Living in Sin
Page 42
from 1902 to 1910. When they returned to England in 1910, Mann briefly
joined the SDF, and later became a Communist, but he never rejoined the
ILP.45Interestingly, Mann did not use arguments against marriage to
justify his desertion of his first wife; he and Harker seemingly shared
socialist unease with ‘free love’. Instead, the couple, like most working-class
cohabitees, pretended to be married, an understandable decision in light of
their difficulties. The discretion helped social y, but economic difficulties
remained. Ellen never divorced Mann, and she received his widow’s pension
when he died in 1941. Mann had to write his will careful y to leave the rest
to Harker. Despite these strains, this second union, lasting forty years, was
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
happy, so he probably never regretted his choice. But they lived together
because they could not marry, not by choice.46 And the ILP’s reaction to
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living in sin
their ‘marriage’ showed its deep hostility to any marital nonconformity.
The ILP’s moralism was also clear in the case of George Belt and
Dora Montefiore. Belt, a married man with four children, was a bricklayer
and organiser for the ILP. Montefiore was a widow from a well-off family.
She became a feminist after her husband’s death and also joined the Social
Democratic Federation. The couple apparently met working in the labour
movement. Belt was unhappy with his wife, who did not share his interest
in socialism. He had a breakdown in 1899, and when he was released from
the hospital, he left with Montefiore. Mrs Belt complained to the ILP, and
the leaders promptly fired George. Montefiore continued her roles with the
SDF, since it considered the marriage question one of personal conscience,
but the women’s movement was a different story. At an International
Women’s Conference in 1899, Margaret McDonald, warned by her husband
Ramsay, blocked Dora from giving a paper.47
One cannot build too many arguments on these two incidents; after al ,
both involved men deserting their families. Nevertheless, the less established
parts of the socialist movement clearly supported unconventional unions
more readily. The traditional branches of working-class activism, as well as
feminism, kept the mid-Victorian insistence on sexual purity – or at least
the appearance of it. This situation baffled Montefiore. She wrote to Keir
Hardie, ‘They [socialists] are for the most part free thinkers as to dogmas
… Why should they not be free to think out their thoughts on the sex
question also?’48 But labour workers feared such experiments would doom
their wider goals.
Like the ILP, the Fabian Society had its bouts of hypocrisy. The Fabians
were a number of largely middle-class writers and reformers who wanted
to bring about socialism by permeating the regular parties with socialist
ideas. The society attracted an interesting set of adherents, including H. G.
Wel s, G. B. Shaw, and Hubert Bland and Edith Nesbit. Wel s was by far the
most radical on the issues of women and marriage. He argued in 1902 that
the state had no right to interfere in sexual relationships unless the couple
had children. In the place of legal monogamy, Wel s suggested people enter
free sexual unions. As Jane Lewis has pointed out, Wel s believed that
sexual freedom would be far more liberating for women than suffrage.49
However, he soon discovered that he was out of step with both socialism
and feminism on this issue.
As discussed before, Wel s left his first wife to live with his second,
and he had numerous affairs during his second marriage. His affair with
Amber Pember Reeves led to an elopement to France and a public scandal.
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
Wel s’s openness about his beliefs, and his willingness to live by them,
horrified his colleagues, but Wel s found their hypocrisy maddening. For
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Frost, Ginger S.. Living in Sin : Cohabiting as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth-Century England,
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radical couples, 1850–1914
instance, Hubert Bland had sex with Edith Nesbit before they married and
was persistently unfaithful thereafter, including affairs with his daughter’s
schoolfriends. Yet, since he made no open scandal, he was a member
in good standing and one of Wel s’s chief critics.50 One can understand
Wel s’s exasperation with this situation, but he was not entirely consistent
himself. In J. R. Hammond’s phrase, ‘equality of the sexes on the lines he
was advocating would lead to greater freedom for men unaccompanied
by any corresponding enlargement of freedom for women.’ After al , if the
state supported all offspring, men had even less responsibility than before,
while women were still confined to domesticity. Nor did Wel s envision
women having affairs as men did. Wel s admitted later that he argued for
his sexual ideas with ‘no thought of how I would react if presently my wife
were to carry them into effect’.51
As pointed out in Chapter 5, Wel s’s relationship with Rebecca West
showed the difficulties of free unions in this hostile atmosphere. Indeed, his
sexual career gave some credence to socialists and feminists who doubted
‘free love’. As Jane Lewis argues, ‘the practical effect of Wel s’s “equal sexual
treatment” was inevitably to make women more sexual y available to men’.52
Furthermore, because of the censorious reaction of many Socialist and
Feminist groups, such couples forfeited their main support group. They
thus faced increasing difficulties in balancing the demands for equality and
freedom with conventional sexual expectations of groups like the ILP or
the Fabians. In other words, the historian must be careful not to overstate
the radicalism of the last half of the nineteenth century.
Another example of the paradoxical influence of socialism and
feminism was the case of Edith Lanchester and James Sullivan. Edith, the
daughter of an architect, became a socialist and worked as Eleanor Marx’s
secretary and as an SDF/ILP speaker. James Sullivan was an Irish labourer
who worked for the SDF, where the two met in the early 1890s. Sullivan
and Lanchester (known to each other as Shamus and Biddy) fell in love;
it was an unusual match, considering their class differences. Even more
unusual y, Edith refused to marry James. Marriage, she insisted, ‘is real y a
private concern of the individual, binding only by mutual love and esteem,
and terminable by mutual consent.’ Lanchester and Sullivan also refused to
hide the decis
ion; Edith told both the landlady and her family about their
plans.53Not surprisingly, the couple met strong resistance. Some in the socialist
movement tried to talk Edith into marrying, and her parents and siblings
were appalled. According to their daughter, Elsa, James preferred to marry,
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
but Edith flatly refused. As a result, her father and brothers committed
her to a lunatic asylum in October 1895. The SDF and the leaders of the
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Frost, Ginger S.. Living in Sin : Cohabiting as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth-Century England,
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living in sin
Legitimation League rallied to her support, and Sullivan eventual y got her
freed. The two then lived together for the rest of their lives, having a son
and a daughter. Both Edith and James worked in the socialist movement
and reared their children to follow freethinking and to support workers’
and women’s rights. They stayed together until James’s death in 1945 (Edith
died in 1966).54
The longevity of the Lanchester/Sullivan union testifies to its success.
Though they had their differences (Biddy was a vegetarian and Shamus was
not), the couple managed to overcome them. Stil , their daughter Elsa, the
future film star, insisted that their relationship had its peculiarities. For one
thing, the children knew their maternal aunts and grandmother, but not the
uncles who helped kidnap their mother, or their grandfather. In addition,
Elsa always believed James wanted to be married. He wore a guard ring for
years, because, she surmised, ‘it made him feel a little bit properly married’.
Edith had purposely never worn one.55
Moreover, the Lanchester/Sullivan union, at least according to Elsa,
was not necessarily happy. Elsa records several ways that Edith belittled
her partner, and Edith may have found it difficult to adapt to life with a
working-class man. Elsa speculated that the fact that the two had made a
public stand forced them to stay together: ‘their Cause united them – and
time does not reward political enthusiasm. From it all I learned that the
cloak of respectability was, paradoxical y, one of the keys to freedom. But
this cloak involves a degree of hypocrisy … [and] Biddy and Shamus were
never hypocrites.’ Elsa speculated that if her parents had found alternative
partners, they might have wanted to divorce, but they could not since they
had never married: ‘In defying convention they were chained by it.’56 Elsa
may not have been right; she had several differences with her mother. But
she was correct that couples in free unions could not end them without
admitting the failure of their ideals.
Free unions within socialist groups il ustrate some important points.
First, ironical y, the women in these unions often had more social support
than the men. Marx remained popular with her colleagues, though none
of them liked Aveling, and Lanchester became a heroine in the Socialist
movement, hailed for her bravery and honesty, while Sullivan, in Elsa’s
words, ‘didn’t seem to get much credit.’57 Second, power relationships in the
family remained. Strong women could hold their own, but radical beliefs
did not always overcome emotional ties. Third, cohabiting partnerships
were sometimes as binding as marriages. Because these relationships were
exemplary, they could not fail. Ironical y, their ‘freedom’ led to less liberty,
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
while hypocrisy allowed room to manoeuvre. Fourth, these couples’ unions,
like those of the Godwin household, led to tensions in their wider families.
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Frost, Ginger S.. Living in Sin : Cohabiting as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth-Century England,
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radical couples, 1850–1914
Lanchester’s family was the most extreme example of this, but problems
emerged for many cohabitees.
Final y, the class make-up of these couples is instructive. Two of them
were cross-class unions, both with a middle-class woman and a working-
class man; the majority of the rest were lower-middle and middle-class
couples. The working class was largely uninvolved in cohabiting from radical
motives. As Anna Martin’s work showed, working-class women resented
the gender and class biases in the divorce law, but they were not opposed
to marriage. And, as Jonathan Rose has pointed out, most working-class
people remained profoundly ignorant of sexual experiments; the fin-de-
siècle age of ‘liberation’ passed them by.58 In socialism, ironical y, middle-
class women were more adventurous than those in the working class.
The Legitimation League
As radicalism grew and splintered, new groups emerged. One example
was the Legitimation League, founded in 1893 in Leeds. The League was
dedicated to achieving legal recognition for all acknowledged illegitimate
children (those from stable free unions). The members expanded the goals
in 1897 ‘[t]o educate public opinion in the direction of freedom in sexual
relationships’. The founder was Oswald Dawson, a man from a wealthy
Quaker family, who lived in a free union with Gladys Heywood. The first
president was J. H. Levy, followed quickly by Wordsworth Donisthorpe, a
doctor. The League moved to London in 1897 and increased its membership
and public profile, though Donisthorpe resigned at this point, since he
disapproved of the change in emphasis. His replacement was Lillian
Harman, an American supporter of free love. The secretary of the League
and the editor of their journal, Adult, was George Bedborough. The
League was a small group and had little visibility until the Lanchester case.
Because of the publicity of that incident, the League ran into trouble in
1898. Bedborough was arrested in March for selling Havelock Ellis’s Sexual
Inversion to a policeman. The League never recovered from the financial
and social blows and petered out in 1899.59
The members of the Legitimation League dissented from legal
marriage vocal y. They published numerous explanations for their stance.
Bedborough argued that neither sex could be ‘truly free, until men and
women alike agree to forego all rights in each other’s person.’ He further
argued that the female members of the League who cohabited did so
because they ‘wanted their freedom, and therefore they acted as paramours
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
instead of wives.’ William Dunton, who lived with Emma Briggs, agreed
with this last point about the sexual double standard in marriage: ‘to any
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living in sin
woman worth considering, there could be nothing more intolerable.’ Some
women members also openly disdained marriage. Emma Wardlaw Best,
who lived with Arthur Wastal , asserted that they did not want ‘any bond
save that of love’ in their partnership.60
Though these reasons sound feminist, at times, the leaders of the
League put individual liberty ahead of women’s concerns. Donisthorpe,
for example, dismissed women’s concern about desertion and possible
poverty.61 Unsurprisingly, then, some women members expressed
concerns about free unions. Mary Reed wrote that free love hurt women
more than men, and she doubted the existence of many ‘real y happy
“free” marriage[s]’.62 In addition to these differences, the League had to
refute accusations of promiscuity. Members often had to explain that they
supported monogamy, if not marriage. Gladys Dawson, for example, said
she believed in free love in the same way that she believed in a free press
or free trade – people should make their own arrangements without state
intervention – but not in polygamy. In addition, most members expected
some sort of registration, since they wanted their children acknowledged.63
In other words, most members wanted more freedom and flexibility, but
not promiscuity.
One of the most interesting aspects of the League was that many of
the members combined theory and practice. Because its original purpose
centred on acknowledged illegitimate children, it attracted those with a
direct interest in that issue. The League provided an officer who registered
such children, and Adult printed public announcements about free unions.
Oswald and Gladys Dawson gave notice that they were in a permanent
union, as did William Dunton and Emma Briggs in 1895 and Emma Best
and Arthur Wastall in 1898. Adult also ran personal ads for a time to help
those interested in free unions, and both men and women advertised for
partners, often ‘with a view to permanent union.’64
The problems of finding a like-minded people was the least of the