The future husbands of Beatrice’s bevvy of sisters would refer to them as a ‘monstrous regiment of women’, the 19th-century version of a girl gang. In a time when it was thought that women couldn’t possibly be clever, because their uteruses would get in the way of their brains, Beatrice and her sisters received fine educations. She was not without her self-doubts, though, as she tried to teach herself advanced maths and science and wondered, ‘Why should I, wretched little frog, try and puff myself into a professional?’ Beatrice also despaired at the absurdity of the marriage market each social season, when her sisters would be married off one by one.
As for Beatrice’s love life, she made The Choice: the choice between a rugged hunk of man and a clever but kind of gross-looking little fellow. The rugged hunk of man was Joseph Chamberlain, future famous politician, and future father of future famous prime minister Neville Chamberlain. He was 20 years older than Beatrice and threw her into a world of turmoil. She said he set off within her a ‘deadly fight between the intellectual and the sensual’, lol. Ever the emo, she called meeting him ‘the catastrophe of my life’. If Beatrice Potter Webb had lived in 2005 she would have dyed her hair black, straightened her fringe over her face, and ringed her eyes in a centimetre of eyeliner.
On the other side of the ring was Sidney Webb. You get a clue from his surname who won this contest of the heart, but thanks to Beatrice’s fanatical diary-keeping we get to enjoy a few vintage sick burns about Sidney’s physical appearance, aged a century to perfection. She recorded the fact that ‘his tiny tadpole body, unhealthy skin, cockney pronunciation, poverty, are all against him.’ Yes, she was a snob, but in the end realised that hunky Joseph was far too controlling of his female relatives for her taste and decided upon Sidney. After all, she reasoned, ‘it’s only the head that I am marrying.’ Ouch. But, I suppose, it’s a sensible choice to make given that when we’re all withered and old, nobody’s a rugged hunk of man any more, but you can still have nice conversations.18
They had to wait for her father’s death to marry, because marrying into the lower middle classes would have been too much for a railway magnate to bear. In one of their many torrid love letters, Beatrice wrote to Sidney that ‘the permanence and worth of a relationship depends on the consciousness in both partners that moral and intellectual growth rises out of it.’ Phew! Is it getting hot in here?
OK, I need to talk about Beatrice’s brain so that I don’t get in trouble with her ghost for getting carried away with the telling of her underwhelming love life. The summary is, boy, was it a big one! Phew, check out the big ol’ brain on her, I tell ya. And on him! A big fat brain on a tiny tadpole body. This was an intellectual power couple for the ages. They were a true partnership, despite their differences in personality (Sidney was chill and used to say to her, ‘Keep your hair on, missus!’ whenever she got *intense* – but in a cute way). They were a two-person think tank and their dinner table hosted the intellectuals and power players and policymakers of the day. They didn’t have children but they did give birth to 18 jointly authored full-length books, and many more not-full-length books. ‘Are the books we have written together worth (to the community) the babies we might have had?’ Beatrice asked in her diary.
Beatrice and Sidney did many impressive things together. They spent their honeymoon researching trade unions in Ireland for a huge history they wrote together, one of their dozens of book-babies. They wanted to found a new, modern university in an urban centre that wouldn’t be a waste of space like Oxbridge, and so founded the London School of Economics, a place where rich people still go today to spend a lot of money on a masters because they don’t know what to do with their lives. They galvanised the Fabian Society, one of the incubators of British socialism, and made the Labour Party suck less. ‘The Labour Party exists and we have to work with it,’ Beatrice once complained in one of her trademark draggings, calling it ‘a poor thing but our own.’ They also founded The New Statesman, for better or for worse, and worked to better the education of Londoners of all ages. Clement Attlee remembered them with the praise: ‘Millions are living fuller and freer lives today because of the work of Sidney and Beatrice Webb.’
Beatrice got her start when she first came to London, as all well-meaning rich girls do, working in philanthropy in the East End. Through this work she came to believe that it would not be charity, but rigorous social science and socialist policies, that could improve the conditions of London’s poor. Beatrice was interested in co-operatives, which were not pleasant mid-range supermarkets, but a sort of trade union for consumers rather than for producers.
As part of a royal commission to look into the alleviation of poverty, Beatrice wrote the dissenting opinion on what should be done, envisaging a national minimum income that was essentially the first draft of the future British welfare state. She said such a state would ‘secure a national minimum of civilised life … open to all alike, of both sexes and all classes, by which we meant sufficient nourishment and training when young, a living wage when able-bodied, treatment when sick, and modest but secure livelihood when disabled or aged.’ As you can see, Beatrice was a mad socialist.
Beatrice wasn’t a proponent of women’s suffrage at first, caring more strongly about what she thought of as economic democracy. She praised the role of women in the new Soviet Russia, where as she and her boo described it in one of their many book-babies, ‘emancipation was never thought of as merely the removal of legal disabilities,’ as in, women winning individual rights, but rather thought that ‘the economic and even the household subjection of women had to be abolished.’ (For more on what this looked like, see the paragraph in Alexandra Kollontai’s chapter in which the family unit is abolished.) When the Webbs did eventually take up the issue of women’s political representation in Britain, they saw it as a battle against ‘an essentially masculine capitalism’ as the movement expanded beyond its rich girl early proponents.
The Webbs felt caught between two systems: they disliked both unchecked American-style capitalism, which Beatrice wrote in 1913 in The New Statesman would lead to ‘constantly increasing armaments and to periodical wars of a destructiveness that the world has never witnessed,’ which is definitely bad; but also the dictatorial nature of Bolshevism in Russia. They were, however, fundamentally collectivists interested in radical reform, and in the mid-1920s visited the Soviet Union and wrote about 1,000 pages of propaganda about how great it was entitled Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? Their support of Stalin (at least until he made a pact with the Nazis) was held in disregard by some factions of the British left who weren’t so hot on Stalin’s purges and gulags. The Webbs died before the post-war British welfare state came into being, but if it weren’t for them, it may not have happened at all – the Webbs helped shape the people, the ideas, and the party that created it.
Anyway, if you’d still like to hear about Beatrix Potter and woodland creatures, you can find her delightful works in all good children’s bookshops.
I’ll stop now before I summon an intellectual haunting by both Webbs, angry that I may have misinterpreted the many fruits of their giant brains.
45
Julia de Burgos
1914–1953
You’ll notice there are a lot of poets in this book. The thing about poetry is that you can’t be stopped from writing it. You can be poor, you can be marginalised, you can be trapped in your home, you can be barred from education or work because you are a woman, but nobody can stop you thinking up poetry. Unless perhaps they run up to you when you are in the middle of a poetic thought and shout ‘BAH!’
Anyone can be a poet, but not everyone can be a good poet. As for Julia de Burgos, she is now regarded as one of the greatest female poets in Latin American history, and the most important poet of 20th-century Puerto Rico. And yet she was only 39 when she died, anonymously, in New York City, and was buried in a potter’s field – a cemetery for unidentified people, usually poor.
Julia was born in 1914 in the
town of Carolina, Puerto Rico, and was the eldest of 13 children. Her family suffered greatly from poverty and malnutrition, and six of Julia’s siblings died. She became a teacher in 1935, and wanted a doctorate, but was too poor to afford it. Instead, she went to Old San Juan in 1936, and began publishing poems in papers and magazines. Her poems dealt with the subjects of Puerto Rican independence, US imperialism, and the unequal status of women, and she also wrote poems and essays for rallies of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party.
Puerto Rico suffered terribly in the 1930s from the Great Depression, which started in the US with the 1929 stock market crash and spread across the entire world making everything Greatly Depressing. The island was consumed with protests and strikes, including strikes by women. In 1936, Julia published the poem ‘Es Nuestra la Hora’ (‘Ours is the Hour’), which called for Puerto Rican workers to unite in the fight against US imperialism.
Julia left the island in 1940, and moved to New York City where she lived and worked in Harlem with African American artists and activists. Julia herself was African-descended. She wrote for the Puerto Rican nationalist paper Pueblos Hispanos in New York City, but eventually moved to Washington DC and worked as a secretary in the civil service. One day, FBI agents came and questioned her about her writings for Pueblos Hispanos. She denied leftist political leanings, and told them, ‘Pueblos Hispanos has become too Communist. I just want to see Puerto Rico be independent and free.’ She was fired that same day, because while she had said she was anti-communist, they decided she was still too much of a lefty for 1950s tastes, when if you weren’t the type with a white picket fence, who enjoyed shooting guns into apple pies, you were a socialist suspect.
Julia moved back to New York, suffered from depression and alcoholism, and spent her last years in a hospital. She once filled an intake form in hospital and wrote her occupation as ‘writer’, only for a hospital employee to cross it out and write ‘suffers from amnesia’ instead. Nobody could erase her writings, though. Julia’s works laid the foundations for future Puerto Rican and Latino poets and feminists. One of her last poems, ‘Farewell in Welfare Island’, foreshadowed her death far from Puerto Rico. It ended:
It has to be from here,
forgotten but unshaken,
among comrades of silence
deep into Welfare Island
my farewell to the world.
46
Marie Chauvet
1916–1973
It’s time to add another Very Bad Man to our growing mental list of Very Bad Men of History. Yes, it sucks to even have to think about Very Bad Men in as lovely a book as this, but in many cases to fully understand a Truly Badass Babe, you have to know how Very Bad the Very Bad Men in her life were.
And so our Very Bad Man in this chapter is Haiti’s François Duvalier. Haiti is famous for being the first independent black republic. Enslaved Haitians seized control from France in 1804 – EIGHTEEN-OH-FOUR – more than half a century before the American Civil War. Duvalier came along a century after the Haitian revolution and independence. His nickname, ‘Papa Doc’, makes him sound more like the beloved proprietor of a small-town pizza restaurant than a brutal dictator. But a brutal dictator he was, remembered for the reign of terror with which he ruled Haiti from 1957 to 1971.
This absolute shitstain of a man wreaked violence upon his own citizens with total abandon. He instituted a volunteer militia force of loyal goons, the Tonton Macoute, who would receive an automatic pardon for any crimes they committed in its service. Duvalier’s ideology, if a monster can be said to have an ideology beyond ‘being a monster’, played upon popular resentment of the country’s mixed-race, lighter-skinned elite, who he declared enemies of the state, thereby attempting to justify his authoritarianism. But anyone could be the victim of his forces’ arbitrary violence. Religious figures, sports clubs, writers, artists, and educators lived under constant threat of censorship, harassment, or murder.
So now you know what the novelist Marie Chauvet was up against.
Born in 1916, Marie Chauvet was a member of the mixed-race elite of Haiti. She would host gatherings of important poets at her home in Port-au-Prince, and wrote novels addressing race, class, and gender. Her works would criticise both the corruption of the elite society to which she was party, and the brutality of the government opposed to it – so basically, she pissed everyone off.
Marie wrote her most important work in 1968: Amour, Colère et Folie, which translates to Love, Anger, Madness. It was a devastating critique of the violence and totalitarianism of the Duvalier regime, and so, of course, put her in a huge amount of danger.
Remember the last time you decided not to rock the boat? ‘Hmm, better not call out my Great-Uncle Martin for that sexist thing he just said. I wouldn’t want to offend anyone. Best to just leave it.’ Now imagine making the opposite decision, and not just calling out Great-Uncle Marty, but your entire set of friends and family, and also a dictator who would not hesitate to kill you. That’s what Marie Chauvet was willing to do for her beliefs.
‘Feel free to shriek at the top of your lungs if you ever see this manuscript,’ she wrote of Love, Anger, Madness. ‘Call me indecent, immoral. Sprinkle me with stinging epithets if it makes you happy, but you will not intimidate me anymore.’
She sent her work to that most chic of old-timey feminists, Simone de Beauvoir, who endorsed it and thus led to the manuscript’s acceptance by a prestigious publishing house in Paris. This is where things should have gone very right. Everything was on track for Marie Chauvet to become a worldwide celebrity, if it hadn’t been for a Very Bad Man of history.
Marie’s family was terrified of the consequences of her novel’s publication under a regime which would have your entire family killed for less than a full-throated denunciation of its rule. And so Marie’s husband, Pierre, convinced her to buy up the entirety of the Paris publishing house’s stock of Love, Anger, Madness upon its publication, and to forbid it from ever being printed again. She agreed. Her family – who had already seen loved ones tortured, imprisoned, murdered and disappeared by Duvalier – then destroyed all copies of the book, other than a few hidden copies left in Paris and elsewhere.
After all this, Marie decided to divorce her husband, and moved to New York City to marry again and write more novels. Love, Anger, Madness would not be reprinted until 2005, many years after her death in 1973.
Duvalier died in 1971, after his 24-year reign of torture and oppression. He was succeeded by his equally awful son, who ruled until a popular uprising caused him to flee the country in 1986.
Listen. This book is full of thwarted plans and missed opportunities for deserving women. Whenever you encounter such a frustration in a woman’s story, take a moment to shake your fist at the sky in rage and disappointment. Shriek into a pillow like a wild banshee. Yell at a passer-by that ‘IT DIDN’T HAVE TO TURN OUT THIS WAY.’ Then please pull yourself together and carry on, because if Marie Chauvet didn’t give up after the destruction of her greatest work, but kept on writing, you certainly don’t have an excuse to give up on anything.
47
Zabel Yesayan
1878–1943
Zabel Yesayan is another example of a brilliant woman who lived in a time and place where to be intelligent and opinionated was the most dangerous thing to be. In fact, she managed to live in not one but two such places in the course of her short life.
Zabel was an Armenian born in 1878 in Istanbul, then the capital of the Ottoman Empire. She published her first poem in a weekly paper at age 16, and by 17, had decided to become a writer professionally. So she did. That was that. There was no decade of umming and erring, no grand proclamations about the novel she had ‘knocking about in her head’ – she just did it.
As Zabel set out on her path she received a warning from Sprouhi Dussap, the first female Armenian novelist. ‘When Madame Dussap learned that I wanted to enter the field of literature,’ Zabel recalled later, ‘she warned me that a woman’s path to bec
ome a writer had more thorns than laurels. She said that our society was still intolerant towards a woman who appeared in public and tried to find a place of her own. To overcome this, one had to surpass mediocrity. Success came easily to the man who merely got his education, but the stakes were much higher for the intellectual woman.’
Zabel went to France to study literature, and married a painter at age 19, as one does when one moves to France. She returned to Istanbul, however, without her husband and against his wishes in order to continue to build her reputation as a writer there. What she found when she returned was one of the first great tragedies Zabel would witness in her life: Armenian refugees fleeing massacres in Adana, in what is now southern Turkey, and arriving in Istanbul. Zabel decided to travel to Adana to see for herself what had happened there, turning her findings into a book called Among the Ruins. The utter destruction she witnessed in that city changed her, and it would not be the last time she documented Ottoman crimes against the Armenians.
As a prominent Armenian intellectual, particularly one who had publically decried crimes against her people, Zabel knew she was in danger. In 1915, the first year of the Armenian genocide that would claim 1.5 million lives at the hands of the ruling Turkish party, the Committee of Union and Progress, she had a close call with Turkish officials. While exiting a building, an official asked her if she was Zabel Yesayan. ‘No,’ she replied coolly, ‘she is inside.’ She quickly made her escape and moved to safety in Bulgaria.
100 Nasty Women of History Page 12
