do, we object to her continuing to teach after she has proved herself human by marrying...

...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 atheism more effectively than all the publications of the rationalist press...

...no lost ladies of old years to kindle the imagination with their beauty, no vision of other countries and the past...

...I admire these attempts to get on with the business of life in spite of the absurdities of civilisation...

...And why not...

...It obviously does not mean what it says, for it is obvious that everybody wants as much comfort as they can get...

...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...

...She shows no penitence at having let the world get into such a rotten state 445 that there are no healthy amusements left to the poor...

...But the highest form of virtue men can imagine is asceticism...

...The schoolmistress is an example of this enforced asceticism...

...But it happens that ascetics are "gey ill to live wi' "; they absolve their wives from the sacred duty of renunciation of all fleshly vanities and, supported by some lingering memory of the old Catholic idea that a woman ought either to be a wife or a nun, put it all on the spinster...

...It turns to rend and destroy life, that out of its wreck it may make a new and more beautiful life...

...Yet not only do they not use it, but they consent to remain members of a quaint body called the National Union of Teachers [NUT], which, although it exacts an equal subscription from men and women alike, maintains this principle of unequal payment...

...The relations between the rich and the poor are often paralleled by the relations between men and women, and it is so in this case...

...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...

...and if one denies an impulse its natural outlet, it will find an unnatural outlet...

...I am no teacher, but I don't think much of that union...

...The students at Newnham and Girton are weakened (some of them for life) by underdone joints and rice puddings...

...But instead we bully her into an elaborate pretence that she is not a human being at all, but some undecorative kind of vegetable...

...The canon's lady who holds the district where I live in the hollow of her hand forbids waltzing in the local girls' club, on the ground that the initiation of the sinful pleasure would ultimately lead them to low dancing-halls...

...Probably she will be less expensive to the shipowner than the male operator, and quite as reliable...

...So they coerce the poor into virtue, and thus make them sure of a good time in the next world...

...No woman could believe that all those little girls had the right temperament for that occupation...

...The milk pudding must go" shall be our party cry...

...Another aspect of the artificial asceticism of woman is the sacrifice of personal liberty she has to make before she can get a respectable roof over her head...

...She is a better rebel than the girl who accepts her poverty as a matter of fate and wears its more durable badge of drab garments and sailor hats, for she perceives that life ought to be hung with flags, and that the ugliness of the world is a stupid convention...

...It is perhaps nothing disgraceful to ourselves, nothing that need make us doubt our worthiness as citizens of the ideal state...

...A year or two ago I went to see a village home for little girls that lay somewhere in the flat dullness past Barking...

...Apparently the male class[room]-teacher is intended to get married at once, as his minimum salary is higher than the female's...

...But there is another duty that is patent only to the more civilised (if one was a really bitter feminist, one might say that that was why it fell to the women), and that is the duty to provide for the old...

...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...

...Miss Grace Neal, of the Domestic Workers' Union...

...What reason is, there that women should play the part of blacklegs...

...The whole trouble is that women make socialists which are just good enough for Mr...

...Women ought to understand that in submitting themselves to this swindle of underpayment, they are not only insulting themselves, but doing a deadly injury to the community...

...We have clever Miss Pankhurst trying to get the vote and earnest Miss Macarthur trying to organise trade unions...

...that every woman (even though she be a doctor) is a mother at heart . . . and that while men doctors were asking £250 a year they could probably get women for £150...

...Women have had to settle down to occupations which were too tame for men and in which there are few opportunities for the adventurous-minded...

...They got "woman's wages...

...It was a very ugly place...

...If she becomes a Marconi operator on these terms, no matter how efficient and plucky she 442 may be, she is living on the wages of dishonour...

...so they stood loyally by their male colleagues and refused to blackleg...

...that men were far too coarse and tactless to deal with them...

...Editorial selection and introduction copyright © 1982 by Jane Marcus...

...Nurses in hospital usually enjoy a diet much too unpalatable and restricted for any better-class child of ten...

...Decidedly the women members of the NUT ought to withdraw their support from their ungracious colleagues and form a union of their own...

...And, apart from the Shipping World's idealisation of the prospects, it does seem an interesting new occupaOctober 18, 1912 tion for women...

...The soul finds that the life for which it has sacrificed itself is in its present state hardly worthy of preserving...

...We never try to do it by 443 fighting the capitalist and turning him out of the workshop...

...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...

...It pretends that women have no dependents...

...They've had no time to travel further, having left the home so recently...

...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...

...states that it is the rule and not the exception for the members of her union to send money home to support their parents...

...But the real interest of the case lay in the determination of his employers to buy their employee, body and soul, off duty as well as on dUty...

...That is the real meaning of the mysterious sentence, heard sometimes from the unregenerate: "Women don't need such big wages as men, because they have a lower standard of comfort...

...We are grateful to the Viking Press for permitting us to take these essays from The Young Rebecca by Dame Rebecca West and Jane Marcus...

...For the working woman is invited by men to lead, as the price of their respect, a grey life of unexuberant decorum and contempt of all the good frivolities of the earth...

...Decidedly what we need is a militant movement for more riotous living...

...True it is that man recognises that first imperative necessity which is plain to the lowest savage, the duty to provide for the next generation...

...but they became anxious when he imperilled his immortal soul...

...Armies of nurses would visit the homes of the hospital governors and forcibly feed them with that horrid breakfast dish, porridge and treacle...

...Here is the powder in the jam, the snake in the grass, the wolf in feminist's clothing...

...Women doctors, being in the main middle-class women, had savings and homes to'fall back on...

...Puzzle: if the NUT thinks a classteacher can keep a wife on the £10 surplus, how many children does it expect him to rear on the £40 surplus...

...And the austerity of the furniture passes description...

...We are afraid of going back to first causes...

...But that is quite irremediable, and probably, since the heavens permit it, ought to be...

...She has bought her job with the flesh and blood of her fellow man...

...The capitalist sucks strength out of an exploited class, which enables him to exploit other classes...

...The air of extreme solemnity possessed by many professional and 446 business women is largely due to overfamiliarity with milk puddings...

...Anti-feminists, from Chesterton down to Dr...

...447...

...Though it is galling for the woman worker to know that she is not loved for herself alone, she may get a good deal of satisfaction out of the encouraging words that are let fall by the capitalist on the make...

...but seemingly we have no women who have read the signs of the times, who have discovered that political power and trade unionism are pinpricks in the hide of the capitalist monster...

...A slave is more of a slave when he is well fed than when he is hungry...

...But then, of course, wherever women are gathered together for the purpose of work their spirits are tamed by partial starvation...

...Ladies of Great Britain, we are clever, we are efficient, we are trustworthy, we are twice the women that our grandmothers were, but we have not enough devil in us...

...Wherever one gets a gathering of women socialists, one gets a programme of such charity gifts from the state as free meals and school clinics for children: excellent things, but dangerous unless taken discontentedly as niggardly installments of a long-due debt...

...It is no use saying that the funds of the institution will not run to luxuries...

...Yet we may wish that they had spared a little of their dear irreverence and blessed pluck to stir up the industrial women to revolt...

...This occurs to me especially in connection with elementary-schoolteachers...

...One might have remembered that the capitalist respects woman in only one capacity...

...Every woman who has risen from the floral stage of political activity (that is, the Primrose League), or the vegetable stage (that is, the Women's Liberal Association), must admire the suffragettes...

...The children seemed well nourished and not unhappy, though it was strange that all—except those December 20, 1912 who had been disfigured by disease—were designed for domestic service...

...Ramsay MacDonald...

...Here we have it...

...The cheerfulness with which they have shouldered the responsibilities thrown on them by the free meals and medical examination of schoolchildren explains why the children love their school and their teachers...

...Text copyright © 1982 by Rebecca West...

...Yet there is really something very hopeful about the pert face of a Cockney beauty, smiling at life from under a wide and worthless hat tipped with nodding, spurious plumes...

...And pure selfishness is the motive of men's desire to repress women...

...The women teachers of England have their remedy in their own hands...

...A similar idealism moves the waitress who, twittering like a little London sparrow, quite ridiculous, quite charming, carries on a flirtation under the sour gaze of her customers...

...The scale which it suggests for certificated class-teachers is quite a humorous little effort...

...It is amazing how angrily the well-to-do speak of the poor girl's love of finery...

...And we must make a fuss about our food...

...Yet they submit to being paid salaries of from onehalf to two-thirds the amount paid to men for similar work...

...While men are rolling round the world having murderous and otherwise sinful adventures of an enjoyable nature, in commerce, exploration, or art, women are to stay at home earning the promotion of the human race to a better world...

...Lionel Tayler, want women to specialise in virtue...

...We impose on her a tradition that she ought to dress dowdily...

...It desires to be a preserver of life...

...His maximum salary is £200 against the female's £160...

...Perhaps if I had been a railway shareholder I should have been more interested in the case of Driver Knox...

...It is only an excuse for sweating more money out of the people...

...she was a wicked polemicist...

...There was not a fleshly vanity in the place...

...For those who know about these things tell me that a man who can get drunk on two small rums must have an economical nature, and would probably make the company's coal go twice as far as anybody else would...

...The industrial women seem to consent to the indignity without resentment...

...and it furthermore provides that women are eligible to qualify as operators...

...Ramsay MacDonald complained that women do not make good enough socialists for him...

...I fear the Marconi Company even when they bring gifts...

...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...

...It may be that the repression of the animal in woman, with its desires for food and freedom and comfort, accounts for her greater liability to nervous irritability and hysteria...

...All over the country councillors enthusiastically declared to one another that it was imperative that children should be attended to by women...

...Thus far have women gone...

...This is illustrated by the middle-class father who never goes to church himself, but always sends his wife and daughters...

...If the benevolent take on the responsibilities of these children's lives they must be prepared to give them "bread and roses," not merely "crust and cabbages...

...Her subconsciousness has reasoned that the Creator cannot have destined her to spend ten hours a day bringing unpleasant food to people she doesn't know or care twopence about for five shillings a week, while he may have destined her to love and be loved...

...True, the difference is but £10, but the maintenance of a family can be the only excuse for any difference at all...

...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...

...Not one woman doctor in Great Britain applied for a £150 post...

...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 to a large hat in a gale...

...So in the end you will make at least ninepence out of it...

...There are no hungry teachers walking the streets, so degraded by poverty that—God forgive them and punish the capitalists—they will help to drag their fellows down to poverty, too, by blacklegging...

...They should watch such things critically lest their children grow up in servitude...

...But what is the explanation of the meekness which makes such impositions on women possible...

...she didn't hesitate to attack stuffed shirts on the left as well as those on the right...

...But there are acidities quite unconnected with any fear of immorality...

...Wages would go up then...

...There were no good books even for the older girls, only sentimental tracts that were really inflated prospectuses of the simplicity of the Christian life...

...in its gauntness it reminded one of the ribs of a London bus horse...

...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...

...I. H. I n the Daily Citizen of October 9 there was a sentimental quotation, seemingly of feminist import, from the Shipping World...

...asks the Shipping World.] The invention opens out a new career for women, in which their special abilities can be used to the best advantage...

...And sometinies widowhood lays the burden of both generations on a woman...

...We want to earn good wages...

...One sees this attempt to provoke piety in the poor in orphanages and other charitable institutions where the inmates are quite defenceless...

...She does work of the highest importance, requiring not only a brain, but a heart...

...Where are our women syndicalists...

...I like to get value for my money, and a union that takes my money and does not give me equal benefits with my fellow unionist is no use to me...

...They accept as doles from the capitalist class what they should take as rights...

...An example of the infectiousness of poverty and the persistence of disease is the terrible economic condition of Edinburgh, which is directly due to the Battle of Flodden Field in 1513...

...In the mind's eye one sees the Marconi operator sitting gracefully at her work, with a rose in her hair, surrounded by votive offerings from passengers, operating much, much better than any mere man ever did...

...And this tendency to regard little girls as made by the gross from the same pattern prepared one for the hard deficiencies of the institution...

...And there was an abrupt subsidence in the wave of feminism among local authorities...

...Yet, "I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts," said the one wise Trojan, when he saw his fellow-Trojans dragging the wooden horse into Troy...

...Nietzsche says that a man who is aiming at Supermanhood passes through three phases: the camel, the lion, and the child...

...There were no pictures on the walls...

...Surely the birth rate can't be going down...

...Reprinted by arrangement with the Viking Press...

...That takes the pride out of the working woman...

...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 I refuse to give up my seat in the tube to a woman with a baby on the ground that, because she went to an elementary school when she was young and I went to a secondary school, she has a lower standard of comfort, I am not only a cad, but also an unimaginative liar...

...For instance, there was that remarkable wave of feminism that passed over local authorities four years ago, when they became obliged to appoint school medical officers...

...They insist on public prayer at certain hours...

...The underpayment of women is one of those "ninepence for fourpence" tricks that capitalists have ever loved to play on the people whenever they had the chance...

...It is strange that women who are independent and fearless in private life should not introduce their independence and fearlessness into their public life...

...And in the same way the lady—who is simply the wellrepressed woman—may be a source of danger to the state...

...That meant that wages all round were depressed, and capitalism in Edinburgh got a good hold over labour by planting its feet on a solid substratum of the blackest and most helpless poverty...

...At first the soul becomes mastered by the idea of duty and selfsacrifice...

...The mildest amusements of the rich become the vices of the poor...

...Labour has never shaken itself free...

...My motive would be pure selfishness...

...Little mud-coloured brick villas, flanked by spiky evergreens that looked dusty with boredom, looked over flat lawns and fields at other little mud-coloured villas...

...But we try to do it by being amenable and competent wage slaves, and thus pleasing the capitalist...

...It is an alluring picture, and one flattering to women...

...How can women bear to be willing instruments of this crime against themselves and the community...

...We ought almost to allow her special privileges...

...She wasn't yet in, say, 1912, the famous writer she would later become, but she was writing then with a sharpness of thought and phrase she would never surpass...

...The ladies of Hopkinson House must stay out till two in the morning, and then come back and sing outside till the doors are opened...

...But when the camel is loaded, it goeth to the desert, and there it is transformed 444 into a lion...

...For it is strange to note with what hostility the rich look on the timid attempts of the poor to grow some roses...

...not as the worker or the wife or the mother, but as the blackleg...

...Let women make haste to become lions, and fearlessly attack the social system...

...The rich perceive that they are giving the poor a very bad time in this world...

...A new Act in the States has decreed that every vessel navigating on the American coast or the Great Lakes must carry a wireless [telegraph] operator...

...The modern psychological theory of insanity states that impulses can never be killed, but only scotched...

...And yet I have a suspicion that roses are not considered good for the indigent...

...Schoolmistresses must go to their work wearing suffrage badges and waving the red flag...

...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...

...But not an unromantic one...