Good Wives

by Margaret Forster

  At the time of writing, Jennie had little experience of any romantic love. It wasn’t that she hadn’t been interested in boys (she had become so distracted by them at the age of fifteen, when she was still at Cowdenbeath’s large mixed secondary school, that for the first time she wasn’t first in the class) but that she hadn’t found a like-minded one. Not until she progressed to Edinburgh University did love of this sort enter her life and begin to show her how complicated were the emotions, as well as the physical sensations, it gave rise to. She was extremely attractive, exuded vitality and sexual energy, and had indeed developed a certain style, dressing well, though with little money to do it on. She was ready, and more than prepared to defy convention, to enter into sexual liaisons which would see her living according to her own ideals and scorning marriage.

  Here it was her father, not her mother, who went a long way towards helping her to be prepared. Before she left for Edinburgh, he put on the bookshelves, where she could not fail to notice it, Marie Stopes’s Married Love (published four years before and giving extremely basic, but revolutionary for the times, information on birth control). In fact, it was so vague about the details of contraception that Jennie soon wanted much more precise knowledge. Edinburgh was the place to acquire it. She got to know a woman medical student who told her all about the various methods of birth control, and also about the ‘bad and indifferent methods of abortion … better to enjoy and suffer than sit around with folded arms … please God, lead me into temptation.’8 He did. Dan Gillies, aged twenty-three to her nineteen, attracted her greatly. She met him during the course of her political activities, when he spoke at one of the socialist party meetings she attended. He was a brilliant orator, full of the kind of idealistic passion she shared, and he was a genuine working man, a rivet-heater from Glasgow, not a callow student. She was ready to have a full-blooded affair with him, but it never happened. ‘I intended to have a plaything,’9 she wrote to her best friend Suse, ‘instead, I am up against a man who is stronger and cleverer than myself in every way.’ Her response was to declare: ‘This love business leaves me perfectly indifferent.’

  This was hardly true. She was battling to separate strong feelings of physical attraction from those of emotional and intellectual commitment. She’d always promised herself that sex and love should, and would, not be confused – she wouldn’t have to love someone to have sex with him. She wasn’t even sure love existed in its own right – maybe, or so she suspected, love was only sex. It confused her, sitting on a train, to meet an Indian who was ‘exceedingly handsome and intelligent … I made no definite promise but he expects to see something of me …’10 So did Dan, but her initial interest in him was waning quickly. He was not the man she had thought he was from his speeches. She had unusual ideas as to the sort of man she did in fact want. She was drawn to ‘big, simple people, free from affectation’. All the men she had admired, those socialist propagandists invited home by her father, had had what she thought of as a purity, an innocence about them, a naïvety about everyday matters in striking contrast to the sophistication of their intellects. That was what she was looking for in a man, what she thought she’d found in Dan. She was soon disillusioned, writing to Suse that he wasn’t after all ‘an unsophisticated child of nature’ but instead that he sounded ‘an ominously modern and familiar note’. Fortunately, at this point, before any real sexual adventure took place, Dan was sent to prison for his political activism during the 1926 General Strike. The ruthless Jennie was vastly relieved. He was sentenced to four months – ‘Thank goodness for all concerned that I had cooled towards him before this occurred.’11

  Nobody else ever came nearer to becoming her lover during her student days, though she was highly aware of her own attractiveness and the power she had. ‘I have been told,’12 she commented to Suse, ‘… that I have eyes like the cinema!’ In other words, that she was sexy. She knew that. She despised herself for it, but she loved making herself look good, spending more time than she thought a serious-minded woman should on her appearance. She wanted to work for a socialist revolution, but she also wanted to see herself in ‘a deep crimson silk chiffon velvet dress, made almost sleeveless, and with that long loose tie in the front … the tie … in heavy black crèpe-de-chine or satin’.13 She would look gorgeous in it, and she craved looking gorgeous. Too much of her time, she felt, went into mooning about clothes when it should have gone into some honest work and continuous thinking and not such frivolities.

  But she was too hard on herself. She was doing plenty of thinking and had worked extremely hard both at her studies and for the socialist cause during her university days. It was not just that she wanted to do well for her own sake, but that she felt a deep obligation to justify her mother’s faith in her. Financially, she was dependent for half her class fees on her family and, though her mother never mentioned the struggle it was to find this money, she was well aware of it and tried to relieve the situation by winning prizes which would provide money. Even so, money went on being a worry and hampered her from being able to attend some of the socialist conferences she wanted to go to. When the organisers of one such conference wrote to invite her, her father told her to reply that she was already a burden to her people through educational expenditure. Considering she had just started teaching that summer, the moment she had taken her degree and was qualified, and had earned enough to contribute £124 already to the family exchequer, she felt this was unfair and that her father ‘should be made to feel that arithmetic of the situation’.

  Teaching was not something she had really wanted to do, but it was the only job that presented itself. It was 1926, the year of the General Strike and, though her brother had emigrated to Australia, meaning there was one less mouth to feed, money was tighter then it had ever been. She was living at home and had to have a job, and teaching was the only professional one available. Even getting a job as a teacher hadn’t been easy – she’d had to wait for the local education authority to appoint her to a school – and the teaching itself made her ‘feel like hell’. She exhausted herself trying to teach according to her own ideals, without brutality, and bringing to it an understanding of the impoverished backgrounds of most of her pupils. But it was tough and, though coming home to be looked after, as ever, by her devoted mother, was a comfort, there were strains there too. Her father, as a result of his own part in political agitation, had been demoted from a ‘fireman’ (meaning a deputy, or inspector) to an ordinary miner. The return to such hard physical work shattered him. Jennie came home each day to witness her mother, the perfect wife, trying to anticipate her father’s every wish, making him special dishes – ‘a light milk pudding with the white of an egg whisked on top’ – because he couldn’t digest anything else. He was almost at the end of his strength and had decided to join Tommy in Australia. Both parents, wrote Jennie to Suse, had definitely made up their minds that this was their only way out.

  Jennie wanted a quite different way out. Emigration, she told Suse, was not for her ‘until I have investigated London, Paris, and maybe New York, and see definitely what shape I am making towards Westminster’.14 One step towards it was to start attending the conferences she hadn’t been able to afford as a student, the kind of gatherings where she would be noted by influential people within the Labour Party. Her first trip abroad was to Brussels, to the Socialist International Conference in the summer of 1927. The letters she wrote from there to Suse had nothing to do with politics. They were all about her first real love affair, her first sexual experience. T’ang Liang-Li was a young Chinese intellectual who had become the London correspondent for a London newspaper. His personality, according to Jennie, was ‘infinitely cleverer, subtler and more understanding’15 than her own. He was passionate and devoted, and though she responded to, and welcomed, the passion, she was troubled by the devotion. At first, she’d been relieved that T’ang already had a girlfriend. Another woman might have resented this and set herself to usurp the existing girl, but believing that
T’ang was already committed and wanted only an affair made Jennie feel secure. But he broke with this girlfriend – ‘I advised him not to …’ – and told Jennie he wanted their union to be perfect. He also wanted to marry her, at once. This sounded the loudest warning signal of all to Jennie, and she felt obliged to spell out to T’ang that, though he pronounced himself finished with experimentation and ready to commit himself only and entirely to her, she did not feel the same. She was ‘just at the beginning’ and might some day desert him in the same way he had ditched his previous girlfriend. ‘This business has a lot of pain in it’, she told Suse, ‘as well as pleasure.’ T’ang wanted her to come to London and live with him, on his money until she could support herself through freelance journalism, which he was confident she would be able to do, but he could not persuade her.

  During what turned out to be a fairly brief, if intense, affair with T’ang, Jennie never once thought of herself as being ‘in love’. Indeed, she was as doubtful as ever that, so far as she was concerned, this condition could exist. The sex had been terrific, but what did it have to do with love? As for marriage, she assured Suse it had never been even a remote possibility. All her energy was going into trying to get out of teaching (though she worked hard at it and did her considerable best to be a good teacher) and into politics. That’s what she wanted to be, a politician. A year later, in 1928, at the age of twenty-three, she was chosen by the Independent Labour Party (ILP) to be their parliamentary candidate for North Lanark in the approaching by-election. She was wildly excited and put everything she had into canvassing to great effect – those who had thought her youth, her sex and her looks would be fatal handicaps were proved wrong. Her passionate commitment to socialism, her absolute identification with the problems of the constituents, and her fiery speeches won people over. She won the by-election.

  She was on her way, in love not with T’ang but with politics, married to the cause she cared so much about. On the overnight-sleeper she caught from Glasgow to London she was as euphoric as any bride. Nothing intimidated her. ‘I will have London at my feet,’ she had boasted to Suse, and in no time she did, or political London anyway. The entire male House of Commons appeared mesmerised by this lovely, sexy, stylish young Scottish woman, who looked so radiant and bore herself with such staggering self-confidence. There had been few women in the House before – Lady Astor had taken her seat in 1919, and she had been joined by three more women in 1923, but none of them had looked like Jennie. Lady Astor had kept to a sort of severe uniform of her own invention, and the other women, except Lady Terrington, had had no interest in clothes. Jennie stood out and all eyes were upon her, which suited her fine. A few weeks after her first appearance in the Commons, when the General Election had seen her seat confirmed, everyone waited to see how she would make her mark. That 1929 election had been called the ‘Flapper’ election, because sixty-nine women candidates had stood and fourteen had been elected, all of whom were anxious to show they could be just as capable as the men, but the Labour Party was in office with only a tiny majority and could hardly take risks. Jennie was at something of a disadvantage anyway. She was expected to abide by ILP policies which, unfortunately for her ambition, often clashed with mainline government policies. (At that time, there were several parties-within-the-party and the most maverick of them was Jennie’s, the ILP.) Her chances of being noticed and marked down for future responsibility were not good if she spouted ILP views too loudly. But, in fact, it was hard for her to make any kind of impression in the chamber, because she was so overwhelmed with the detail of what being an MP turned out to be. She badly needed guidance, and more than any other new colleague the one who provided it was Frank Wise, another, but very experienced, ILP member. Frank, however, did more than put her straight on policy matters – he fell in love with her, and she with him.

  Frank Wise was forty-five years old to her twenty-five. He came into the 1929 Parliament as MP for Leicester, after an already distinguished career as an economist. A Cambridge graduate, Frank had been called to the Bar but then joined the civil service, becoming economic adviser on the Soviet Union. He was not only clever but also physically dynamic, an athlete who climbed, played football and was an accomplished rider. And he was married, with four children. This deterred Jennie not one bit – as with T’ang’s existing girlfriend, it only made her feel safe in a love affair with Frank. He couldn’t try to persuade her to become a wife. She had no scruples about Dorothy, Frank’s wife of twenty years, either. Dorothy had a first-class degree, was a teacher and a JP – but Jennie didn’t fear her wrath. As far as she was concerned, Dorothy could stay Frank’s wife and welcome to the role. She didn’t even want to live with Frank all the time, but was perfectly content to have her own flat. She’d started off in Dean Street, Soho, but during her affair with Frank she moved to Guilford Street in Bloomsbury, round the corner from his London base in John Street. She liked her own space and didn’t mind the coming and going all the time between the two flats.

  But Frank did. He was completely bewitched by Jennie and desperate not just to be with her all the time but to make her his wife. Very soon he wanted to divorce Dorothy and marry Jennie as quickly as possible. Writing to a friend, he described Jennie as ‘very clear-headed’16 and said ‘she achieves an amazing combination of cool detached judgement with warm personal feelings which at once bewilders and delights a mere Englishman’. But it was this very clear-headedness and cool detached judgement which worked against him. Jennie didn’t want Frank to divorce Dorothy and she had no desire to become his wife. The word, the role, was still taboo. She did love him, but not to that extent. Times spent with him, usually abroad when Frank was on some kind of business trip and she joined him, during the parliamentary recesses, were wonderful but they did not change her mind. She was aghast when he told Dorothy he wanted a divorce, and relieved when Dorothy refused to give him one. Then, two years later, as Frank grew more and more restless with a situation he found agonising, Jennie and Frank both lost their seats in Parliament in the General Election of October 1931.

  This put their affair to a hard test. They had not the same easy access to each other that belonging to the House of Commons had given them. Worse than that, Jennie had to earn a living, mostly as a journalist. She was certainly not going to crawl back to Scotland and teaching, and snatched at the opportunity which arose for her to go on a lecture tour, expounding the socialist cause, to America. From there, her letters to Frank confirmed that she still loved him but was no nearer to wanting him to divorce Dorothy and marry her. She assured him: ‘Darling, you would be surprised if you knew how dull and virtuous I am these days … [there is] no one I want to flirt with.’17 Yet at the same time she left him in no doubt that she would not guarantee her fidelity to him: if there were someone worth flirting with, she might flirt, and more. It wouldn’t mean much, but if she was apart a long time she might indulge in sexual comfort if it came her way. Early on in their relationship, she’d warned him that men reached the stage very quickly of wanting to sleep with her and it wasn’t her fault. If he ‘left a gap’ it would be easy for her to succumb and fill it.

  Her resistance to the idea of Frank’s divorcing Dorothy was not, however, only because she didn’t want to marry him herself and become that hateful thing ‘a wife’, but because she didn’t want either of their careers damaged. While they were both MPs, the damage caused by a divorce would, judged Jennie, be ‘calamitous’, and once both had lost their seats, getting re-elected as, respectively, the guilty party in a divorce, and the woman cited as the offender, would be impossible. Again and again she dinned it into Frank that divorce would be disastrous for their ambitions and that those ambitions were far, far more important than their personal happiness, which he imagined he’d only find if she could, and would, become his wife. Marriage was an impediment to ambition. Furthermore, it would actually wreck their relationship.

  In December 1931, when Frank was becoming more insistent than ever, Jennie wro
te a letter in which she tried harder than ever to make him understand what becoming his wife would do to her. They had just had one of their many partings and when he saw her off at the station he’d absent-mindedly called her Dorrie (his wife’s pet name). She wrote that ‘a kind of alarm bell rang’:18 he’d called her that because she’d sounded like a nagging wife. She told him that, though she had indeed come close to the ‘stupid boorish nagging’ wives were famous for, he had to appreciate that it was marriage which made women nags. And as for men, it made them jealous. She couldn’t bear the thought of Frank regarding her as his property and therefore thinking he had a right to be jealous. She was, she said ‘a rather overvital animal with the temptation to love others as well as you’ and even though she loved him ‘more completely than any other man’ this did not ‘still my curiosity and even temporary infatuation for others’.

  She seemed to think that Frank would see nothing contradictory in her statement on the one hand that she loved only him and on the other that she was capable of ‘temporary infatuation’ with others, an infatuation invariably leading to a sexual relationship, however brief and, to her at least, meaningless. When Frank was around she had eyes for no one else, but when he wasn’t she had other companions. One of them was Aneurin Bevan, MP for Ebbw Vale, an ex-miner and a passionate socialist like herself, though he was not a lover. She liked his company immensely and admired the way he enjoyed himself with women without getting trapped into marriage. He regarded marriage as something to be avoided at all costs, just as she did. They acknowledged each other’s sensual natures and for both of them, as Jennie put it, ‘celibacy was no part of our creed’. They gloried in ‘free’ relationships which, so long as they were discreet, would not in any way threaten their political ambitions.