So, during those three years of lecturing and teaching, and very partially successful writing, I gradually acquired, faced and accepted the settled conviction that I was destined for permanent spinsterhood. My poem, ‘The Superfluous Woman’, written in Cornwall after the anæmic Oxford love-affair had died of inanition, represented the last bitter protest against the non-fulfilment of one part of my human potentialities to which the War appeared to have condemned me and so many other women whose natural completion had been frustrated by the withering frost of grief and loss. Marriage, I definitely decided, was not for me, nor ever, for me, were the tender joys of maternal patience and pity and understanding; those romantic hopes of late flowering, of postponed fulfilment, to which some of my contemporaries clung so pathetically, were merely a form of cowardly self-delusion in which women who had seen the destructive realities of War should know better than to indulge. Very deliberately, with an aching regret that I had been born, physiologically, so normal, I pushed into the deepest recesses of my mind the old haunting memories, the once confident dreams, the sweet anticipated comfort of warm responsive flesh, the visionary children for whom, during strange dark nights in Camberwell, I had planned to work and achieve, and resolutely turned upon this too poignantly equipped storehouse the firm key of purposeful ambition.
10
In any case, it was impossible to remain very long preoccupied with the effect of the War upon one’s own position when the opportunity of changing the position of all women, whether superfluous or otherwise, was there to be seized for the first time in history. Directly after the Armistice numerous women’s organisations, slightly altered since pre-war days in name and constitution, began to emerge from the all-pervading military fog which between 1914 and 1918 had enveloped all movements for social reform, and though their resources were low, and they had to rely upon such ignominious expedients as jumble sales for raising funds, they all had definite and intelligent political plans for the pursuit of such objects as the retention of the wartime women police, the introduction of women establishment officers into Civil Service departments, pensions for widows, and the extension of the franchise to all adult women. Under their auspices a series of long-postponed measures, such as the Criminal Law Amendment Bill, the Guardianship of Infants Bill, the Illegitimacy and Bastardy Bills and the Matrimonial Causes Bill - always strangely regarded by men as ‘women’s’ questions in spite of the fact that men, just as much as women, are born, get married and become parents - were introduced into the House of Commons and reached the Statute Book within the next three or four years.
Much of this activity was due to the fear that the Government which had passed the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act on a surge of sentimental post-war gratitude did not really intend to keep faith with the women who were no longer supposed to be handicapped by sex or marriage. The abolition of women police patrols had been recommended by the Geddes Committee and numerous policewomen were in process of being ‘axed’; Cambridge, steadily refusing to give Degrees to women, had its female students limited to five hundred by the Royal Universities Commission; while the London Hospital refused to take any more women students at all, using the now time-worn argument about the difficulties of teaching ‘certain unpleasant subjects of medicine’ to mixed audiences. (Simultaneously, owing to the shortage of nurses, the age of admission was being lowered by the same hospital, and girls under twenty-one were accepted for training without questions of ‘delicacy’ being raised.)
Finally, as though to confirm the suspicions of organised women that a conspiracy existed to make the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act a dead letter, the Glasgow and St Pancras Corporations, as well as the Education Committees in eighty-seven areas, went out of their way to dismiss or recommend the dismissal of the married women in their employment, apparently under a curious impression that the marriage and motherhood of the healthiest and most intelligent women would somehow be furthered if these normal human relationships had to be paid for by the loss of a good job. As the Viscountess Rhondda, then in the midst of her historic contest with the House of Lords, remarked at a Six Point Group meeting during the summer of 1922, the word ‘(Removal)’ in the title of the Act had never managed to get outside its brackets.
This feeble functioning of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act was typical of all post-war reaction, in which war neurosis had been transformed into fear - fear especially of incalculable results following from unforseen causes; fear of the loss of power by those in possession of it; fear, therefore, of women. It all formed part of what Rebecca West, in a Time and Tide review of Jailed for Freedom by the American feminist, Doris Stevens, called ‘the disappointing aftermath of our suffragist movement’.
‘When we read,’ she added, ‘of such achievements of character as this’ (the American women’s endurance in prison), ‘the belittling attitude towards the militant suffrage movement, which is common to-day among the younger intellectuals, appears as the mean ingratitude, the computation so grudging that it arrives at falsehood, which it is’ - a comment still as appropriate in these days as in those.
In 1922 the soundest hopes for the future liberation of women from traditional restrictions and burdens appeared to lie with two widely different organisations which had both been formed the year before. With a barrister-cousin from the Temple, I went to some of the earliest Essex Hall meetings of the Society for Constructive Birth Control, started by Dr Marie Stopes, and expressed to him my surprise at the young face, the soft voice and the youthful garments of the movement’s confident and dauntless founder. The other organisation, the Six Point Group, had been inaugurated in February 1921, under the chairmanship of Viscountess Rhondda, to work for six closely connected objects - pensions for widows, equal right of guardianship for married parents, the improvement of the laws dealing with child-assault and the position of the unmarried mother, equal pay for teachers, and equal opportunities for men and women in the Civil Service.
Soon after our establishment at the Doughty Street studio in the early spring of 1922, Winifred saw in the recently founded Time and Tide the announcement of a mass meeting to be held by the Six Point Group in the Queen’s Hall on March 14th. Chiefly attracted by the fact that Clemence Dane, whose A Bill of Divorcement we had seen soon after it began its long run at St Martin’s Theatre in March 1921, was billed as one of the speakers, we decided to go.
As it happened, we looked vainly for Miss Dane among the distinguished women - Lady Astor, Lady Rhondda, Mrs Pethick-Lawrence, Miss Agnes Dawson and Mrs Chalmers Watson, all of them then unknown to us by sight - on the Queen’s Hall platform, for she had not been able to attend, but this disappointment was compensated by the surprised interest with which we listened to Lady Rhondda’s speech.
She had, we knew, the reputation of a harsh and pitiless feminist, chiefly - and quite unreasonably - because, five days after the first Degree-giving for women at Oxford, she had begun her struggle for permission to enter the House of Lords as a peeress in her own right by a petition to the King for a writ of summons to Parliament. On March 2nd the Committee for Privileges of the House of Lords had decided in favour of her petition, but their decision had still to be discussed by the House itself on March 30th. I was astonished beyond measure at the deprecating sweetness of her expression, the mild earnestness of her hesitating voice, as she spoke rather shyly on the subject of child-assault, which was said to have increased owing to the widespread mental and moral instability that had followed the War. My surprise was exceeded only on the solitary occasion that I saw Mrs Pankhurst - back in England after working for the Canadian Society of Mental Hygiene in Toronto - speaking not long before her death in Lady Rhondda’s own drawing-room, and observed the wistful and faded but still potent beauty of that small, attractive figure.
Three months after the Queen’s Hall rally, at a summer afternoon meeting of the Six Point Group, for which we had now begun to work and occasionally to speak, we saw a very different aspect of Lady Rhondda. By
that time the House of Lords Committee for Privileges - owing to Lord Birkenhead’s energetic opposition to feminine claims, and to the replacement as Attorney-General of Sir Gordon Hewart (who had become Lord Chief Justice) by Sir Ernest Pollock - had given its final vote against the admission of peeresses, and Lady Rhondda, no longer mild or deprecating, expressed to the small, select audience of women her opinion of a so-called Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act which exercised no restraint upon injustice and prejudice. With her flushed face and indignant blue eyes she looked very young and determined; as she spoke the combs fell out of her soft, exuberant hair and clattered to the floor, but she treated them with as much contemptuous indifference as if they had been the insolent witticisms of Lord Birkenhead.
When her speech was over, Winifred and I, intimidated but resolutely bold, went up to her and proclaimed our regret for the misdoings of the peers; the cordiality with which she received us revived both our courage and our determination to go on working with the Group. That meeting, especially for Winifred, was the beginning of many things. Four years later, on her return from a lecture-tour in South Africa, she was to find herself the youngest director on the Board of Time and Tide, while I was to join its staff of reviewers for a time when I came back from America in 1926.
The first and immediate result of this contact with post-war feminism was to send us into the crowded publicity of summertime Hyde Park, there to advocate, from a platform lent to the Six Point Group by the London Council for Promoting Public Morality, the early passage by the Government of the Criminal Law Amendment Bill. This Bill, which was chiefly concerned to raise the ‘age of consent’ in cases of indecent assault from thirteen to sixteen, and to remove from the defence permitted to the assaulter the plea of ‘reasonable cause to believe’ that the child was over sixteen, had been wrecked and dropped the previous August. After a good deal of Press agitation the Government re-introduced it in 1922; on June 14th its opponents deliberately ‘talked out’ the Second Reading by prolonging the discussion on the previous Summer Time Bill, but although they did their best to create an atmosphere of sex-antagonism during the debate, the Bill did pass its Third Reading on July 25th.
For complete novices to open-air speaking, the advocacy of such a measure offered a good many pitfalls, but in Hyde Park the necessity of resolute vocal competition with taxi-horns, thunderous ’buses and Salvation Army hymns soon overcame our surviving remnants of pre-war squeamishness over such very public discussion of assault and prostitution. One warm June evening, no longer nervous, but flushed and a little excited after a tussle with some good-humoured hecklers, I was walking dreamily back to Bloomsbury along Oxford Street, when a middle-aged man planted himself ingratiatingly in my path. Such a charming young lady, he began without preamble, oughtn’t to have to go home by herself; would I allow him to call a taxi and accompany me wherever I should like to be driven? A little disconcerted at being taken in the half-light for exactly the social type against whose existence I had just been arguing, I stammered that I was going home to work, and preferred walking alone. What would the London Council for Promoting Public Morality have thought of this ironic encounter? I asked myself, as I resumed, rather more rapidly, my meditative progress towards Doughty Street.
On the oppressive July night that the Criminal Law Amendment Bill passed its Third Reading, I went with Winifred to the House of Commons, and listened from the Strangers’ Gallery to that curious debate, which lasted from 10 p.m. until nearly 2.30 a.m. At an earlier hour of that same day, Mr Justice Lawrence, in giving evidence on the Guardianship of Infants Bill before a Joint Committee of the two Houses of Parliament, had remarked that the effect of this measure was to offer an insult to God Almighty and to the father whom He had appointed; and the opposition against the Criminal Law Amendment Bill was conducted by Mr Macquisten, Sir George Hamilton and Colonel Moore-Brabazon on similar if somewhat less elevated lines. Sitting in the pale, drowsy light of the midnight House, I remembered my long-ago molestation in the train going to Buxton, and felt a little sick as I listened to the facetious gibes about pigtails and effeminate men. Was this really the heart of that conveyor of civilisation to primitive peoples, the British Empire, in the post-war summer of 1922, or had we inadvertently strayed into the time of Martin Luther, with his robust views on the uses of women?
When the Third Reading was finally passed we looked down from our seats in the gallery at Lady Astor, who had fought so fearlessly for the measure against such distasteful opposition. Slight, black-robed, persistent, she had, like ourselves, sat out the hot, stuffy debate; elatedly we believed that she smiled up at us from the floor of the House. As we went out into the cool freshness of the dark streets just before dawn, I was conscious of quite a ferocious satisfaction because the plea made by a few gallant Englishmen that our liberties would be curtailed if the opportunities for attacking female children were made more difficult had not succeeded.
11
Soon after we came back from Geneva that autumn, the General Election of 1922 broke like a storm from the threatening political skies, and at once diverted England’s attention from such trivial events on ‘the Continent’ as the Fascist march on Rome and the opening of the Lausanne Conference. Even the picturesque erection, on the fourth Armistice Day, of a memorial in the clearing of the Forest of Compie‘gne where the Armistice was signed passed almost unnoticed by a country already beginning to forget its dead and to meditate upon the possibilities of ‘the next war’.
As soon as the Coalition fell, the Six Point Group announced its inspired and disconcerting expedient of publishing Black and White Lists. The Black List contained the names of those Members of Parliament, including the jocular opponents of the Criminal Law Amendment Bill, who had hampered the various reforms demanded by organised women, and members of the Group were urged to work and vote against them. The White List represented those men and women who had been especially helpful to the women’s cause in Parliament. Its twenty-two names included those of Lord Robert Cecil, Lady Astor, Sir Robert Newman, Mrs Wintringham and Colonel Josiah Wedgwood, and members of the Group were asked to work and vote on their behalf.
In the intervals of my work in Bethnal Green, I kept in touch with the Six Point Group campaign, which reached its most spectacular moment on November 1st with a big meeting at the Central Hall, Westminster, to demand the amendment of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act. It was at this meeting, where she was one of the speakers, that I first saw Rebecca West, whose novel The Judge, which had recently been published, I had read with a disturbed and passionate interest. Dark, courageous, still in her rebellious twenties, she gave, with her incisive voice and proud head with brushed-back hair, the impression of some intrepid young thoroughbred, destined to win all contests because completely undaunted by every obstacle conceivable to mortal imagination.
‘The Houses of Parliament,’ she said, ‘seem to me the most romantic buildings in the world . . . They . . . are the symbol of a real miracle, a real mixture of ramshackleness and nobility. There has developed there a system of government which bears witness to the extraordinary nature of the human soul, and the hopefulness of the prospects that are before human society. There again and again assemblies have gathered in all honesty, have matured to power, have fallen into corruption, have miraculously reassembled again, glorious with the honesty of a new generation and a new movement. There men of all sorts who seemed utterly selfish and corrupt have to an extraordinary extent, that the most cynical interpretation of history cannot dispute, showed that they cared a little for the common good.’b
As she spoke she seemed the embodiment of the modern woman’s movement, so old in its aspirations but so young in achievement, and some at least of her audience began to visualise the House of Commons, not as the place which thwarted their hopes and hampered their participation in the forward-looking work of their day, but as a genuine part of the work itself, as the actual scene in time to come of their own finer struggles and efforts. It was
still many years before I was to know Rebecca as a friend, but from that moment she became to me a personal symbol of the feminist cause which had thrilled me ever since my naïve adolescence, the twentieth-century successor of Mary Wollstonecraft and Olive Schreiner.
The Six Point Group was only one of many active women’s organisations that autumn, for these were now able for the first time to use a measure of power instead of merely to agitate for it. Even past and future Ministers began in alarm to remember that all but the youngest women had votes and could no longer be disregarded, and Mr Bonar Law addressed a mass meeting of women voters at Drury Lane Theatre. It was the first time that a Prime Minister had addressed an audience composed solely of enfranchised women, and many of the more prescient feminists - foreseeing deplorable consequences if the new voters came to be regarded in politics as a class apart - sincerely hoped that it would be the last. Whatever their Party, the election addresses of the thirty-three women candidates supported the League of Nations and urged the need for measures to benefit health and education, but though women had already introduced a new element of compassion, of perceptiveness, of imagination, into politics, there appeared to be no reason, other than the established tendency of certain males to look upon ‘the ladies’ as a sub-species of humanity, for treating them as a specialised category.
Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 Page 63
