Iris married John Austen Philips, a civil servant who was six years her senior, in a simple ceremony held on February 5, 1907. He had served with the British army in South Africa and was Postmaster at Droitwich in northern Worcestershire at the time, but he had ambitions to write. He succeeded with a good deal of help from Edith. She was in her early fifties by then but had lost none of her high spirits. In March she traveled to Paris with Hubert, Alice, Arthur Watts, and a young man named Ambrose Flower, who she nicknamed “Florizel, Prince of Bohemia.” He was a friend of Iris’s from the Slade School of Fine Art but had retrained as an actor. As it was exceptionally hot when they visited Versailles, Edith suggested they paddle in a fountain. She hitched up her skirts and Flower rolled up his trousers, but an irate gendarme ordered them out. Later, at the Comédie-Française, Flower and she went from corridor to corridor opening every window, even when they were asked not to do so. In response, Edith gripped the curtains and pretended to feel faint while Flower assured the ushers that his friend was desperately ill and needed some air. She must have seemed an unlikely rebel. A profile in Authors Today and Yesterday described her at this time:
In physical aspect a stout, ageing woman who suffered from asthma and bronchitis and walked about in trailing gowns with a tin of tobacco and cigarette papers under her arm, in heart a combination of the whole Bastable family put together, in capabilities a great artist one day and no sort of artist at all the next, it is not astonishing that she inspired in many of her friends a mixture of awe, bewilderment, and devoted love.23
Iris gave birth to a daughter in Well Hall on January 27, 1908. It was a difficult birth, and she was desperately weak afterward. She named her daughter Rosamund Philippa Philips, but the family called her “Pandora” and she looked uncannily like her maternal grandmother. Edith doted on her and dedicated Harding’s Luck to “Rosamund Philippa Philips with E. Nesbit’s love.” Iris’s marriage was not a success. By 1911 she was earning a living as “Madame Iris,” an “artistic dressmaker and designer.” She operated her business out of Edith’s flat at Royalty Chambers. It may have been Iris’s status as a single mother and the circumstances that required her to earn her living that in some way informed an exceptionally controversial speech her mother delivered to the Fabian Women’s Group in 1908.
* In 1914, Pryse documented the horror of war by driving a Mercedes around France and Belgium, carrying his lithographic stones in the back. He left an account of this trip in Four Days: an account of a journey in France made between 28 and 31 August 1914, published by John Lane.
* Dunsany died in Dublin in 1957 after an attack of appendicitis. His wife, Beatrice, was supportive of his literary career, assisting him with his writing, typing his manuscripts, selecting work for his 1950s retrospective short story collection, and overseeing his literary heritage after his death.
CHAPTER 18
“VOTES FOR WOMEN? VOTES FOR CHILDREN! VOTES FOR DOGS!”
Edith showed exceptional loyalty to her women friends. Under the terms of her will she guaranteed Ada Breakell a place in her home in perpetuity. She also acted as mentor to several young women, including Berta Ruck, who recalled with embarrassment the hours she spent “unthinkingly and unblushingly” in Edith’s study, reading aloud her “perfectly hopeless young writings”:
I wish I could adequately convey to you that delightful and gifted friend of mine as I saw her then, at Well Hall, or down at Romney Marsh, when, as a lanky girl, I used to sit quite literally among scattered sheets of manuscript paper at her feet, and used to be given advice and help, of which I shall feel the benefit of her patience . . . her generosity . . . her unconquerable frankness over anything that she considered beneath my powers as far as they went. “Won’t do Berta! Won’t do!” she would exclaim suddenly and would stop me to show how various details of the story were not consistent, pointing out the faults kindly but quite firmly.1
Yet it was Edith’s failure to support women that prompted a breach with Laurence Housman, one of her staunchest friends. He admitted to admiring her “fine generous character and her enormous energy—also her wonderful faculty of joie-de-vivre,” but he justified this estrangement in a letter to Doris Langley Moore:
After 1902 I saw less and less of her. I never liked her husband; and when my feeling toward him became active dislike, it was embarrassing to continue visiting the house. I fancy she understood the reason, and acquiesced. When the Women’s Suffrage Movement started, she disappointed me by refusing to take any part in it when it took the form of Adult Suffrage. I felt that this was a dishonest excuse, put forward, I guess, because her husband was a violent Anti, and she wished not to annoy him.2
Housman, who was openly homosexual, campaigned bravely for gay rights and law reform. When Oscar Wilde was impoverished and living in exile, Housman traveled to Paris with funds his friends had collected at the Café Royal. A staunch Socialist and a committed pacifist, he was also a tireless campaigner for women’s suffrage. His sister Clemence, a leading figure in the movement, sat on the committee of the Women’s Tax Resistance League.
Edith’s views on women’s rights, and the suffrage question in particular, were generally hostile. She justified her opposition to limited suffrage on the grounds that it was contrary to her commitment to socialism. In June 1910 she refused a request from journalist Evelyn Sharp to sign a petition asking Prime Minister H. H. Asquith to put through the Conciliation Bill of 1910. She explained her decision:
I am sorry I cannot sign the enclosed memorial as it does not embody my views. I am for adult Suffrage, but primarily my political interest is all for Socialism, and I do not wish Socialism to be endangered by an extension of the franchise to Conservative women.3
Before she sent it, she softened this note by replacing “Conservative women” with “a class of women mainly Conservative.” She was not the only socialist to rely on this argument. Her fellow socialist Gerald Gould, a co-founder of the United Suffragists, explained:
E. Nesbit’s attitude towards Woman Suffrage, for instance, was a reasoned one; she favoured adult suffrage, but refused for political reasons to support the Conciliation Bill [this would have allowed the vote to about a million women]; whereas Hubert’s contribution to the controversy was to exclaim with the manner of one swallowing an emetic; “Votes for women? Votes for children! Votes for dogs!”4
This stance was confirmed when her letter to the Sheffield Daily Telegraph was published on January 22, 1912:
Sir—The question of Woman’s Suffrage is not one in which I take much interest. At the same time I admire the courage of the militant suffragettes. And if the right to own property be conceded to women, and the obligation to pay rates and taxes be enforced on women, I cannot see any logical loophole by which I can escape from giving women the vote.5
Her ambivalence peaked in 1908. Many Fabian women were expressing impatience at the lack of progress on women’s rights, and prominent among them was anarchist Charlotte Wilson, who had re-engaged with the society. This unrest was summarized in Fabian Women’s Group, Three Years’ Work 1908–1911, a pamphlet published in 1911:
Many ardent suffragists amongst Fabian women felt that the Society was not keeping pace with a movement to which it had recently committed itself by the insertion of a new clause on its basis.6
On March 14, 1908, a “little party” of like-minded women met in the home of Maud Pember Reeves, who was Amber’s mother, to “discuss the situation.” Wilson addressed them on the need to clarify the “real meaning and significance of the Economic Independence of women under socialism and the steps to be taken to obtain it.”7 That day the Fabian Women’s Group was established, and Wilson was elected secretary. The six hundred women members of the Fabian Society (out of two thousand total) were invited to a general meeting at which the group outlined its stated aims:
Firstly, to make the equality in citizenship advocated in the Fabian Basis an active part of the Society’s propaganda and an active principle in its intern
al organization; Secondly, to study woman’s economic independence in relationship to socialism.8
On April 4 a “large gathering” assembled in the studio of artist Marion Wallace Dunlop. It was agreed that, while “natural difference” existed between men and women, this had been “artificially exaggerated and distorted by the subjection of women.” They drafted an announcement that asserted the equality of Fabian women and launched a campaign to get more women onto the Executive. It was also agreed that they would participate in the suffrage processions that were organized by the National Union of Woman’s Suffrage Societies and the Woman’s Social and Political Union. A group banner was designed, and May Morris presented the materials to make it.9 By May 9, 159 women had joined the Women’s Fabian Group. During the summer of 1908 they demonstrated under a banner that read “Women’s Will Beats Asquith’s Won’t.”* On July 5, 1909, Marion Wallace went on a hunger strike after she was arrested for militancy. By 1910 eleven members had been jailed for their activism.10
Edith joined the Fabian Women’s Group, but she was reluctant to engage with their suffrage campaign. She did, however, accept Charlotte Wilson’s invitation to deliver the first in a series of lectures on “Woman and Work.” Since its title was advertised as “Motherhood and Breadwinning,” those gathered to hear her on May 29, 1908, were astonished when she announced that, rather than addressing them as a successful writer, she would speak as the wife of Hubert Bland. Her name is not mentioned in the account of her lecture included in Three Years’ Work 1908–1911:
Our first paper was by a Socialist wife and mother who had herself gained economic independence by her arduous and brilliant work, and we asked her to take “Women and Work” as her general subject. The special aspect of it she chose was the “Natural Disabilities of Women.” Women, she held, are predominately creatures of sex, whose paramount need is a mate and children; and also they are heavily weighted throughout life by physical and mental disabilities unknown to men. Nevertheless, their economic independence ought to be secured if only to enable them to mate well and wisely.11
One audience member, who described herself as “an English Socialist woman,” gave an account of this controversial lecture in an open letter she sent to Wilshire’s Magazine:
The Fabian women have formed a branch of their own a month or so ago, to study especially those questions which affect women, and their meetings bid fair to be very interesting, though the first lecture, given by Mrs Hubert Bland (E. Nesbit) was a very extraordinary one, and the lecturer found her audience more or less hostile all the way through. I can’t think how she could have come before an audience of “waked-up” women and expect them to listen to her running down their sex. She took a very odd tone: of course, in a mixed audience, we should not give ourselves away, but, as we were all women together, we might as well be honest with ourselves and own that women were men’s inferiors all along the line, inherently, etc. etc. She got a nice chorus of opposition: she said too that if we were honest we should own that all we have of the best we could always trace back to some man, and it did me good to hear the interruption there. “What about our mothers?” and the call was taken up till the whole meeting was calling “Mothers. Mothers.” in remonstrating tones. She put my back up before five minutes were over by flattering us with pretty names—“flower of femininity” was one awful appellation she presented us with and in the same breath inviting us superior beings to join her in throwing stones at “the average woman.” Lord save me from Mrs Bland. I wonder her Socialism hasn’t sweetened her imagination.12
A summary of Edith’s lecture, produced for private circulation, confirmed that she had described women as “predominantly creatures of sex, whose paramount need is a mate and children.” She also spoke in defense of polygamy and suggested that women should be willing to accept short-term mating, leading to motherhood, in preference to enduring marriage. She allowed that such arrangements would require women to be financially self-supporting but warned that the cultivation of the intellect led to sterility in women. One can only imagine the gasps of horror that greeted her suggestion that the world would suffer little if women’s output were eradicated.13
The official report, although diplomatically worded, makes it clear that Edith’s audience was far from supportive:
The stress laid on the inevitable disabilities of sex in the first lecture had aroused a strong feeling of opposition amongst our members, including some who were themselves mothers. It was felt that an altogether disproportionate importance had been attached to female incapacity for other vocations than motherhood. Our Studies Committee therefore decided to take natural and inevitable sex disability as a preliminary subject, with the object of discovering what women themselves are feeling about it.14
In response the Fabian Women’s Group resolved to demonstrate that:
Women’s disabilities of strength and skill were the result not of natural difference, but—in the age-old plea of feminism—of the artificial exaggeration of sex differences, arguing that this exaggeration was historical, patriarchal, and that its effects radiated adversely through domestic and industrial production.15
A new lecture series was organized to counteract the damage she had done. It was reported that the first speaker, physician Dr. Constance Long, “set the physiology of the matter clearly before us.” Novelist Emma Brooke, a founding member of the Fabian Women’s Group, delivered the second lecture and argued that “the ability for motherhood was in itself a cogent reason why the claim of women to full social recognition, economic and political, should be acknowledged.”16
George Bernard Shaw was tasked with correcting the proof copy of Summary of Seven Papers and Discussions Upon the Disabilities of Women as Workers. He erased Edith’s name and the summary of her lecture and, in a handwritten note, directed that the final copy must omit all reference to her paper in order to avoid a scandal should the press get hold of it. An excerpt from the unedited version makes it clear that she regarded the campaign for women’s suffrage as a threat to both maternity and the socialist cause. She insisted that “the cause of mankind is greater than the cause of women” and argued:
And supposing that, by training and teaching women to use their brains, it were possible, contrary to received opinion regarding the transmission of acquired characteristics, to produce a crop of geniuses it would have to be at the expense of the mother characteristics which are women’s raison d’être; and thus the cultivation of the intellectual or masculine characteristics of women would end in sterility and race extermination.17
The Fabian Society struggled to arrive at a comprehensive and coherent approach to the women question, a failing Ramsey MacDonald attributed to the inherent conservatism of the “Old Gang.” A proposed tract asserting women’s entitlement to the same civil and political rights as men was abandoned in disarray.*
Although Edith appeared to speak her own mind, Hubert exerted a considerable influence over her views. Several of the statements in her controversial lecture echoed his more forthright declarations. In “Men’s Love” he observed:
Why is it, by the way, that when there was no “Women’s Movement” there were great women artists and that now when woman is clamorous and obtrusive, there are none?18
Although both were essentialists, Hubert was utterly unreconstructed. “Women’s realm is the realm of the heart and the afternoon tea-table, not of the brain and the intelligence. It is hers to bewitch man, not to convince him,” he insisted.19 In Letters to a Daughter, he advised women to “affect an ignorance” since:
There is nothing people in general like so little in women as knowledge, and when I say people in general I mean people of both sexes. So you must never put all the goods in the shop window, or, at any rate, not all at once.20
He believed that men loved explaining things to young women, and he warned:
Unexpectedly to check his enterprise by showing that you know as much as he does has pretty much the same effect upon his mind as though y
ou were to suddenly add twenty years to your age, to discover wrinkles, or to develop a squint.21
He justified the exclusion of women from the legal profession by pointing out, playfully:
We feel that so irresistible are woman’s attractions, so winsome her ways, so seductive and bewildering the very atmosphere she creates around her, that were a woman, a pretty woman, (and one cannot ensure, you know, that all women lawyers should be ugly), to appear in court as the counsel for the most obviously guilty prisoner the jury would promptly acquit the criminal and then wait outside on the chance of inviting the lady to luncheon at the Savoy.22
Turning his attention to the medical profession, he declared:
But we do not allow our young women in schools to learn physiology, for we regard it as indelicate, almost indecent, that a young woman, particularly that species of young woman that we call a young lady, should know more of her own body than her own looking glass can tell her.23
It is tempting to blame Hubert for Edith’s illiberal views, but this does not exonerate her entirely. A letter she sent to Ada Breakell in 1884 describes an “infinitely boring” meeting of a Women’s Rights Group. She characterized one speaker, Lydia Becker, who was secretary of the Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage and an influential leader of the Woman’s Suffrage Movement, as “hideously like a hippopotamus.”24 In A Storyteller Tells the Truth, Berta Ruck included an anecdote of Edith’s that underlined her ambivalence to the cause:
The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit Page 27
