'Thinking Against the Current' : Literature and Political Resistance 9781845195946, 9781782842057, 9781782842064, 9781782842071, 2013021489

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One: ‘Oh England, / Sick in head and sick in heart’ (Anon, 1675)
1 ‘No Respecter of Persons’: The impact of Quaker persecution history on the radicalism of Tom Paine
2 Blake and Shelley versus Their Society
3 Hazlitt versus Malthus
4 ‘Warmint’ and ‘Gentleman’ in Great Expectations: The ambiguous ‘lowness’ of Abel Magwitch
Part Two: Enter the Women
5 ‘Ourstory’ by Carole Satyamurti
6 Introduction to ‘Which Dead Should Awaken?’: From the Collective Biography of Women, 1550–1900
7 A ‘Strong-minded Woman’ – Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827–1890): The ‘mother’ of the 19th century British women’s movement
8 Introduction to Jeanie, an ‘Army of One’: Mrs. Nassau Senior (1828–1877), the first woman in Whitehall
9 Introduction to International Woman Suffrage News (Ius Suffragii), 1906–1914
10 Eleanor Rathbone MP (1872–1946) and Indian Girls: Cultural imperialist or friend to women?
Part Three: Twentieth-Century Women and the Problem of War
11 England’s Cassandras in World War One
12 Caroline Playne (1858–1940): Cultural historian and and social psychologist
13 Jane Addams, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate (1860–1931): The chance the world missed
14 Simone Weil (1909–1943): The wise fool
15 Virginia Woolf and Antigone: Thinking against the current
16 German Women in the Resistance to Hitler
17 Germany’s Antigone: Sophie Scholl (1921–1943)
18 Compiling the First Dictionary of British Humanitarians: Why? What? Who? How?
19 Vera Brittain (1893–1970): The dogged pacifist
20 American Visionaries: Helen Keller, and the poets Muriel Rukeyser, Denise Levertov and Sharon Olds
21 Righteous Violence – War in the Family, War in the World
Index
Back Cover

Citation preview

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This collection of literary/historical essays, written 1970–2010, covers political subjects as diverse as seventeenth-century Quaker persecution history, the social impact of Malthus, the self-emancipation of English women, Eleanor Rathbone on the human rights of girls and German women’s resistance to Hitler. The more literary subjects include the social thinking of the English Romantics, Dickens’ Great Expectations, Simone Weil’s great essays attacking militarism and Virginia Woolf’s opposition to the State – as well as contemporary American women poets on the subject of war. But despite all its diversity, this collection has one unifying theme – the necessity for resistance, for ‘thinking against the current’, as Virginia Woolf wrote in ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air-raid’. The torch of resistance to oppression and militarism is shown to have been continuously handed on through the generations from the seventeenth century to our own day by men and women who had the courage, whatever the terrible personal cost, to ‘fight with the mind’. This book of passionate, lively essays is not merely a treasure trove for biographical researchers; it is also strengthening medicine, introducing us to unfamiliar forebears who can help us in our current struggle for a better world. As Simone Weil said: ‘We can find something better than ourselves in the past.’

Sybil Oldfield, Emeritus Reader in English, University of Sussex, UK, is the author of Spinsters of This Paris: Tthe Life and Times of F. M. Mayor and Mary Sheepshanks; Women Against the Iron Fist: Alternatives to Militarism, 1900–1989; The Collective Biography of Women in Britain, 1550–1900; British Women Humanitarians, 1900–1950; Afterwords: Letters on the Death of Virginia Woolf; and Jeanie, an ‘Army of One’: Mrs. Nassau Senior, 1828–1877 – The First Woman in Whitehall.

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To Gwen Shaw my sharer and in memory of my grandmother

Anna Haag a fierce resister

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SYBIL OLDFIELD

‘Thinking Against the Current’ Literature and Political Resistance

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Copyright © Sybil Oldfield, 2015. Published in the Sussex Academic e-Library, 2015. SUSSEX ACADEMIC PRESS

PO Box 139 Eastbourne BN24 9BP, UK and simultaneously in the United States of America and Canada All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Oldfield, Sybil. Thinking against the current : literature and political resistance / Sybil Oldfield. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84519-594-6 (h/b : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-78284-205-7 (e-pub) ISBN 978-1-78284-206-4 (e-mobi) ISBN 978-1-78284-207-1 (e-pdf) 1. Women—Political activity—History. 2. Feminism—History. 3. Political participation in literature. 4. Politics in literature. I. Title. HQ1236.O44 2013 305.42—dc23 2013021489

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Contents Preface Acknowledgments Introduction

vii viii 1

PART ONE ‘Oh England, / Sick in head and sick in heart’ (Anon, 1675) 1 ‘No Respecter of Persons’: The impact of Quaker persecution 5 history on the radicalism of Tom Paine 2 Blake and Shelley versus Their Society 22 3 Hazlitt versus Malthus 35 4 ‘Warmint’ and ‘Gentleman’ in Great Expectations: 47 The ambiguous ‘lowness’ of Abel Magwitch PART TWO Enter the Women 5 ‘Ourstory’ by Carole Satyamurti 6 Introduction to ‘Which Dead Should Awaken?’: From the Collective Biography of Women, 1550–1900 7 A ‘Strong-minded Woman’ – Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827–1890): The ‘mother’ of the 19th century British women’s movement 8 Introduction to Jeanie, an ‘Army of One’: Mrs. Nassau Senior (1828–1877), the first woman in Whitehall 9 Introduction to International Woman Suffrage News (Ius Suffragii), 1906–1914 10 Eleanor Rathbone MP (1872–1946) and Indian Girls: Cultural imperialist or friend to women? PART THREE Twentieth-Century Women and the Problem of War 11 England’s Cassandras in World War One 12 Caroline Playne (1858–1940): Cultural historian and and social psychologist 13 Jane Addams, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate (1860–1931): The chance the world missed 14 Simone Weil (1909–1943): The wise fool

59 60 68

76 80 101

113 126 130 143

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vi | Contents 15 16 17 18

Virginia Woolf and Antigone: Thinking against the current German Women in the Resistance to Hitler Germany’s Antigone: Sophie Scholl (1921–1943) Compiling the First Dictionary of British Humanitarians: Why? What? Who? How? 19 Vera Brittain (1893–1970): The dogged pacifist 20 American Visionaries: Helen Keller, and the poets Muriel Rukeyser, Denise Levertov and Sharon Olds 21 Righteous Violence – War in the Family, War in the World

165 177 196 220

257

Index

263

230 233

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Preface “[Le] verbe ‘résister’ existe depuis que les êtres humains sont capables de réfléchir.” (French Resistance heroine, Lucie Aubrac, La Résistance expliquée à mes petits-enfants, Édition du Seuil, 2000, p. 9)

These essays about past resistance struggles were written between 1970 and 2010, a time which itself witnessed much social and political oppression, as well as heroic attempts at resistance. ‘Resistance’ has come to be a daily news item worldwide and is in itself a contested term. It is significant that a new teaching and research centre as well as archive should have been founded this year at the University of Sussex, UK – a Centre of Resistance Studies – precisely because we need to recall, analyze and compare these diverse, significant socio-political movements. SYBIL OLDFIELD (Emeritus Reader in English and Women’s History, University of Sussex, BN1 9SH, UK)

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Acknowledgments I am grateful to the following people and publishing houses who have kindly given permission to reproduce the essays in this book. The author and publisher have made every effort to trace the copyright holders of the material in this book. Should the rights of any copyright holders have been inadvertently infringed, we shall be pleased to make all due acknowledgements in future editions. Source information is detailed in the footnote to chapter opening pages. Robert Morrell, Editor of the Journal of Radical History, and the Thomas Paine Society, UK, for ‘No Respecter of Persons’; Anthony Thorlby, co-editor of Literature and Civilization: The Modern World, vol. 1 for ‘Blake and Shelley versus their society’; Stephen Burley, editor, The Charles Lamb Bulletin, for ‘Hazlitt versus Malthus’; Carole Satyamurti and Bloodaxe Books for ‘Ourstory’; Continuum Publishers, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. for Introduction to Which Dead Should Awaken? Collective Biography of Women; Sussex Academic Press for Introduction to Jeanie, an ‘Army of One’; Taylor and Francis for Introduction to International Suffrage – Ius Suffragii 1913–1920 and ‘England’s Cassandras in World War One’; Professor Francine D’Amico, co-editor, Women in World Politics, for ‘Jane Addams – the Chance the World Missed’; The Edwin Mellen Press for ‘Simone Weil, the Wise Fool’, ‘Germany’s Antigone, Sophie Scholl’, and ‘American Visionaries’; Siân Reynolds, editor, Women, State and Revolution, for ‘German Women in the Resistance to Hitler’; Professor Wayne Chapman on behalf of Clemson University for ‘Virginia Woolf and Antigone’; New Directions Publishing Corp. for the work of Denise Levertov: ‘A Speech for an Antidraft Rally, D.C. March 22, 1980,’ from Candles in Babylon, copyright © 1982 by Denise Levertov; ‘Sound of the Axe’ from Oblique Prayers, copyright © 1984 by Denise Levertov; ‘Fragrance of Life, Odor of Death’ from The Freeing of the Dust, copyright © 1975 by Denise Levertov; and ‘Statements for a Television Programme from The Poet in the World, copyright © 1973 by Denise Levertov. All reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

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Acknowledgments | ix International Creative Management Partners (ICM) for quotations from the work of Muriel Rukeyser; Sharon Olds and Random House LLC for ‘When’ from The Gold Cell by Sharon Olds, copyright © 1987 by Sharon Olds. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved; Sharon Olds and Random House LLC for ‘Rite of Passage’ and ‘The Missing Boy’ from The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds, copyright © 1984 by Sharon Olds. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf, Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this [Random House] material, outside this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House LLC for permission; Sharon Olds, Random House UK for ‘When’, ‘Rite of Passage’ and ‘The Missing Boy’, taken from Selected Poems by Sharon Olds, published by Jonathan Cape. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited; Sharon Olds and University of Pittsburgh Press for five lines from ‘The Unjustly Punished Child’, from Satan Says, by Sharon Olds (1980).

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Introduction ‘[We] can fight with the mind’ wrote Virginia Woolf in her ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’ in September 1940. ‘Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it.’1 Most of this book is concerned not with my own attempts to think ‘against the current’ but with the mental fights of other thinkers. For, as Hazlitt wrote: ‘As to my speculations, there is little to admire in them but my admiration of others.’2 Therefore this collection of literary/historical essays, 1970–2010, covers heroic political subjects as diverse as the revolutionary Tom Paine and his debt to persecuted 17th century Quakers; William Hazlitt’s prophetic denunciation of the impact of Malthus; the dogged, emancipatory leadership of 19th and 20th century women by Barbara Bodichon and Eleanor Rathbone, and the breath-taking resistance put up by many German women against Hitler. My literary subjects include the dissident social thinking of the English Romantics, Dickens’ subversive novel Great Expectations, Simone Weil’s great essays attacking militarism and Virginia Woolf’s writing on opposition to the State – as well as contemporary American women poets in anguish over our habitual recourse to war. Despite all its diversity, this collection of essays has one unifying theme – the necessity for resistance, for ‘thinking against the current’. For some men and women, their mental fight was at the cost of personal breakdown and suicide; for a few it entailed imprisonment, or even torture and execution; for all it demanded a refusal to despair in the face of failure and defeat. The two words ‘politics’ and ‘literature’ have become notoriously elastic. These essays are concerned with the widest possible definition of the term ‘politics’ to include every kind of power relationship or struggle, not merely between different groups but also between individuals, whether at work or in their private lives, between the sexes or between generations. And where I discuss some writing that is not consciously ‘literary’ at all, perhaps polemic or intimate personal letters and diaries, the powerful prose always does, in my view, possess literary value and deserves to be remembered. Like most women historians of ideas circa 1970, I began by reading and writing about men – as is clear in Part One. It was only when I started to research the historical context for my own first large-scale work, the double biography of F. M. Mayor and Mary Sheepshanks, Spinsters of This Parish, that I had to begin to teach myself the subject of women’s

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2 | Introduction self-emancipation. And in the course of doing that I discovered more and more forgotten but heroic women whose lives deserve respect and gratitude. Out of that widening biographical research comes the later part of this book. The unifying perspective behind these essays is humanistic feminism – feminism grounded in a humanism that reveres creativity and kindness in both sexes. All my writing life I have endorsed the feminist thinking of Virginia Woolf that combined ‘equality’ feminism with ‘difference’ feminism. Like her, I want women, like men, to be equal in order to be different – free to fulfil our unique, individual selves, living what we feel to be constructive, fully human lives, both within the family and outside. I am a feminist because I am a humanist.3 Quite simply, I want to see the United Nations Charter of Human Rights applied to both sexes. My recurrent subjects are resistance to oppression and resistance to the killing competition that is war. The writers who fought with the mind trying to ‘think peace into existence’,4 whom I discuss in Part Three, include Jane Addams, Simone Weil, Helen Keller and Sharon Olds. My final essay, ‘Righteous Violence – War in the Family, War in the World’, traces a possible causal connection between private emotional violence in the family and acquiescence in our species’ recourse to massacre. Out of my need for some hopeful way forward, I have looked throughout this book to those men and women who, thinking ‘against the current’, managed to sustain the fellow-feeling that is war’s antidote.5 They can still help us, I believe, now that it is our turn to try to make a better world. Notes 1 Published posthumously in The Death of the Moth and other Essays, Hogarth Press, 1942. 2 ‘A Farewell to Essay Writing’, 1828, collected posthumously in Winterslow, 1839. 3 See ‘Sybil Oldfield at Seventy-Two: humanistic feminism – or thinking back through our grandmothers’, Women’s History Review, Vol. 19, No. 5, Nov. 2010, pp. 741–758. 4 Virginia Woolf, ‘ Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’. 5 Cf. Freud’s response to Einstein’s question: ‘Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?’ All that produces ties of sentiment between man and man must serve us as war’s antidote. . . . All that brings out the significant resemblances between men calls into play community, identification, whereon is founded . . . the whole edifice of human society. (Nathan and Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace, New York, Avenel, 1981, pp. 188 and 199)

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PART O NE

‘Oh England, / Sick in head and sick in heart’ (Anon, 1675)

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CHAPTER

1 ‘No Respecter of Persons’ The impact of Quaker persecution history on the radicalism of Tom Paine Putting the world to rights: The presumptuous audacity of Tom Paine How dared Thomas Paine, a man whose formal education had ended at 13 (Gilbert Wakefied, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, would call him ‘the greatest ignoramus in nature’), a man who had failed as a skilled craftsman, as a teacher, as a shopkeeper, as a street preacher, as a petty customs official in the Excise, dismissed more than once and a sometime debtor and bankrupt, how dared such a nobody, such a non-achiever even dare to think about the ends and means of government, about the basis of a just society, about the meaning we can give life ? Some of the fundamental questions that Paine pondered and tried to answer were: Are humans essentially anti-social animals, whose lives are, in the philosopher Hobbes’ words just ‘nasty, brutish and short’? Do we have to be ruled by some absolute, hereditary, hierarchical authority backed by force? Or should governments be representative and accountable – recallable through election? • • •

Is humanity capable of a more just, and therefore much more equal, distribution of the world’s resources and goods? Is humanity capable of instituting an alternative to war? Is Christianity the only true religion? Is any religion true?

But Thomas Paine did not merely articulate such fundamental questions in his secret thoughts; he also talked about them and dared to write about them. Think of his audacity when he, an almost penniless, recently very sick, immigrant Englishman, not long off the boat, started telling the First published in the Thomas Paine Society’s Journal of Radical History, Vol. 11, no. 2 (2012).

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6 | Part One people of North America in print what they should all now do, first in relation to slavery (they should abolish it) and then in relation to Britain. He called on Americans to revolt against his own country, and even called it just ‘Common Sense’ for them to do so. Or think how Paine, a few years later, dared to take on Edmund Burke, Burke, the graduate of Trinity College Dublin, former barrister at the Middle Temple, former Private Secretary to the Secretary for Ireland, and then Private Secretary to the Prime Minister and himself an MP. Paine told Burke that his reactionary championing of the ancient regimes of Europe after the fall of the Bastille was wrong. His answer to Burke in The Rights of Man was a trumpet call to ‘begin the world anew’: the British should abolish the hereditary principle of monarchy and aristocracy and substitute a just redistribution of wealth through graduated income tax. Paine did not only engage with Burke but also with many other dominant spirits of his age, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, General Lafayette, Danton, Condorcet, Marat, even Napoleon. In his dedication of the first part of the Rights of Man to George Washington, Paine hoped that its principles of freedom would soon become universal. In his Dedication of the Second Part of his Rights of Man to General Lafayette, he urged the latter to export the French Revolution to the whole world – above all to the despotism of Prussia. Finally, in his Age of Reason, Paine took on God Himself and denied the divinity of Christ whom he called simply ‘a virtuous and amiable man’: ‘I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.’ Mocked and caricatured in his own day as presumptuous little ‘Tommy Paine’, where did Paine get his unexampled, defiant audacity, enabling him to ‘speak Truth to Power’? Ultimately, behind the radicalism of Thomas Paine, in my view, there lies the testimony of the early, persecuted Quakers and behind them, the Epistle of James, the angriest exhortation to social justice in the whole of the New Testament: . . . [Be] ye doers of the word, and not hearers only . . . My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ . . . with respect of persons. For if there come unto your assembly a man with a gold ring, in goodly apparel, and there come in also a poor man in vile raiment; And ye have respect to him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him, Sit thou here in a good place; and say to the poor, Stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool: Are ye not then partial in yourselves . . . [Ye] have despised the poor . . . [If] ye have respect to persons, ye commit sin; . . . What doth it profit,

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‘No Respecter of Persons’ | 7 my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? Can faith save him? And if a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, And one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit? Even so faith if it hath not works, is dead, . . . For, as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also. . . . Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you . . . Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth, and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.

That Epistle had been written, perhaps by Jesus’ brother, 1,700 years before Paine’s birth but was available of course to Paine as a child and young man, in the Authorized Version of the King James English Bible. And much nearer to Paine, as exemplars and inspiration, were the first English Quakers, 1650–1690, who grounded their stance on that Epistle of James and saw themselves as ‘Doers of the Word’. Paine was born the son of a Norfolk Quaker and, as Moncure Conway, Paine’s earliest sympathetic biographer wrote – ‘[Had] there been no Quakerism there would have been no Paine’.1

PART ONE Who were the Quakers? Had there been no Civil War, or ‘Revolution’ as Paine himself called it, in England between 1642 and 1651 there would have been no Quakerism, which began as a collective movement in 1652. The world had just been ‘turned upside down’ in Britain by that very recent war in which people had been asking – and killing each other over – fundamental questions about how to be a Christian and what kind of society Britain should be. The Parliamentarian ‘Roundheads’ believed they were fighting against royal tyranny and ungodliness; the monarchist Cavaliers believed they were fighting against mob anarchy and against hypocrites out to usurp power under the fig leaf of religion. Each side, of course, believed very sincerely that God was on their side. And this English Civil War, called ‘The Great Rebellion’ by the Royalist Cavaliers, and ‘The Good Old Cause’ by their Puritan Roundhead opponents, had actually been the English Revolution – culminating in the trial

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8 | Part One and execution of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1645 and of the King in 1649. The men and women who would be convinced and converted to Quakerism just three years later at the beginning of the 1650s had sympathized with the Puritan, Roundhead side. Some, (though not George Fox), had even fought for Cromwell and Parliament against the King. They saw themselves in the tradition of the Protestant Martyrs, burned at the stake under ‘Bloody Mary’ a century earlier. (Margaret Fell, ‘the Mother of Quakerism’, born Margaret Askew, was believed by some, mistakenly, to be descended from the famous Protestant martyr Anne Askew.) During the Civil War they had often called themselves ‘Independents’ and once the war had been won by Cromwell’s New Model Army and the Parliamentarians, many of these ‘Independent’ men and women remained restless ‘Seekers’, looking for spiritual leadership that might help them towards personal and social salvation. They would walk or ride many miles to hear a preacher who, they had heard, was a true man of God. Hence that great assembly of about a thousand or more Westmoreland ‘Seekers’ at Firbank Fell, above Brigflatts, near Sedbergh, in Whitsun, 1652, who heard George Fox’s exhortation: ‘Let your lives speak.’ He told them that they had no need of a church or a parish priest, but that they should all live their Christianity, emulating the earliest ‘primitive ‘ Christians as a Society of Friends. The ‘Valiant Sixty’ among those who heard Fox, then attempted to do that, spreading their message of ‘the Inner Light’ in every man and woman, out from the North and South, West and East – to Norfolk, the county of Thomas Paine’s forebears. Although the Quakers’ creation of new congregations of ‘Friends’ in the 1650s came out of the spiritual turmoil of the Civil War, it was also a reaction against the brutal cruelty of that war. George Fox had been moved to begin preaching a gospel of brotherly love already in 1646, right in the middle of the war. For no war is quite as terrible as Civil War – town against town, family against family, father against son, brother against brother, besieged women and children deliberately starved to death, prisoners deliberately mutilated and murdered after they had been promised pardon on surrender – and many other such atrocities – all in the name of ‘King and Country’ or else ‘For God and the People’. These very earliest Quakers were fired by a defiant, millenarian vision; they too wanted to turn the world upside down – but this time, unlike in the recent Civil War, by wholly non-violent means. Therefore immediately after the Civil War that had not brought about Jerusalem, the Quakers preached and practised the alternative to war – non-violent resistance. Margaret Fell, who would later marry Fox, wrote in 1660 to Charles II: We who are the people of God called Quakers, who are hated and despised, and everywhere spoken against, as People not fit to live . . . We are a people that follow after those things that make for Peace, Love and

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‘No Respecter of Persons’ | 9 Unity . . . we do bear our Testimony against all Strife and wars . . . Our weapons are not Carnal, but Spiritual.

George Fox himself delivered to Charles II in 1661 a ‘Declaration from the Harmless and Innocent People of God, called Quakers against all plotters and fighters’. And the Quaker Francis Howgill, at his trial in 1663 in Appleby declared: It has been a Doctrine always held by us, and a received principle . . . that Christ’s Kingdom could not be set up with carnal Weapons, nor the Gospel propagated by Force of Arms, nor the Church of God builded by Violence; but the Prince of Peace is manifest among us and we cannot learn War any more, but can love our Enemies, and forgive them that do Evil to us . . . This is the Truth, and if I had twenty Lives, I would engage them all, that the Body of Quakers will never have any Hand in War, or Things of that Nature, that tend to the Hurt of others.

Following George Fox, the Quakers also opposed slavery and capital punishment. But if Quakers were so peaceable, why were they so persecuted in the 1650s, 1660s, 1670s and 1680s? Betrayed by local ‘informers’, arrested for meeting to worship in silence in one another’s houses, or for refusing to attend their local church, they were very heavily fined, imprisoned for months and years in filthy, stinking, dark cells – often below ground – publicly stripped and whipped, stoned, even transported as slaves. Some, like Francis Howgill, were kept in prison until they died. Under Charles II (1660–1685), 13,562 Quakers were arrested and imprisoned; 198 were transported as slaves; at least 338 died in prison or as a result of their injuries. It was in this same period that Bunyan, the unlicensed Baptist preacher, was in Bedford Jail and Richard Baxter, the Presbyterian Minister who would not conform to the 39 Articles, was tried in his frail and sick old age by the Chief Justice Judge Jeffreys. “What ailed the old stock-cole, unthankful villain, that he could not conform? . . . He hath poisoned the world with his linsey wolsey doctrine.” But Bunyan and Baxter were individuals who were persecuted; the Quakers were persecuted as a collective body, an alternative, threatening counter-culture, a ‘Society of Friends’ that was a standing criticism of the dominant, unfriendly, social fabric of Britain. Quakers were seen as a threat to the given social order because they had many subversive beliefs and practices, in addition to their refusal to bear arms: • They refused to take their hats off in respect to ‘their betters’ because they were ‘no respecters of persons.’ This was not trivial but a traditional gesture of popular social protest and it enraged ‘the better sort’. When one accused Quaker refused to take his hat off

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10 | Part One

•

•

•

•

before the Magistrate, the Judge seized it, burned it and sentenced him to five months’ imprisonment. Quakers refused to bow courteously or to use the polite terms of address calling everyone the familiar ‘Thou’ – (like ‘Du’ in German or ‘Tu’ in French) and refusing to give any one a special title. They would not say ‘Your Majesty’ to the King, but just call him ‘King’; they would not say ‘My Lord’, to an aristocrat or ‘Your Honour’ to a Judge, or even refer to any one as ‘Sir’ or ‘Lady’, ‘Mr’ or ‘Madam’ or ‘Mrs’. Instead, everyone was simply called by their first name and surname and addressed directly as ‘Friend’ by the Quakers. Even Cromwell, when Lord Protector of England, was addressed just as ‘Friend Oliver’ by Fox. Quakers refused to swear any oath in a court of law because Christ had said ‘Swear not at all’. As the Epistle of James had admonished: ‘[Above] all things, my brethren, swear not, either by heaven, neither by the earth, either by any other oath: but let your yea be yea; and your nay, nay.’ The truth was what everyone should speak everywhere and at all times, not merely in the witness box. But how could the non-oath taking Quakers be believed to be loyal citizens owing allegiance, or held to be capable of keeping any binding contracts, if they refused all oaths? Quakers refused to have any parson or minister, believing instead in their own Inner Light – that which is of God in every one. They refused to go to the established church to be baptised, married and buried. And they stubbornly refused even to attend Anglican church services, ‘the prescribed national worship’, or to pay their local Anglican parson his ‘tithes’ or church rates, no matter how often their own goods were thereupon ‘distrained’, i.e. looted. Half of their confiscated property would be taken by those who had informed against them. Quakers maintained that there should be no paid ‘hireling’ ministers in Britain at all, which did not endear them to the professional clergy. And who knew what sedition, or incitements even their silent meetings in one another’s houses might not be brewing? Finally, and perhaps worst of all in the eyes of their contemporaries, there were many women Quakers, who preached in the streets as public missionaries and who, when they were not in prison, travelled indefatigably throughout Britain and even the world, broadcasting the Quaker message of ‘that of God’ existing in every one.

Thus 17th century Quakers seemed to be threatening to create an alternative, egalitarian society. And they were making thousands of converts. Already by 1660, in their first eight years, there had been at least 20,000 converts. In 1653 George Fox wrote: ‘O ye great men and rich men of the

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‘No Respecter of Persons’ | 11 earth! Weep and howl for your misery that is coming [another quotation from the Epistle of James] . . . the day of the Lord is appearing . . . All the loftiness of men must be laid low.’ Alarmed, the Presbyterian MajorGeneral Skippon, then in charge of London, had said in Parliament already in 1656: “[The Quakers’] great growth and increase is too notorious, both in England and Ireland; their principles strike at both ministry and magistracy.” It is not surprising that, peaceable though they were, the Quakers were ruthlessly persecuted in an attempt to extirpate every one of them.

Quaker History of the Persecution From the moment that they were persecuted, the late 17th century Quakers chronicled that persecution and their own immoveable, nonviolent resistance. They wrote and printed pamphlets and letters to one another, above all to Margaret Fell, herself often imprisoned, and they appealed eloquently to the Magistrates, to the King and to Parliament. In 1660 Richard Hubberthorn wrote: ‘[If] any magistrates do that which is unrighteous, we must declare against it.’ Thus the Quakers judged the Magistrates and their social ‘superiors’ – not the other way round. In 1664, after the Conventicle Act that sought to banish Quakers to the West Indies, George Whitehead, who has been called possibly the most influential advocate of religious liberty in Britain,2 ‘shewed the Judges their duty from the law and Magna Carta’. Every single example of arrest and punishment of Quakers was documented by a local Friend who could write a clear hand, naming both the local Sufferers and the local Persecutors, on facing pages of their records.3 Thus Quaker solidarity and continuity were achieved through the creation of their own written accounts of individual and collective persecution. And it was upon these many local records, in addition to trial transcripts, that the amazingly comprehensive collective narrative compiled by Joseph Besse was based – The Sufferings of the People Called Quakers for the testimony of a Good Conscience 1650–1689 (1723 and 1753). Thomas Paine was born precisely half-way between these dates, in 1737. Besse’s Preface to the Reader declared: It was an excellent observation . . . that God is tried in the Fire, and acceptable Men in the Furnace of Adversity. . . . Persecution is a severe test upon the Hypocrite and Earthly-minded. “When thou passest thro the Waters, I will be with thee” (Isaiah). A Measure of this holy Faith, and a sense of this divine Support, bore up the spirit of the People called Quakers for near 40 years together, to stem the Torrent of Opposition. . . . The Messengers of it were entertained with Scorn and Derision, with

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12 | Part One Beatings, Buffetings, Stonings, Whippings Banishments, and even Death itself.

and

Imprisonment,

To give just one vivid example of the persecution there is the case of Mary Akehurst as summarised by Besse in his volume on Southern England, Ch. 34, pp. 711–712: 1659 . . . Mary Akehurst, a religious Woman of Lewis [sic], going into a Steeple-house there, and asking a Question of the Independent Preacher, after his Sermon, was dragg’d out by the people, and afterward beaten and puncht by her Husband, so that she could not lift her Arms to her Head without Pain. She also suffered much cruel Usage from her said Husband, who bound her Hand and Foot, and grievously abused her, for reproving one of the Priests who had falsly accused her. Her Husband also kept her chained for a Month together, Night and Day.

Mary Akehurst’s neighbours won her release by pinning a written protest about her treatment on the church door. She continued to testify to her Quaker convictions, although, she was punished by the authorities time and again. Finally, in 1686 (27 years after asking her first question in St. Michael’s church), when old, sick and unable to walk without being held up on either side, Mary Akehurst was carried off to prison at midnight by Bailiffs. In Besse’s words: One of the Bayliffs, being drunk, when he got on Horseback, with many Oaths and Threatenings had her set upon his Horse, and would not suffer her to take Necessaries with her, so that her Friends thought she could not live till she came to the Prison. But the barbarous Bayliff swore, that If she could not hold it to Prison, which was twenty Miles, he would tie her, and drag her thither at his Horse’s Tail. Being brought to Horsham Jail, she was kept close Prisoner there about seven Months, and then was removed to London, and committed to the King’s Bench.

It was men like George Fox, Francis Howgill, Edmund Burroughs, Richard Hubberthorn, George Whitehead, and Robert Barclay, and women like Margaret Fell, Ann Blaykling, Mary Fisher and Mary Akehurst,who were Thomas Paine’s radical 17th century forerunners, speaking out for justice and civil liberty, including liberty for non-violent, religious and social non-conformity.

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‘No Respecter of Persons’ | 13

PART TWO Paine’s Quaker Background Paine’s magisterial biographer John Keane stresses that Paine was the child of a mixed marriage – half Anglican, half Quaker – and suggests that that must have led him to have a balanced view of both orthodox and heterodox Christianity and hence led to his championing of toleration. However I see no reason to think that young Paine felt himself to be equally Anglican and Quaker. He is generally agreed to have been much closer to his Quaker father, to whom he was apprenticed at thirteen, than he was to his Anglican mother. And he recounts in his Age of Reason how shocked and alienated he had been when he was seven or eight years old, on hearing his Anglican aunt’s orthodox teaching of Original Sin and redemption through God allowing the crucifixion of his own son: I revolted at the recollection of what I had heard. . . . I was sure . . . that God was too good to do such an action, and also too almighty to be under any necessity of doing it. I believe in the same manner to this moment; and I moreover believe, that any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be a true system. (Ch. xiii)

Instead, when young Tom Paine attended Quaker meetings in Meeting House Lane, he would have heard his Quaker neighbours testifying not to sin or damnation but to their feelings of love and unity and to the working of God’s mercy in their own lives; and he would also have absorbed the practical mercy that Thetford Quakers gave out towards the needy Members of their Meeting. For in Thetford, Quaker collective selforganization had already been established soon after the start of the first Friends’ Meetings there. Through democratic ‘Quaker discipline’ that included ‘Elders’ and ‘Overseers’ and Monthly, Quarterly and Yearly Meetings as well as Women’s Meetings, taking care of the poor, the sick, the old, the widowed and the orphans had been the Quaker way from the first.4 Their path-breaking schemes for providing accommodation, weekly allowances, legacies and gifts of fuel and clothing gave Paine a lifelong ‘Quakerly feeling for the hard condition of others’, as he himself would later write in his letter to the town of Lewes. It is also important to remember that Quakerism was from the first an outward looking faith, something to be lived out in the world. And this principle bonded Friends in a shared effort at humanitarian intervention: they have never been short of others’ ‘Sufferings’ that need addressing – the misery of slaves, of prisoners, of the disenfranchised, the starving, and all victims of war and persecution. Did young Paine read a copy of Besse’s Sufferings of the Early Quakers

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14 | Part One in the small Thetford Meeting House library? Or did his father – or a richer Quaker neighbour – actually own a copy?5 At the very least there must have been an inextinguishable orally transmitted tradition. As Sylvia Stevens writes in her monograph A Believing People in a Changing World: Quakers in Society in North-east Norfolk, 1690–1800: When Friends such as Mary Kirby and Edmund Peckover who were directly descended from a Quaker of the first generation, gave their [oral] ministry, they were doing so as people who linked to the past but spoke a message for the present. 18th century Norfolk Quakers acknowledged, shaped and revered their own religious pasts but lived in their own time.

What would young Thomas Paine have read – or been told – about the treatment of Quakers, including his own kin, in Thetford, in Norwich and elsewhere in Norfolk, before he was born? Besse’s first reference to Norfolk was the 1660 deposition of Samuel Duncombe on the breaking up of a Friends’ Meeting in Norwich: [We suffered their] smiting, punching, cruel mocking, . . . thumping on the Back and Breast without Mercy, dragging some most inhumanly by the Hair of the Head, and spitting in our Faces, abusing both men and women . . . [They] have taken the Mire out of the Streets and have thrown it at the Friends, some of them holding the Maid of the House whilst others daubed her Face with Gore and Dung, so as the skin of her face could hardly be seen.

For that ‘scandalous expression’, Duncombe and the other Quakers were sent to prison. Whereupon Samuel Duncombe wrote again to the Mayor and Aldermen, beginning Friends, Our Oppression is more than we ought always to bear in Silence. And now we are upon the brink of Ruin by the loss of our Goods, . . . made harbourless in our own houses . . . And what would you have us to do? Do you think we are only wilful and resolve so to be? Do you think these things are pleasing to our own wills as creatures of flesh and blood as you are also, so to suffer? You must also expect Judgment – therefore be not high-minded, but fear – for the Lord can quickly blast your Honour and disperse your Riches. We cannot sew Pillows under your armholes, but wish you well as we do ourselves.

Duncombe later sent a second letter from Norwich prison, beginning not ‘Friends’, this time, but ‘Magistrates!’ And continuing:’ For complaining of injustice our liberties are taken from us – we are forced to lodge in straw.’ Besse later chronicles the persecution of Quakers from Paine’s own town of Thetford:

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‘No Respecter of Persons’ | 15 In February 1665 at the Quarter Sessions held at Norwich Castle, Henry Kettle and Robert Eden both of Thetford, and two others, were convicted of the 3rd offence in meeting together [against the Conventicle Act] and were sentenced to be carried from thence to Yarmouth, and from that Port to be transported for seven years to Barbados’ [i.e. as slaves]).

(When Henry Kettle returned after seven years, he was again arrested and imprisoned.) . . . In 1676, William Garnham, Mary Townsend and Robert Spargin of Thetford were distrained of their goods woth £2.5shillings. One Captain Cropley molested them and attempted to disperse their religious meetings by Force of Arms. And when they asked for his commission so to do, he showed them his rapier. And one of them not going at his command, he beat him on the Head with his Stick and kickt him on the Back to the endangering of his Life.

In November 1676: Samuel Dunscombe [again] reported how his house was forcibly entered; ‘officers bringing with them one Tennison an impudent Informer and the common Hangman. They tarried several days and nights in that home and kept Samuel Duncombe’s wife, then big with child, a Prisoner, suffering her to speak to no body and admitting none of the neighbours to come near her. The Goods they took were valued at £42. 19 shillings.

In 1678: George Whitehead and Thomas Burr were taken at a meeting in Norwich. Charles Alden, a Vintner and one of the Singing Men in the Cathedral, rushed in calling out ‘Here’s Sons of Whores; Here’s 500 Sons and Daughters of Whores. The Church Doors stand open but they will be hanged before they will come there.’ And whilst George Whitehead was speaking, [Alden] cryed out ‘Put down that Puppy Dog! Why do you suffer him to stand there prating?

Those Norfolk Quakers were then sent to prison in Norwich Castle and again in 1680 for refusing to take the oath. On his release, George Whitehead went straight to Hampton Court to plead with the King on behalf of his fellow-prisoners left twenty-seven steps below ground in Norwich Castle dungeon – ‘They are burying them alive’, he told the King, whom he just addressed as ‘King’, ‘They are poor harmless people, poor Woolcombers, Weavers and Tradesmen, like to be destroyed.’ The prisoners were only released two years later. In 1682 Anne Payne was committed to prison for ‘absence from

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16 | Part One National Worship’ and several other Paines, or Paynes suffered the seizure of their goods, and imprisonment. 1684 saw an excessive Seizure from two Norfolk farmers, John Roe and William Roe, who were fined £240 and had all their cattle, corn and households goods taken by the Sherriff’s Officers in East Dereham. ‘ The behaviour of the Officers and Assistants who made this seizure was very rude. They broke open the Doors, Drawers and Chests and threatened the Servants of the House with Sword and Pistol. To make themselves merry they roasted a pigg and laid so much wood on the Hearth that they set the Chimney on Fire with which, and their Revelling, Cursing and Swearing, they affrighted the wife of the said William Roe to the endangering of her Life; she being then great with child, was delivered before her Time, and the child died a few days later.

Such things are not soon forgotten. Whether or not young Thomas Paine, born in 1737, read a copy of Besse, so many would have been the oral accounts of this period that he must have heard many examples of the Norfolk persecution from his father, from his paternal grand-parents and from other Thetford Quakers. It was still living memory and in my view it would simply not have been possible for him – a sensitive, spirited, indignant youth – to have been equally on the side of the punishing, Anglican ruling class, and on the side of their stubborn Quaker victims.

PART THREE Paine’s writing on Quakers and on Quakerism Between 1775 and 1780 Paine worked with Philadelphia Quakers in the first anti-slavery society in America, founded by the Quaker John Woolman. Paine’s first essay there was ‘African Slavery in America’, urging the Americans to ‘discontinue and renounce’ slavery. Later in 1775, however, in his ‘Thoughts on Defensive War’, he distinguished himself from the quietist American Quakers, when he wrote supporting the war for colonial independence: I am thus far a Quaker, in that I would readily agree with all the world to lay aside the use of arms, and settle matters by negotiation: but unless the whole will, the matter ends, & I take up my musket [against the British and Hessian mercenaries] laying a Country desolate with Fire and Sword. (Common Sense)

Therefore, in 1776 in his Appendix to Common Sense, Paine opposed those conservative, ‘Tory’, non-resisting Philadelphia Quakers who, in

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‘No Respecter of Persons’ | 17 1776, were advocating reconciliation with the British King. Paine accused this group of rich Quakers, who, he said, did not represent all Quakers, of being not really neutral and peacefully above the conflict as they claimed but rather de facto partisans on King George III’s side, when they argued against resistance. By their very participation in political argument, he maintained, they forfeited their claim to be a-political. They were really on the side of Mammon. Had Paine known of the extent of rich American Quakers’ economic collaboration with the British, then going on behind the scenes, he would have been even more incensed.6 It is noteworthy that in that same Appendix to Common Sense, Paine proves that he had read some Quaker persecution history in his admiring allusion to ‘the honest soul of [the Quaker Robert] Barclay’ and in his quotation from Barclay’s Address to Charles II, who had ‘reason to know how hateful the oppressor is both to God and man.’ In 1776 Paine wrote The American Crisis, his first essay advocating total resistance even unto death: ‘These are the times that try men’s souls . . . Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered . . .’ And he quoted the Epistle of James: ‘show your faith by your works.’ In November 1778, in his 7th Crisis essay, Paine coined the phrase ‘Religion of Humanity’; for him Humanity was the one true religion. Between 1789–1790 and 1792–1795 Paine lived in France. In 1793, attacked by Marat for his public advocacy of clemency for the condemned French King, Paine was denounced for being a Quaker and therefore against the death penalty. Writing in prison in Paris in 1794, under threat of imminent execution, Paine then wrote several significant, notable passages on Quakers and Quakerism in The Age of Reason. As Moncure Conway wrote in his Introduction to the Age of Reason: ‘Paine’s ‘Reason’ is only an expansion of the Quaker’s “inner light”.’ Certainly there is a very Quakerly ring in Part 1, Chapter 1, in Paine’s ‘I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy. . . . My own mind is my own church.’ In his Chapter III Paine says of Jesus: He was a virtuous and amiable man. The morality he preached and practised was of the most benevolent kind; and though similar systems of morality had been preached by Confucius, and by some of the Greek philosophers, many years before, by the Quakers since, and by many good men in all ages, it has not been exceeded by any.

And in his Chapter XIII he gives details of the early formative influence that his father’s Quakerism had on him: My father being of the Quaker profession, it was my good fortune to have an exceedingly good moral education, and a tolerable stock of useful learning. Though I went to the grammar school, I did not learn

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18 | Part One Latin, not only because I had no inclination to learn languages, but because of the objection the Quakers have against the books in which the language is taught.

And we note how his ‘first attempts to think and write about politics and government were determined by the principles in which he had been raised’, i.e. by Quakerism. But Paine’s respect for Quakerism did not prevent him on occasion from laughing at its limitations, and above all at its puritanical failure to revel in the multifariousness and wonder of the natural world: The religion that approaches the nearest of all others to true Deism, in the moral and benign part thereof, is that professed by the Quakers: but they have contracted themselves too much by leaving the works of God out of their system. Though I reverence their philanthropy, I cannot help smiling at the conceit that if a Quaker could have been consulted at the creation, what a silent and drab-coloured creation it would have been! Not a flower would have blossomed its gaieties nor a bird been permitted to sing.

In his Conclusion to Part II of the Age of Reason, Paine wrote: ‘The only sect that has not persecuted are the Quakers; and the only reason that can be given for it is, that they are rather Deists than Christians. They do not believe much about Jesus Christ, and they call the scriptures a dead letter.’ In 1797 he wrote the little known Letter to Camille Jordan – Jordan was anxious to restore Catholic privileges, including church bells, in postrevolutionary France. Here Paine declared his respect for Quaker practice as compared to that of any of the established Churches: The intellectual part of religion is a private affair between every man and his Maker, and which no third party has any right to interfere. The practical part consists in our doing good to each other. But since religion has been made into a trade, the practical part has been made to consist of ceremonies performed by men called priests; true religion has been banished; and such means have been found out to extract money even from the pockets of the poor, instead of contributing to their relief. . . . No man ought to make a living by Religion. It is dishonest to do so. Religion is not an act that can be performed by proxy. One person cannot act religion for another. . . . The only people who, as a professional sect of Christians provide for the poor of their society, are people known by the name of Quakers. Those men have no priests. They assemble quietly in their places of meeting, and do not disturb their neighbours with shows and noise of bells. . . . Quakers are equally remarkable for the education of their

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‘No Respecter of Persons’ | 19 children. I am a descendant of a family of that profession; my father was a Quaker; and I presume I may be admitted as evidence of what I assert. . . . Principles of humanity, of sociability, and sound instruction for advancement in society, are the first objects of studies among the Quakers . . . One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests.

Conclusion Paine himself was not a Quaker because he was not a Christian and the Quakers were Christians, however unorthodox and radical. Nevertheless, his Quaker heritage from his father gave him a birthright example of principled, fundamental criticism of the corrupt, caste-ridden, unjust society into which he was born. The persecution history, in particular, of his Quaker forebears that would have been transmitted to Paine in his youth, whether by word of mouth or in print, could not but have been inspirational when he in his turn dared to ‘speak Truth to Power.’ Paine, like the early Quakers, would face trial for ‘sedition’ and would be exiled by a fearful, aristocratic government. Once in exile, he would be imprisoned and risk death for his convictions – ironically, at the hand of revolutionary extremists. Paine acknowledged the ideal rightness of the Quaker Peace Testimony and would only ever see justification for resorting to arms in a purely defensive resistance struggle. Paine helped to found the American Quaker campaign in Philadelphia to abolish slavery and the Slave Trade. Paine remembered the Society of Friends’ organization of care for its weakest members as a template for the possibility of organized national social welfare that he would later expound in The Rights of Man. His allusions to Quakerism and the practices of the Quakers in his writings whether in America, in France or in England, were overwhelmingly respectful, even at times reverential – ‘I reverence their philanthropy’. So far I have implied that the influence of Quakerism on Paine was as positive as it was profound. But was it wholly positive? We should remember the comment on Paine made by the 80 year-old portrait painter James Northcote, himself a political liberal, as reported in Hazlitt’s First Conversation with Northcote, in 1829: Nobody can deny that [Paine] was a very fine writer and a very sensible man; But he flew in the face of a whole generation; and no wonder that they were too much for him, and that his name is become a bye word with such multitudes, for no other reason than that he did not care what offence he gave them by contradicting all their most inveterate prejudices. If you insult a room-full of people, you will be kicked out of it. So neither will the world at large be insulted with impunity. If you tell a

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20 | Part One whole country that they are fools and knaves, they will not return the compliment by crying you up as the pink of wisdom and honesty. Nor will those who come after be very apt to take up your quarrel. It was not so much Paine’s being a republican or an unbeliever, as the manner in which he brought his opinions forward (which showed self-conceit and a want of feeling) that subjected him to obloquy. People did not like the temper of the man.

The first Quakers had certainly known how to exasperate their 17th century persecutors. They knew that they were in the right, that they were ‘the Children of God’ and that those who were against them were mere ‘hirelings’ and ‘world-lings’. But they did not thereby endear themselves to their world. As Besse himself wrote: ‘Nor could it be expected that a Testimony levelled both against the darling Vices of the Laity and the forced maintenance of the Clergy, should meet with any other than an unkind reception.’7 Was Paine too much like those earliest Quakers, forfeiting persuasiveness in the certainty of his own exclusive rightness – and so ‘[meeting] an unkind reception’? Twenty years earlier than Hazlitt’s Conversation about him with Northcote, on his death-bed in March 1809, Paine had expressed his last wish: I know not if the Society of people called Quakers, admit a person to be buried in their burying ground, who does not belong to their Society, but if they do, or will admit me, I would prefer being buried there; my father belonged to that profession, and I was partly brought up in it.

According to his biographer John Keane, Willett Hicks, a local New Jersey Friend, then conveyed Paine’s request sympathetically to the local Friends, but it was refused. Hicks reported back that the society felt that Paine’s own friends and sympathizers “might wish to raise a monument to his memory, which being contrary to their rules, would render it inconvenient to them.” . . . Paine sobbed uncontrollably . . . and then fell into a silence lasting many hours.

Notes 1 Moncure Conway, Life of Thomas Paine, 1892, vol. 1, p. 11. 2 Those among the ‘Valiant Sixty’ at Firbank Fell in 1651 who went on to ‘ publish truth’ in Norwich and Norfolk in 1653–4 included Christopher Atkinson from Kendal, Ann Blaykling from Drawell, Richard Hubberthorne from Yealand, James Lancaster from Walney, Dorothy Waugh from Preston Patrick and George Whitehead from Orton. 3 See New Oxford DNB entry on George Whitehead. See also County Public

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‘No Respecter of Persons’ | 21

4

5

6 7

Record Offices throughout Britain for the earliest mss. Quaker archives, listing local ‘Sufferers’ and ‘Perpetrators’ on facing pages, month by month, year by year, 1652–1690. John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life, London, Bloomsbury, 1995, p. 24: ‘[They] believed their mutual aid enabled them to return in Spirit to the grace of the earliest ‘primitive’ Christians.’ ‘In 1753, 1000 copies of [Besse] were printed of which 719 were sent straight to subscribers . . . .[In] 1755 100 were distributed to 43 Quarterly Meetings . . . for the use of such Friends as are not of ability to purchase the Work. . . . Fifty copies were sent to Philadelphia.’ Michael Gandy, Introduction to Facsimile of Besse, Sessions Book Trust, York, 2006. See Conway, vol. 1, pp. 76–77. Besse, Introduction.

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CHAPTER

2 Blake and Shelley versus Their Society ‘We are in a war of a peculiar nature’, wrote Edmund Burke in 1796.1 ‘It is with an armed doctrine that we are at war. . . . It has one foot on a foreign shore, the other upon the British soil.’ To counter that nightmare of a contagious bellum servile, the English governing class attempted to repress political dissent and to practise preventive oppression of the poor between 1790 and 1830.2 It was a period of high prices, depressed wages, and heavy indirect taxation; a period of post-war unemployment, of rapid industrialization and urbanization, and of an accelerating agricultural enclosure movement, all accompanied by massive population growth. Not surprisingly, therefore, it was also the period of the Jacobin trials in Edinburgh and London, of the Gentlemen Volunteers to put down disaffection, of Malthus’s attack on Poor Law relief, and of Bread Riots, Luddism, and Peterloo. Mirroring this upheaval was the press. Political journalism flourished in Britain as it had not done since the Civil War: new dailies, weeklies, monthlies, or quarterlies were being founded every year and enormously increasing their circulation.3 Almost every significant writer of this period attached himself to one or more of these politically partisan newspapers and periodicals, or attempted to found a new one of his own,4 and some, such as William Cobbett and Leigh Hunt and his brother, were even fined and imprisoned for so-called ‘seditious libel.’ What first emerges from any reading of the Quarterly, Edinburgh, and Westminster reviews, of the Tory Courier, The Times, The Anti-Jacobin, and John Bull, of the Radical Examiner or Cobbett’s Political Register, is the sheer hatred felt by the Tories and Radicals for one another. To Radicals, the Tories were the cat’s-paws of tyranny, murder, hypocrisy,

The complete text of this essay was first published in David Daiches and Anthony Thorlby, eds., Literature and Western Civilization: The Modern World: 1: Hopes, London, Aldus Books, 1975, ch. 3.

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Blake and Shelley versus Their Society | 23 and fraud. To Tories, the Radicals were mob-sycophants, demagogic incendiaries, either wicked or mad. The ideological gulf between them was so extreme because the alternatives then thought to be facing Britain were so extreme. Was the war with France (1793–1815) a great crusade against the menace of world-wide Jacobinism and Bonapartist world hegemony? Or was it a conspiracy of legitimist reactionaries, backed by a ‘panic of property’ against the just claims of ordinary men to their ‘universal rights’? Were the British Constitution and private property sacred, or should one listen to Major Cartwright advocating manhood suffrage and to Spence’s nationalization of land? Would Adam Smith’s individualist laissez-faire or Robert Owen’s promotion of state intervention in industrial conditions prevail? Were the masses ‘the swinish multitude’, a ‘mob’, a ‘turbulent rabble’, ‘unwashed artificers’, ‘the lower orders’, ‘the dissolute and worst part of the community’, the ‘half-witted vulgar’, ‘the labouring poor’, ‘the redundant population’? Or were they ‘the people’, ‘the working classes’, ‘the hand, heart, and head of the nation’? Were the few who governed them ‘the higher classes’, ‘those with a stake in the country’, and ‘the respectable part of the nation’, or were they ‘infamous oppressors’, ‘idle spongers’ and ‘cool, cruel, and insolent hirelings’? Behind these opposed attitudes lies the profoundest opposition of all: that between the belief in Original Sin, which justifies inequality and authoritarianism, and faith in the ultimate goodness of man, which validates and will make possible a good society. The English Romantics shared all the intense political partisanship of their age. Even when bound by ties of long friendship or congenial literary outlook, they could alienate each other by an opposed stand on foreign policy or on parliamentary reform. And even when they all agreed, as they did, on hating the new industrialism or the Utilitarians or the recommendations of ‘Parson’ Malthus – the common foe of all their deepest humane instincts – such agreement merely highlighted their basically opposed political allegiance, whether to the neo-feudal, religious paternalist ideal of Burke, Coleridge, and Scott, or to the democratic welfare state as prophetically outlined by Tom Paine. And at times, every English Romantic could sink to mere abusive vituperation of ‘the unclean side’. But at their best, the Romantics differed from their age in that they refused to see the issues at stake in the simplistic black and white terms outlined above. Romantic conservatism and Romantic radicalism were much more complex and profound than the conservatism and radicalism of professional politicians, polemicists, and panacea-mongers, either then or now. They were so because the men concerned were ‘Romantics’, writers possessing by definition exceptional gifts of feeling and imagination with which to confront their world. The aim of this essay is to indicate how complex their social and political attitudes were and to show how intimately these attitudes

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24 | Part One invaded even their apparently non-political work, thus rendering some knowledge of their politics essential to any deeper understanding of their great poetry and prose. . . . Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) shared many of Coleridge’s ‘idealist’ philosophical assumptions, including the necessity for a change of heart in man prior to any meaningful social reform, and the rejection of violence as a political means, but he was nevertheless profoundly opposed to Coleridge in his politics. For Shelley, ‘idealism’ comprehended not a frightened and fastidious alienation from the ‘envious’ materialist preoccupations of the masses, but a tremendous urge to improve the debased lot of the poor as constituting the essential first step in creating a better society.5 And Shelley’s emphasis on the need for love in public as well as in private life, on the important role of enlightened intellectual leadership, and on the change of heart within each individual member of society, was not, as with Coleridge, an alternative to political action, but rather the argument for arousing reformist pressure from below as well as progressive legislation from above. For Shelley, the lesson of the French Revolution was not to abjure all revolutions in the future, but to attempt to prepare men’s minds for a permanent non-violent revolution that would not fail. He agreed with Wordsworth’s diagnosis, in Book X of The Prelude, that the atrocities committed during the Reign of Terror were the inevitable consequence of centuries of oppression; but Shelley went on to conclude that such dark acts were the strongest possible argument, not for continued oppression, but for that liberty through which alone men may grow to be more than beasts.6 What, then, was Shelley’s hope for society in his early poetry and prose? His ultimate aim, which he knew it would take many centuries to realize, was a world of communist anarchists, of men and women ‘Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless, / Exempt from awe, worship, degree . . . ’7 where there would be no poverty, no crime, no judging and being judged, no capital punishment, no standing armies, no censorship or persecution of alien ideas, no organized religion: in short, peace on an earth at last capable of practising liberty, equality, and fraternity. Thus Shelley’s ultimate vision of man was perfectabilitarian. However, all his immediate political undertakings reveal him to have been not the utopian crackpot of caricature but an advocate of practical, gradual reform. Thus in his Address to the Irish People (1812) he says: ‘We can expect little amendment in our own time . . . we must be contented to lay the foundation’. His Declaration of Rights (1812) insisted: ‘No man has a right to do an evil thing that good may come’, and advocated passive resistance to injustice. His Proposal for putting Reform to the Vote throughout the Kingdom (1817) advocated extending the franchise only to all payers of direct taxes in the immediate future. Even Shelley’s most incendiary poems’ – his ‘Song to the Men of England’ and ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ (1819) incite the poor not to

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Blake and Shelley versus Their Society | 25 revolution but to a peaceful mass demonstration for freedom, and to insistence on their right to the product of their own labour. And his ‘Ode to the West Wind’ hopes only for some posthumous inspirational impact on ‘unawakened’ mankind: ‘Drive my dead thoughts over the universe/ Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!’ Finally, in Shelley’s last piece of political prose, A Philosophical View of Reform (1820) it comes almost as an anti-climax, after his fierce indictment that ‘the majority of the people of England are destitute and miserable, ill-clothed, ill-fed, illeducated’, that his immediate proposed reforms comprised no more than an extended franchise, abolition of the national debt, of tithes, sinecures, and the standing army, and an extended use of juries. He explicitly admitted that ‘Equality in possessions must be the last result of the utmost refinement of civilization’. Nevertheless, however moderate a meliorist Shelley was, he was at least a generation, and in many things a century, ahead of English public opinion. And this, his failure in political persuasion, must account in part for a very noticeable tension in Shelley’s work after 1816, between hope for mankind and despair. Increasingly, he found himself forced to acknowledge the horror of things as they were, in contrast to his vision of things as they might be. For instance, in contrast to such forwardlooking, sanguine early statements as: ‘We are in a state of continually progressive improvement’,8 Shelley was so appalled by the judicial murder in 1817 of the leaders of the abortive proletarian Pentridge rising,9 that he could only cry: It is a national calamity that we endure men to rule over us who sanction for whatever ends a conspiracy which is to arrive at its purpose through such a frightful pouring forth of human blood and agony. . . . There should be public mourning when those events take place which make all good men mourn in their hearts Mourn then, People of England . . . man has murdered Liberty.10

And the section of ‘Peter Bell the Third (1819) beginning ‘Hell is a city much like London’ ends: . . . and in this smother All are damnable and damned ; . . . So good and bad, sane and mad, The oppressor and the oppressed; Those who weep to see what others Smile to inflict upon their brothers; Lovers, haters, worst and best; . . . All are damned. . . .

Even Prometheus Unbound (1820), whose whole message is that man

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26 | Part One can achieve his own salvation by conquering the will to power and the destructive impulse of hate within himself, anticipates Yeats’ terrible ‘Second Coming’, as the last Fury gloats: In each human heart terror survives . . . The good want power, but to weep barren tears. The powerful goodness want: worse need for them. The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom; And all best things are thus confused to ill. . . . 11

But the most haunting example of all is the last chorus of ‘Hellas’ (1821). Here Shelley fuses the dream of a bygone golden age with the historians’ theory of the cyclic rebirth of civilization and the radicals’ faith in progress, in verses of great yearning, incantatory power: The world’s great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn. . . . Another Athens shall arise, And to remoter time Bequeath, like sunset to the skies, The splendour of its prime. . . . Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers, But votive tears and symbol flowers.

But in the final stanza Shelley is so overcome by the spectre of everrecurring war, as opposed to his humanist millennium, that he prays for the end of the world: Oh, cease! must hate and death return? Cease! must men kill and die? Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn Of bitter prophecy. The world is weary of the past, Oh, might it die or rest at last!

Underlying Shelley’s indignant sorrow at all social wrongs there gradually grew a yet deeper, more tragic awareness of something hopelessly amiss in the very fabric of human life itself. The deaths of his young children, guilt and failures in his most important personal relationships, all resulted in his last and greatest poems (1820–2) expressing a profound pessimism that undercuts his apparently joyful idealism. For instance, in

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Blake and Shelley versus Their Society | 27 ‘The Sensitive Plant’ (1820) the beautiful garden becomes a place of corrupt decay, the poisonous weeds, the blight, and winter itself being symbols of the evil death-principle in life. The conclusion attempts to redress the balance: . . . but in this life Of error, ignorance, and strife, Where nothing is, but all things seem, . . . death itself must be Like all the rest, a mockery. That garden sweet, that lady fair . . . In truth have never passed away: ’Tis we, ’tis ours are changed; not they. For love, and beauty, and delight, There is no death nor change: their might Exceeds our organs, which endure No light, being themselves obscure.

Yet what is the point of love and beauty and delight in a world of human beings unfit to know them? It is reminiscent of Kafka’s ‘Plenty of hope for God. No end of hope. Only not for us’. Similarly, in ‘To a Skylark’ (1820), Shelley equates the rapturous birdsong with ‘ignorance of pain’ and admits: Yet if we could scorn Hate, and pride, and fear; If we were things born Not to shed a tear, I know not how thy joy We ever should come near . . .

The implication is that we cannot transcend our own imperfect nature. In Adonais, written in the same year as the hopeful, ardently reformist A Defence of Poetry (1821), Shelley goes further and asks: ‘Whence are we and why are we?’ And, in the absence of an answer, he transposes life and death: . . . we decay Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief Convulse us and consume us day by day, And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

Only when dead is the spirit free to live within the ‘young hearts’ of

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28 | Part One those who come after, and so Shelley is ‘borne darkly, fearfully afar’ to the ‘suicidal ending’.12 Finally, in Shelley’s extraordinary ‘The Triumph of Life’, life itself is the enemy of the good – an imbecile, meaningless flux during which human passions continuously destroy themselves and their possessors, grow distorted, or decay. In contrast to Shelley’s other vision of man as king over himself,13 Rousseau, the central figure in this poem and the type of all defeated idealists, is betrayed by his ‘own heart alone’. Our passions are beyond our will to control, each psyche is their battleground, and by the end of the struggle there is no psyche left to fight over. Love, which Shelley had always seen as man’s master-key to a better world, is now just another destructive force, like lust for power: Maidens and youths fling their wild arms in air . . . Kindle invisibly-and as they glow, Like moths by light attracted and repelled, Oft to their bright destruction come and go . . . . . . The marble brow of youth was cleft With care; and in those eyes where once hope shone, Desire, like a lioness bereft Of her last cub, glared ere it died.

Shelley, at 29, had reached the stage of Yeats’ ‘Why should not old men be mad?’ Thus we have the paradox that the same consistent and indefatigable Radical, who all his life gave up his time, money, and reputation to help both immediate partial reforms and ultimate world revolution, was at the same time in despair about the un-assuageable futility and horror of life, finally seeing ‘Good and the means of good’14 as irreconcilable. He could alter neither what he believed ought to be nor what he saw was, and the gulf between them made his last and greatest poetry tragic. There is a terrible, naked cry from the heart in a fragment he wrote in 1820: Alas! This is not what I thought life was. I knew that there were crimes and evil men, Misery and hate; nor did I hope to pass Untouched by suffering thro’ the rugged glen . . . .

But just what the intolerable revelation was, Shelley does not say.



. . . William Blake’s great strength was his attempt to connect the disparate, conflicting aspects both of the personality and of society: body and spirit, reason and emotion, human creativity and human destructiveness. What he undertook in his lyrical and prophetic poetry was no less

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Blake and Shelley versus Their Society | 29 than a visionary synthesis of the inner and the outward simultaneous revolutions that are essential if we are to create a world that will realize man’s potentiality for good. Critics have tended to see Blake (1757–1827) as a social revolutionary who ended up a ‘mystic’, but I would maintain that all his life Blake made a two-pronged assault on the world outside and the world within us. He did so because he saw the human spirit deformed by and deforming society with its ‘mind-forged manacles’ of personal repression and social oppression. He saw the tyranny of kings, the mass slaughter of war, the life-denying hypocritical Church, the callousness of the rich toward the poor, the older generation’s jealousy of the young, the nation’s neglect of art, as all stemming from the same source: the deathly will-to-power, the destructiveness, born of repressed energy. Burns, Shelley, and Hazlitt had also been against repression as well as against oppression, but Blake was the only one to diagnose repression as the cause of oppression. Therefore he had to fight on both fronts at once to combat social and personal death-in-life: ‘Satan is the state of Death and not a Human existence . . . / A World where Man is by Nature the enemy of Man.15 As against this world, in which ‘the actual makes the ideal look impossible’,16 and which he found intolerable, Blake appealed to our submerged racial memory of the earth’s Golden Age: O Times remote! When Love and Joy were adoration, And none impure were deem’d . . . 17

He wrote, he said, to bring the golden age again, and the means he saw as necessary to that end were both political revolution and the individual change of heart. His earliest work, Poetical Sketches (1783), includes songs focussing on states of mind – ‘How Sweet I Roam’d from Field to Field’ and the ‘Mad Song’ – but also ‘Gwin, King of Norway’ with its call to bloody class-war: The Nobles of the land do feed Upon the hungry Poor; They tear the poor man’s lamb, and drive The needy from their door! . . . The shepherd leaves his mellow pipe, And sounds the trumpet shrill; The workman throws his hammer down To heave the bloody bill.

Even the Songs of Innocence (1789) are also implicit cries for social reform. For only a person aware of much amiss and seeking a cloak

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30 | Part One against ill winds could have made Blake’s conscious creative effort to organize a place of shelter for wisdom and innocence, lion and lamb, to dwell in together.18 The ‘innocent’ idealism of ‘Can I see another’s woe/And not be in sorrow too ?’ strikes at all our inadequacy of response to others’ sufferings, blind as we are to that ‘human face divine’ belonging to those we consider alien or ‘the enemy’. But the Songs of Innocence are obviously not a call to violent revolution; they ask for an inner change of heart. Such a purely spiritual appeal, however, Blake later recognized to be inadequate at a time when the French Revolution was triumphantly using force, and his own unfinished poem The French Revolution (1794) therefore endorses that social cataclysm as the necessary violent means to a spiritual end. This end is not only every human being’s achievement of literacy, culture, and the leisure to love, but it is also every man’s complete spiritual freedom; no longer need anyone be moulded or judged by his fellows: ‘But go! merciless man! enter into the infinite labyrinth of another’s brain / Ere thou measure the circle that he shall run’.19 A little later, the Terror did not cause Blake to change sides, as ‘Let the Brothels of Paris be opened’ makes clear; and throughout his prophetic works that follow, there is a recurrent, apocalyptic vision of the necessary, violent revolution: ‘Red rose the clouds from the Atlantic in vast wheels of blood. . . .’20 In the Preludium to Europe (1794), Orc the revolutionary spirit brings forth ‘howling terrors, all devouring fiery kings’. And the prophecy ends: But terrible Orc, when he beheld the morning in the east, Shot from the heights of Enitharmon, And in the vineyards of red France appear’d the light of his fury. . . . Then Los arose: his head he rear’d in snaky thunders clad; And with a cry that shook all nature to the utmost pole, Call’d all his sons to the strife of blood.21

However at no time did Blake forget the parallel need for the liberation of the individual’s psyche. The Songs of Experience (1793), although they include some powerful statements of social protest – ‘Holy Thursday’, ‘The Chimney Sweeper’, ‘London’ and ‘The Human Abstract’ (‘Pity would be no more/ If we did not make somebody poor’) – are primarily concerned with the freeing of sexual love from guilty inhibition, jealous possessiveness, hypocrisy, and shame. And the ‘Proverbs of Hell’ include Blake’s most famous manifesto against repression: ‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires’. The two themes of oppression and repression are brought together in Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), which fuses racial slavery and the sexual slavery of jealous monogamy,22 and in ‘A Song of Liberty’, which ends with the vision that once political ‘Empire’ is no

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Blake and Shelley versus Their Society | 31 more, ‘pale religious lechery’ will no longer ‘call that virginity that wishes but acts not!’ Blake achieved his great synthesis of inner and outer revolution in the tremendous Four Zoas (1795–1804). ‘Four Mighty Ones are in every Man”: Tharmas (Body), Luvah (Feeling), Urizen (Reason), and Los (Imagination). This symbolic epic traces their ‘fall into division’ and ‘resurrection to unity’. First, the body is divorced from love, then love from imagination, and finally, and most fatally, reason is divorced from all three and dominates them. Urizen is at once Reason and cruel Jehovah, as well as the type of all earthly tyrants. In so far as he dominates the individual psyche, he dominates society, and creates a world where there are wars for dynastic and territorial aggrandizement, as well as traffic in African slaves, the Industrial Revolution, and Malthusian or Utilitarian harshness to the poor. For example: My little daughters were made captives, & I saw them beaten With whips along the sultry sands. I heard those whom I lov’d Crying in secret tents at night, & in the morn compell’d To labour . . . . Then left the sons of Urizen the plow & harrow, the loom, The hammer & the chisel & the rule & compasses. They forg’d the sword, the chariot of war, the battle ax . . . And all the arts of life they chang’d into the arts of death. The hour glass contemn’d because its simple workmanship Was as the workmanship of the plowman, & the water wheel. . . . And in their stead intricate wheels invented, wheel without wheel, To perplex youth in their outgoings & to bind to labours Of day & night the myriads of Eternity, that they might file And polish brass & iron hour after hour, laborious workmanship, Kept ignorant of the use that they might spend the days of wisdom In sorrowful drudgery to obtain a scanty pittance of bread . . . 23 Urizen read in his book of brass in sounding tones. . . . . . . let Moral Duty tune your tongue, But be your hearts harder than the nether millstone . . . Compell the poor to live upon a Crust of bread, by soft mild arts. Smile when they frown, frown when they smile; & when a man looks pale With labour and abstinence, say he looks healthy & happy; And when his children sicken, let them die; there are enough Born, even too many, & our Earth will be overrun Without these arts . . . . . . . reduce the man to want a gift, & then give with pomp.24

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32 | Part One Ore, the revolutionary spirit within man, rebels; the Last Judgment in Night the Ninth of The Four Zoas is seen in terms of a final, world-wide, social revolution: ‘The thrones of kings are shaken, they have lost their robes and crowns, / The poor smite their oppressors, they awake up to the harvest. . . .’ Simultaneous with the re-establishment of a pastoral paradise on earth is the re-establishment of harmonious balance within the psyche, as each of the four Zoas is restored to his proper place and all are made equal again: A democracy of the faculties, the achievement of ‘identity’ precedes and makes possible the brotherhood of men and of nations. . . . [This is] the means by which[Blake] finally welded into one his personal, and his social necessities.25

By the time Blake wrote Jerusalem (1804–20), counter-revolution was triumphing throughout Europe. Blake could no longer appeal to force as the effective righter of social wrongs – reaction had bigger battalions – but to forgiveness made possible by imagination. It is an appeal to himself and all other ‘liberty boys’ to forgive the tyrants who have been deformed by our fallen world, just as ‘Every Harlot was once a Virgin; every Criminal an infant love’. But it is also an appeal to the tyrants to exercise their imagination and forgive: ‘Why should Punishment Weave the Veil with Iron Wheels of War?’26 (We remember the Delenda est Gallia spirit of 1814–15.) It is also an appeal to those in power to do good in minute particulars, instead of sacrificing individuals, especially the children of the poor, to the Utilitarians’ ‘General Good’: ‘General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite & flatterer’ . . . 27 ‘ . . . every Particular is a Man, a Divine Member of the Divine Jesus.’28 ‘Everyone knows we are One Family’. . . .29

But Jerusalem ends with a groan of desolation as the mighty ones of the earth remain deaf to this cry. All his life Blake championed individual liberty and social equality. The opposition between these ideals he attempted to resolve through his emphasis on fraternity. ‘Are not Religion & Politics the Same Thing? Brotherhood is Religion’.30 Conservative critics have tended to emphasize Blake’s focus on the individual soul and his growing emphasis on forgiveness; Radical critics stress his plea for brotherhood and his justification of revolution. What I have tried to show is that both elements are there all the time as Blake resists the politicians’ demand that he choose between the rights of the individual and the needs of the masses, insisting instead that they be recognized as inseparable aspects of the same problem, i.e. how to build Jerusalem, a world worthy of the Divine in Man.

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Blake and Shelley versus Their Society | 33 To Conservative critics all the Romantics were essentially conservative, and to the Radicals, they were essentially radical. This essay has tried to confuse the issue by demonstrating that they were both. A summary of their socio-political attitudes is a succession of paradoxes: Burns at once anarchist and conformist, socially rebellious and politically indifferent; Wordsworth, whose most deeply personal values and insights were also the most universal and whose Toryism included entreaties for social reform; Scott, the complete Tory in private life, whose novels demonstrated the truth of what his despised political opponent, Hazlitt, felt about ‘the people’, that they were the ‘hand, heart, and head’ of every nation, whereas their ‘betters’ were the truly ‘redundant’ or ‘superfluous’ men; Coleridge, who proved through his own ever self-contradictory person that the dilemma of politics lies in its being a conflict of different ‘goods’, a clash of mutually exclusive truths; Shelley, at once the most optimistic and the most despairing of visionaries; Hazlitt, passionately partisan and yet acknowledging that truth is not one but many, that life is a conglomeration of fragments that no one dominant value or social panacea can force into a coherent whole; and Blake, to whom life did seem a whole, but who felt compelled by the contemporary facts of political persecution to conceal his revolutionary vision in strange symbols, and who therefore, though first and last a humanist, has been miscalled a ‘mystic’ ever since. ‘To generalize (about the Romantics) is to be an Idiot’, indeed.31 Yet all these writers had certain fundamental things in common. They all lived through what must have seemed a peculiarly terrible period of history, including the failure of the French Revolution, the first ‘total’ war, and the victory of despotism abroad, accompanied by the arrival of urban industrialization and the pauperization of the landless labourers, leading to an apparently imminent class-war at home. In response to all this suffering on a mass scale and to the threat of still greater suffering to come, the Romantics evolved certain fundamental, common values. They all placed ‘the heart in the centre of (their) moral system’.32 And in the name of this ‘universal heart’33 they all dreamed, though in very different ways, of a better society, which would be a community held together by fellowfeeling, where every individual would be regarded as an end in himself. All the Romantics were inspired by their vital sense of the brotherhood of man, and it is this socially imaginative insight that permeates the greatest work produced by their literary imagination. Notes 1 Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796), Letter I. 2 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London 1964), Chs. 5, 6, 7. 3 See H. Fox-Bourne, English Newspapers, 2 vols. (1887). 4 For instance, Wordsworth’s projected Philanthropist, Coleridge’s The

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34 | Part One

5

6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Watchman and articles for the Morning Post and Courier, Scott’s and Southey’s connection with the Quarterly Review, Byron’s, Hazlitt’s, and Shelley’s contributions to the Hunts’ Examiner; even the un-political Charles Lamb had a brief involvement with the short-lived, radical Albion. Cf. Shelley’s definition of freedom as ‘Clothes and fire and food/ For the trampled multitude’, in ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, (1819), with Coleridge’s spiritual definition in ‘France: an Ode’. See Shelley’s preface to ‘The Revolt of Islam’ (1817). Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, Act III (end). Shelley, Proposals for an Association of Philanthropists (1812). Brandreth, Turner, and others incited to revolt by Oliver, the agent-provocateur under instructions from the government: see Thompson, op. cit., ch. 15. ‘We Pity the Plumage but Forget the Dying Bird: an Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte’, in Shelley’s Prose, ed. D. L. Clark (London 1954). Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, Act I. Harold Bloom, ‘The Visionary Company’ (1961), reprinted in Shelley, ed. G. M. Ridenour (New Jersey 1965). In, for instance, Prometheus Unbound and the sonnet ‘Political Greatness’. Shelley, ‘The Triumph of Life’. William Blake, Jerusalem II, 49. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry (Princeton 1947), ch. 8. Blake, Book of Los. See David Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire (Princeton 1954), ch. 6. See the speeches of Abbé Sièyes and of Orléans in Blake, The French Revolution. Blake, America: a Prophecy (1793). Blake, Europe. See the commentary on the poems in Erdman, op. cit. Blake, The Four Zoas, Night the Seventh (b). Ibid., (a). See Mark Schorer, Blake: The Politics of Vision (New York 1959), ch. 9. Blake, Jerusalem III, 61. Ibid., I, 22. Ibid., III, 55. Ibid., IV, 91. Ibid., III, 55. Blake, Marginalia Annotations to Reynolds’s Discourses; reprinted in Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. by G. Keynes (London 1956). Cf. William Hazlitt, ‘The New School of Reform’, The Plain Speaker. Wordsworth, The Prelude, Bk. 12, line 219.

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CHAPTER

3 Hazlitt versus Malthus ‘The mind revolts against certain opinions, as the stomach rejects certain foods.’ (Characteristics in the manner of Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, 1823, no. ciiivi)

Hazlitt first put his case against Malthus’ Essay on Population in his Reply to Malthus, the first three Letters being published anonymously in Cobbett’s Weekly Register in May 1807 when Hazlitt was 29.1 He subsequently wrote ‘Mr. Malthus and the Edinburgh Reviewers’, in Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register in November 1810 – a riposte to a hostile ‘review’ of his ‘Reply’, one possibly written by Malthus himself in the Edinburgh Review. He published ‘Queries relating to the Essay on Population’ in The Examiner in October 1815, and reprinted four short pieces from his 1807 Reply in the Morning Chronicle and Yellow Dwarf of 1817. They were then, together with the 1815 ‘Queries’, slightly revised and collected as the five last essays in his book Political Essays, 1819. In 1825 he wrote his ‘Character of Mr. Malthus’ in The Spirit of the Age and in February 1826 he made his last, desperate attack on ‘The New School of Reform’, collected in The Plain Speaker. For twenty years, therefore, Hazlitt’s domestic bugbear was the social implication of Malthusianism, while his foreign bugbear was hereditary, absolutist ‘Legitimacy’. His unapologetic, class-based social Radicalism was never more fiercely and lucidly articulated than in his now little-read A Reply to Malthus. I shall begin by summarizing the six heads under which Hazlitt resisted and countered Malthus; then I shall connect that attack with Hazlitt’s definition of his own ethics and aesthetics. Finally I shall claim that Hazlitt was a true social prophet.2 First, Hazlitt focuses on Malthus’s own initial motive in writing – his wish to attack the utopian social theory of Human Perfectabilitarianism in William Godwin’s Political Justice by pointing out the indisputable facts that we inhabit a limited earth with a limited fertility but that we witness a continual increase in human population. This is what is meant First published in The Charles Lamb Bulletin, April 2007.

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36 | Part One of course by Malthus’ famous arithmetical and geometric ratios. Sooner or later our species will overpopulate the globe, with catastrophic social consequences. How did Hazlitt counter that diagnosis and prognosis? He argued that Malthus confused potential over-population with the actual under-population of our planet, taking no account of the human capacity for technical progress in increasing the fertility of the earth or of the human capacity for social adaptation. Under such adaptation, Hazlitt included ‘medical advances’, (an oblique reference to birth control), migration to unpopulated areas, and the radical redistribution of the earth’s resources in order to avert famine. Next Hazlitt pointed out that Malthus wrote as though the human sex drive were an uncontrollable appetite, an essential survival need, just like our need to eat and drink, and equally non-amenable to any restraints of rationality or self-control. That simply was not true.3 Hazlitt then attacked Malthus’ insistence that the evils of war, famine, and plague, those riders of the Apocalypse, are necessary evils for checking population growth and are therefore not really evil, properly understood, at all. Hazlitt’s Letter 111 begins by saying that Malthus would seem to have turned our whole moral world based on humane values ‘topsy-turvy’: The common notions that[had used to prevail] . . . were that life is a blessing, and that the more people could be maintained in any state in a tolerable degree of health, comfort and decency, the better: that want and misery are not desirable in themselves, that famine is not to be courted for its own sake, that wars, disease and pestilence are not what every friend of his country or his species should pray for in the first place; that vice in its different shapes is a thing that the world could do very well without, and that if it could be got rid of altogether, it would be a great gain. (Reply, p. 18)

(I hear Dickens, a great admirer of Hazlitt, and his later irony here). Regarding Hazlitt’s own faith in social progress, writing in 1807 after the defeat of his early Revolutionary hopes,4 he has to confess that deep down, he too, is no longer a great optimist. But he cannot bear, on that account, to surrender all hope of hope: Perhaps if the truth were known, I am as little sanguine in my expectations of any great improvement to be made in the condition of human life either by the visions of philosophy, or by downright, practical, parliamentary projects, as Mr. Malthus himself can be. But . . . [it] requires some exertion and some freedom of the will to keep even where we are. . . . Take away the hope and the tendency to improvement, and there is nothing left to counteract the opposite never-failing tendency of human things ‘from bad to worse’. (Reply, p. 34)

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Hazlitt versus Malthus | 37 Malthus, however, was put in such a panic by his own mathematical ratios that he regarded all increase in population, no matter how happy and prosperous in the actual present, as constituting merely the harbinger of an inevitable, eventual social disaster. Hazlitt next attacked Malthus’ relish for his grim scenario, his wallowing in examples of brutalizing ‘squalid poverty’, especially that of ‘savages’. Hazlitt was shocked by Malthus’ insistent, ‘civilized’ revulsion at the spectacle of destitution: There is something in this mis-placed and selfish fastidiousness, that shocks me more than the objects of it. It does not lead to compassion but to hatred. We. . . . lose the passive feelings of disgust excited in us by others in the active desire to inflict pain upon them. Aversion too easily turns into malice. Mr. Malthus . . . triumphs over the calamities and degradation of his fellow-creatures. . . . Through a dreary space of three hundred ‘chill and comfortless’ pages, he ransacks all quarters of the globe . . . in anxious search of calamities . . . and eagerly gropes into every hole and corner of wretchedness to collect evidence in support of his grand misery-scheme. . . . His tongue grows wanton in the praise of famine. (See Reply, p. 44 and footnote; and Extracts, p. 136)

I am struck in that passage by Hazlitt’s implicit question: “What is psychologically wrong with Malthus that he should enjoy thinking, want to think, the terrible things that he thinks?” For not only did Malthus enjoy his pessimistic prophesying, he also enjoyed arguing that the poor had no right not to starve. Hazlitt quotes Malthus’ declaration that he felt ‘bound in justice and honour formally to disclaim the right of the poor to support’ (Extracts, p. 138; italics in the original). At which Hazlitt explodes that Malthus ‘[engrafted] the vices of a bad heart on a perverted understanding’ (Extracts, p. 144). For does he not get a sadistic satisfaction from his ruthless, imaginary infliction of necessary pain, when he advocates banning charity, forbids the poor to marry, and punishes poor mothers for giving birth to still poorer babies? The Rev. Malthus’ humanity, says Hazlitt is ‘of a singular cast . . . He is a kind of . . . patriotic Jack-Ketch [the hangman]. He never flinches when there is any evil to be done, that good may come of it’ (Extracts, p. 165). A right-wing Robespierre or Lenin? In rooting Malthus’ political and economic theories in that clergyman’s own psychological needs, Hazlitt was anticipating by a century Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life (1912): Philosophy answers to our need of forming a complete and unitary conception of the world and of life, and as a result of this conception, a feeling which gives birth to an inward attitude and even to outward action. But the fact is that this feeling, instead of being a consequence of

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38 | Part One this conception is the cause of it. Our philosophy – that is our mode of understanding or not understanding the world and life – springs from our feeling towards life itself. And life, like everything affective, has roots in sub-consciousness, perhaps even in unconsciousness. It not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it is our optimism or our pessimism, of physiological or perhaps pathological origin, as much the one as the other, that makes our ideas. (My italics)5

We might also note the contemporary philosopher Mary Midgley’s reminder ‘that philosophical positions are not arrived at quite as impersonally as many philosophers would like to believe. . . . Even the most aseptic philosophical enquiry has a frame of reference defined at least in part by un-argued intuitions and passions.’6 Hazlitt next attacks Malthus for his exclusive solicitude towards the rich and for his absolute refusal to indict the rich as the prime cause of inequality and the problem of hunger: ‘It is to me pretty clear that as long as there are such passions as sloth and rapacity, these will be sufficient to account for the unequal division of property . . . by force or fraud’ (Reply, p. 71). Far from entertaining any possibility of the re-distribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, however, Malthus actually insists on enforcing ‘the rights of the rich’ (Extracts, p. 125). Hazlitt’s sense of justice was outraged: It is one thing to have a right to the produce of your own exertions, and another to have a right to the produce of the earth, that is, of the labour of others. . . . (Extracts, p. 129). . . . To hear Mr. Malthus talk, one would suppose that the rich were really a very hard-working, ill-used people, who are not suffered to enjoy the earnings of their honest industry in quiet by a set of troublesome, unsatisfied, luxurious, idle people called the poor (Extracts, p. 131, italics in the original). . . . Why does Mr. Malthus practise his demonstrations on the poor only? Why are they to have a perfect system of rights and duties prescribed to them? I do not see why they alone should be put to live on these metaphysical board wages . . . nor why it should be meat and drink to them, more than to others, to do the will of God. Mr. Malthus’ gospel is preached only to the poor! (Extracts, p. 76, italics in the original). . . . [Has not] Mr. Malthus been too much disposed to consider the rich as a sort of Gods upon earth? . . . 7

In Hazlitt’s England the rich privileged even their dogs over the poor: When I see a poor old man, who after a life of unceasing labour is obliged at last to beg his bread, driven from the door of the rich man by a surly porter, and half a dozen sleek well-fed dogs, kept for the pleasure of their

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Hazlitt versus Malthus | 39 maser or mistress, jumping up from the fire-side, or bouncing out of their warm kennels upon him, I am, according to Mr. Malthus, [to think] . . . that by the laws of nature[the rich man] is bound to give[his superabundance] to his dogs, because if we suffer the poor to work upon our compassion at all, this will only embolden their importunity. (Extracts, pp. 136–7)

Although he was no longer a Christian, Hazlitt had had a thorough education in the New Testament which he put to eloquent use, quoting St. Matthew, xxiii, 4, on the rich who ‘lay heavy burthens on the poor and needy, which they will not touch with one of their fingers’ (Extracts, p. 150). Finally, as against Malthus’ defence of the rights of the rich, Hazlitt insists on the rights of the poor. He reminds his readers of Condorcet’s recent plan for a national savings fund into which all should contribute and which could be drawn upon to support the old, the sick, the widowed and the fatherless children. Malthus had opposed Condorcet’s scheme because it would militate against prudent self-reliance by the poor at all times. Hazlitt quarrels with such an exclusive onus of total economic responsibility being placed upon the poor as though they alone were subject ‘to this disease of population . . . In his division of human life, he has allotted to the poor all the misery’ (Extracts, p. 130, italics in the original). Brilliantly, Hazlitt then quotes Malthus’ own most pitiless prophecies and social prescriptions in order to condemn him out of his own mouth: Those who were born after the division of property [into private ownership] would come into a world already possessed. . . . The members of a family which was grown too large . . . could not then demand a part of the surplus produce of others as a debt of justice. It has appeared from the inevitable laws of human nature some human beings will be exposed to want. These are the unhappy persons who in the great lottery of life have drawn a blank. All who were in want of food would be urged by imperious necessity to offer their labour in exchange . . . [The sick, the old, the babies?] A man who is born into a world already possessed . . . if the society does not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food and in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. (Malthus, quoted in Extracts, pp. 135–6, italics in the original)

‘[There] are plenty of vacant covers’, retorts Hazlitt, ‘but that the guests at the head of the table have seized upon all those at the lower end, before the table was full’. As against the Malthusian right of the rich to enjoy superfluity in the

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40 | Part One midst of hunger, Hazlitt contends ‘that the mass of the labouring community always have a right to strike, to demand what wages they please’ (Extracts, p. 133, italics in the original). An outspoken Radical, he advocates repealing the Combination Acts that had been passed against forming Trade Unions; he wants ‘a general combination of the labouring poor’ to insist on a living wage as against the combination of the rich to monopolize and raise the price of corn; he wants price controls on food and a rise in wages in hard times, and he wants, pace Malthus, to see relief distributed in time of scarcity, in relation to the price of grain (Extracts, pp. 149–50). The ‘natural order’, by which people starve in times of scarcity, was to Hazlitt a very artificial order which might – and should be – artificially redressed through enlightened Poor Law provision. (Extracts, p. 153). Hazlitt was as appalled as he was incredulous at Malthus’ proposal to abolish Poor Relief altogether, lest one increase the number of paupers who apply. But it is when Malthus blames the poor themselves for all their suffering, when he condemns them for their ‘carelessness and want of frugality’, that Hazlitt rises to a climax of incandescent outrage. First he quotes Malthus himself once more: The labouring poor, to use a vulgar expression, seem always to live from hand to mouth. Their present wants employ their whole attention; and they seldom think of the future. Even when they have an opportunity of saving, they seldom exercise it; but all that they earn beyond their present necessities, goes, generally speaking, to the alehouse. (Extracts, p. 157)

Hazlitt’s tremendous rejoinder begins: The poor live from hand to mouth, because, in general, they have no hopes of living in any other way. They seldom think of the future, because they are afraid to think of it. . . . If what they earn beyond their immediate necessities goes to the ale-house, it is because the severe labour they undergo requires some relaxation, because they are willing to forget the work-house, their old age, and the prospect of their wives and children starving, and to drown care in a mug of ale, in noise, and mirth, and laughter, and old ditties, and coarse jokes, and hot disputes; and in that sense of short-lived comfort, independence and good-fellowship, which is necessary to relieve the hurt mind and jaded body. . . . No human patience can submit to everlasting toil and self-denial. . . . You reduce them almost to the condition of brutes, and then grudge them their coarse enjoyments. (Extracts, pp. 157–8, italics in the original)

That defence of the labourer’s recourse to ale reminds one irresistibly of the classic climactic passage in Scott’s The Antiquary of 1816, when Maggie Mucklebackit, the fisherman’s wife, gives her unanswerable defence of the fisherman’s need for a dram. (The local gentleman,

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Hazlitt versus Malthus | 41 Jonathan Oldbuck, has just expressed his hope that the local whisky distillery will stay closed down for the rest of his lifetime): “Aye, aye – it’s easy for your honour, and the like o’ you gentlefolks, to say sae, that hae stouth and routh, and fire and fending, and meat and claith, and sit dry and canny by the fire-side – But an’ ye wanted fire, and meat and dry claise, and were deeing o’ cauld, and had a sair heart, whilk is warst ava’, and had just tippence in your pouch, wadna ye be glad to buy a dram wi’t, to be cliding and claise, and supper and heart’s ease into the bargain, till the morn’s morning?”8

Is it just conceivable that Scott might have read – and remembered – the long, anonymous attack on Malthus (no friend of his) in Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register? Or was it enough that Scott should have had ‘five hundred hearts beating in his bosom’?9 If the poor have no right to exist themselves, they have even less right to beget and bear children according to Malthus: The common people . . . are themselves the cause of their own poverty; . . . [they] ought not to bring beings into the world for whom[they] cannot find the means of support . . . [When] the wages of labour will not maintain a family, it is an incontrovertible sign that their king and country do not want more subjects, . . . that if they marry in this case, so far from fulfilling a duty to society, they are throwing a useless burden on it; and that they are acting directly contrary to the will of God. (Extracts, pp. 164–5, italics in the original)

Resistance to this view of things is useless, Malthus preached, because it was against Nature, against God – and against the Government which, however benevolent, is powerless to alleviate hunger. Malthus advocated that one to two years after his proposed abolition of poor relief, no poor child ‘should ever be entitled to parish assistance’, and any private charity to the starving would have to be received with the most humble gratitude (see Extracts, pp. 173–4). Then, says Hazlitt, Malthus would indeed have achieved his anti-Godwinian Utopia. We would call it a Dystopia; Hazlitt called it ‘Euthanasia’: . . . the struggle would be over, each class would fulfil the task assigned by heaven, the rich would oppress the poor without remorse, the poor would submit to oppression with pious gratitude and resignation, . . . there would no longer be any seditions, tumults, complaints, petitions, partisans of liberty, . . . no grumbling, no repining, no discontented men of talents proposing reforms, . . . but we should all have the same gaiety and lightness of heart, that a man feels when he is seized with the plague, . . . [and] knows that his disorder is without cure. (Extracts, p. 178)

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42 | Part One But although the men might be puzzled into acceptance of that alleged ‘grinding law of necessity’, Hazlitt is ‘afraid that the women might prove refractory. . . . Surely the children of the poor are as good as puppy-dogs! Or as the Squire’s new hunter? So might run any poor wife’s indignant curtain-lecture. A mob might then gather in Mr. Malthus’ parish, and ‘our unfortunate Essayist be ‘ordered to the lamp-post [à la lanterne!] . . . his book committed to the flames.’ (Extracts, pp. 178–9, italics in the original)

For when the poor see their ‘children starving at the doors of the rich’, Hazlitt warns menacingly, they see also that ‘[it] is not by their own fault alone that they have fallen into this degradation; those who have brought them into it ought to be answerable for some of the consequences’ (Extracts, p. 134). That is what might happen, Hazlitt threatens, in the immediate future. (‘Incendiary’ Cobbett was not the only incendiary writing then). But worse still, in Hazlitt’s view, given ever more crushing poverty under a pitiless Malthusian state-regimen, the poor might actually become so browbeaten as to go under, their spirit of resistance totally broken. Can one connect Hazlitt’s passionate, socio-political anti-Malthus polemic with his much better-known later writings on experience and on literature? I see Malthus as Hazlitt’s anti-self who helped him existentially to define his own self in opposition. How do we know who we are? We know we are not X. Hazlitt knew that he was not Malthus. Malthus’ selfdeclared credo ran: ‘[The] principle of utility [is] the great foundation of morals’ (Extracts, p. 162). In contrast, Hazlitt countered what he called Malthus’ ‘flinty heart’ (Extracts, p. 138) by saying ‘I hope I shall sometimes be allowed to appeal to my feelings [and] the common sympathies of our nature . . . against Mr. Malthus’ authority’ (Extracts, p. 143, my italics). It was a case of the ever-recurrent opposition of ‘tough mindedness’ against tenderness of heart; reason, condemned as un-feelingness, versus feeling despised as sentimentality. Fellow-feeling was Hazlitt’s grounding for his ethics, his politics and his literary response. But in order to be capable of fellow-feeling, one has to believe that others are as emotionally vulnerable as one-self. Hazlitt endorsed Rousseau’s Third Maxim in Emile: The pity we feel for others is proportionate, not to the amount of the evil, but to the feelings we attribute to the sufferers. We only pity the wretched so far as we think they feel the need of pity . . . the rich console themselves for the harm done by them to the poor, by the assumption that the poor are too stupid to feel.10

This human capacity for fellow-feeling is our only counter to our other

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Hazlitt versus Malthus | 43 tendency – callous self-interest. Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action, hammered out just two to three years before his Reply to Malthus, had argued that we humans are capable of disinterested transcendence of self through our faculty of sympathetic imagination. In contrast, ‘Hazlitt took the doctrines of Malthus to be . . . a pernicious outcome of allowing the erroneous self-interest theory to stand unchallenged’ (my italics).11 His white-hot anger, revulsion – and dread – between 1807 and 1815, at the righteous social callousness of Malthusianism, strengthened the affective base for all Hazlitt’s later writing on experience and literature. For example, poetry, (by which, like Shelley in his Defence of Poetry, he meant all imaginative literature), is for him the great expression and inspirer of human fellow-feeling in every culture. In his opening lecture ‘On Poetry in General’ in Lectures on the English Poets, 1818, Hazlitt declares his literary credo: Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. . . . If history is a grave study, poetry may be said to be a graver: its materials lie deeper, and are spread wider. . . . It strengthens the desire of good. . . . [It] shews us the rich depths of the human soul . . . makes us drink deeper of the cup of human life; tugs at the heart-strings; . . . and rouses the whole man within us.

Every phrase there, appealing to our sense of common, universal humanity rooted in our most intense personal experience, is unMalthusian, anti-Malthusian, for it assumes both an equal human right to live and a view of all human life as rooted in emotion rather than in rationality. ‘I felt before I thought’ as Rousseau said in his Confessions – one of Hazlitt’s sacred texts. Human feeling, the pulse of the passions, has been the same and as well understood, for thousands of years past, Hazlitt believed. In his ‘Lecture on Shakespeare and Milton’ in Lectures on the English Poets, Hazlitt declares Shakespeare the greatest literary genius of the world because his work ‘was like the genius of humanity . . . all the people that ever lived are there.’ And writing of Measure for Measure, in The Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817), Hazlitt seems to claim Shakespeare himself as the greatest of all Anti-Malthusians: Shakespeare was in one sense the least moral of all writers; for morality (commonly so called) is made up of antipathies; [we remember Malthus’ fastidious antipathy to ‘savages’ and to the brutish, fornicating, self-reproducing, ale-downing poor] and his talent lay in sympathy with human nature, in all its shapes, degrees, depressions, and elevations. . . . He showed the greatest knowledge of humanity with the greatest fellow-feeling for it. (My italics)

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44 | Part One Even the convicted murderer Barnardine rouses Shakespeare’s – and our – sympathy when he refuses, in a very un-Malthusian way, to get up and let himself be hanged. Hazlitt’s essay ‘On Reason and Imagination’ (1826) is the essay where he most explicitly links humane ethics with the emotional effect of sympathy. It begins with characteristic passionate directness: ‘I hate people who have no notion of anything but generalities, and forms, and creeds, and naked propositions’ – he might well have instanced ‘of arithmetic and geometric ratios’. Men act from passion; and we can only judge of passion by sympathy. . . . Those evils that inflame the imagination and make the heart sick, [Hazlitt has been evoking the torment of the African slaves’ Middle Passage] ought not to leave the head cool. . . . I would not wish a better or a more philosophical standard of morality, than that we should think and feel towards others as we should, if it were our own case . . . [As for Bentham’s and Malthus’ calculus of utility], a calculation of the mere ultimate advantages, without regard to natural feelings and affections, may improve the external face and physical comforts of society, but will leave it heartless and worthless in itself. . . .

Hazlitt’s final attack on Malthus and his utilitarian disciples occurs in the dialogue between a rationalist and a sentimentalist in The Plain Speaker essay ‘The New School of Reform’ (1826). Hazlitt lambasts their whole philosophy as ‘a dull antithesis to human nature’: This is their idea of a perfect commonwealth: where each member performs his part in the machine, taking care of himself and no more concerned about his neighbours, than the iron and wood-work, the pegs and nails in the spinning-jenny. Good screw! good wedge! good tenpenny nail! . . . [They] snub and lecture the poor gratis. . . . There is not enough of evil already in the world, but we must harden our feelings against the miseries that daily, hourly present themselves to our notice . . . (Italics in the original)

It is worth looking at one of those miseries in more detail in order fully to understand Hazlitt’s abhorrence of Malthusianism in action. He asks, regarding the Utilitarians, ‘Do they not wish to extend ‘the greatest happiness to the greatest numbers’ by putting a stop to population – to relieve distress by withholding charity, to remedy disease by shutting up hospitals?’ ‘Shutting up hospitals?’ In a recent Westminster Review essay, July 1824, the Malthusian author of the essay ‘Charitable Institutions’, had advocated their wholesale abolition, including that of the Thomas Coram Foundling Hospital, and had quoted a description of women in the very

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Hazlitt versus Malthus | 45 last stage of pregnancy or already actually in labour, struggling to reach a Lying-in hospital somewhere in London, commenting: We agree with Mr. Highmore that nothing can be more shocking than that women should be running around about in such a state, totally unprovided; but we would ask him whether the occurrence of such events is not entirely owing to the existence of Lying-in hospitals. If there were no such receptacles women would then be left to their own prudence, and might, perhaps, reflect upon the inconveniences that necessarily attend a state of pregnancy, and guard against them before-hand. The principle of population assures us, that the miseries of the poor can only be provided against by their own prudence.

Hazlitt’s response to that is expressed in his Characteristic no. Ciiivi: ‘The mind revolts against certain opinions, as the stomach rejects certain foods.’

Hazlitt did not live to see the 1834 New Poor Law that attempted to abolish pauperism by punishing the poor for their poverty, withholding every form of ‘out-relief’, bringing back slavery into Britain in the shape of compulsory twelve hours’ daily unpaid hard labour in the workhouse, separating husbands from wives, parents from children, brothers from sisters, socially stigmatising them through workhouse uniform (with shaved heads for the children) and all this on an official starvation diet that was part of the ‘lesser eligibility principle’. Conditions in the workhouse had to be made deliberately worse than any suffering outside it, in order to cut the number of claimants. But Hazlitt had seen it coming. On the very first page of his Reply to Malthus’ Essay on Population he had written already in 1807: ‘Mr. Malthus’ reputation may, I fear, prove fatal to the poor of this country.’ He was right. Notes 1 Hazlitt’s A Reply to the Essay on Population by the Rev. T.R. Malthus consists of two parts: (a) Five Letters, (104 pp.) referred to hereafter as Reply, followed by (b) Extracts from the Essay with Commentary and Notes (79 pp. ) referred to hereafter as Extracts. All references are to A.R. Waller and Arnold Glover, eds., The Collected Works of William Hazlitt. London, J.M. Dent and Co, 1902, vol. iv. 2 Hazlitt was not the only prophet denouncing the social consequences of Malthus’ theory at this time. See Blake’s Song of Los and The Four Zoas, quoted above p. 31. 3 See Reply, pp. 54–5 and p. 62. 4 See my essay ‘‘‘What were the leaders of the Revolution to do?” Hazlitt on Revolutionary Terror in his Life of Napoleon’ in The Charles Lamb Bulletin, October 2005.

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46 | Part One 5 Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life. New York, Dover Publications Inc. – reprint of 1921, English transl., London, Macmillan, ch. 1, pp. 2–3. 6 See Raymond Tallis, review of Mary Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, London, Routledge, 2005, in The Times Literary Supplement, 8 April 2006. 7 See Hazlitt’s ‘Queries relating to the Essay on Population’, Round Table essays in The Examiner, October 1815, reprinted in Political Essays, 1819, Query 17. 8 The Antiquary, vol. 1, ch. 11. 9 See Hazlitt, ‘On the New School of Reform’, The Plain Speaker, 1826. 10 Rousseau, Emile, (1760), London, Dent, 1963, Book IV, p. 186. 11 See A. C. Grayling, The Quarrel of the Age: The Life and Times of William Hazlitt. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000, ch. 6, pp. 112–116, for a short discussion of the context and reception of Hazitt’s Reply. For a summary of Hazlitt’s critique of Malthus see Kenneth Smith, The Malthusian Controversy, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951, pp. 70–81.

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CHAPTER

4 ‘Warmint’ and ‘Gentleman’ in Great Expectations The ambiguous ‘lowness’ of Abel Magwitch It is an occupational infirmity of Dickens critics to think that they alone have understood Great Expectations. I make no such claim. All I wish to do is focus on one aspect of the novel’s central chapters – especially Chapter 40 which follows the second greatest recognition scene in English literature. What did Magwitch mean – (and what did Dickens mean?) – when the convict suddenly abased himself before Pip for having been ‘low’? And how do his subsequent lapses and near-lapses into ‘lowness’ deepen our response to the relationship between ‘warmint’ and ‘gentleman’, both in the novel and in life? Magwitch first refers to his having forgotten himself and said something ‘low’ in Chapter 40: . . . “All I’ve got ain’t mine; it’s your’n. Don’t you be afeard on it. There’s more where that came from. I’ve come to the old country fur to see my gentleman spend his money like a gentleman. That’ll be my pleasure. My pleasure ‘ull be fur to see him do it. And blast you all!” he wound up, looking round the room and snapping his fingers once with a loud snap, “blast you everyone, from the judge in his wig, to the colonist a stirring up the dust, I’ll show a better gentleman than the whole kit of you put together!”. . . . . . . “I forgot myself half a minute ago. What I said was low; that’s what it was; low.”

The allusion to ‘the colonist a stirring up the dust’ is only intelligible if we immediately remember Magwitch’s earlier speech showing his classhatred in the previous chapter: This essay is previously unpublished.

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48 | Part One . . . “The blood horses of them colonists might fling up the dust over me as I was walking; what do I say? I says to myself: “I’m making a better gentleman nor ever you’ll be!” When one of ’em says to one another, “He was a convict, a few years ago, and is a ignorant common fellow now, for all he’s lucky,” what do I say? I says to myself, “If I ain’t a gentleman, nor yet ain’t got no learning, I’m the owner of such. All on you owns stock and land; which of you owns a brought-up London gentleman?”

And the allusion to ‘the judge in his wig’ in the first passage looks forward to Magwitch’s climax of angry passion as he recounts his trial: . . . “And when the verdict come, warn’t it Compeyson as was recommended to mercy on account of good character and bad company, and giving up all the information as he could agen me, and warn’t it me as got never a word but Guilty? . . . And when we’re sentenced ain’t it him as gets seven year, and me fourteen, and ain’t it him as the Judge is sorry for, because he might a done so well, and ain’t it me as the Judge perceives to be a old offender, likely to come to worse?” He had worked himself into a state of great excitement, but he checked it, took two or three short breaths, swallowed as often, and stretching out his hand towards me, said in a reassuring manner: “I ain’t a going to be low, dear boy!” (Chapter 42)

He had just had an unforgettable attack of ‘lowness’ a little earlier in the recital of his childhood and youth spent “in jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail” which he had begun ‘ . . . after turning an angry eye on the fire for a few silent moments’ (Chapter 41): “This is the way it was, that when I was a ragged little creetur as much to be pitied as ever I see . . . I got the name of being hardened. “This is a terrible hardened one,” they says to prison visitors, picking out me. “May be said to live in jails, this boy.” Then they looked at me and I looked at them, and they measured my head, some on ‘em – they had better a measured my stomach – and others on ’em give me tracts what I couldn’t read, and made me speeches what I couldn’t unnerstand. They always went on agen me about the Devil. But what the devil was I to do? I must put something into my stomach, mustn’t I? – Howsomever I’m a getting low, and I know what’s due. Dear boy and Pip’s comrade, don’t you be afeerd of me being low.” (Chapter 42)

And his last near-approach to ‘lowness’ comes in the rowing boat as Pip tries to help him escape from England:

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‘Warmint’ and ‘Gentleman’ in Great Expectations | 49 “If you knowed, dear boy,” he said to me, “what it is to sit here alonger my dear boy and have my smoke, arter having been day by day betwixt four walls, you’d envy me. But you don’t know what it is.” “I think I know the delights of freedom,” I answered. “Ah,” said he, shaking his head gravel, “But you don’t know it equal to me. You must have been under lock and key, dear boy, too know it equal to me – but I ain’t a going to be low.” (Chapter 54)

It should now be plain that Magwitch’s ‘lowness’ is his angry, rebellious consciousness of the past sufferings inflicted on him by governing-class society. And for all that Pip’s reaction to the first two aggressive outbursts is ‘a frenzy of fear and dislike’ and a shudder of horror at Magwitch’s violent nature, I do not think that the reader is meant to feel any such repulsion. On the contrary, I find myself rejoicing at Magwitch’s suddenly clenched fist – it is an essential demonstration of his resilient refusal simply to lie down quietly at the bottom of the social heap. I am irresistibly reminded of William Cobbett’s tremendous Address To The Journeymen and Labourers of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland: These people[the middle class] call themselves the respectable part of the nation. They are, as they pretend, the virtuous part of the people, because they are quiet; as if virtue consisted in immobility! There is a canting Scotchman in London, who publishes a paper called the “Champion”, who is everlastingly harping about the virtues of the “fire-side” and who inculcates the duty of quiet submission . . . Quiet, indeed! Why, in this quality, a log, or a stone, far surpasses even the pupils of this “Champion” of quietness; and the chairs round his fire-side exceed those who sit in them . . . Some men, in all former ages, have been held in esteem for their wisdom, their genius, their skill, their valour, their devotion to country, etc. but, never, until this age was quietness deemed a quality to be extolled. It would be no difficult matter to show, that the quiet, fire-side gentry are the most callous and cruel, and therefore, the most wicked, part of the nation . . . The humanity which is continually on their lips, is all fiction. They weep over the tale of woe in a novel, but round their “decent fire-side” never was compassion felt for a real sufferer, or indignation at the acts of a powerful tyrant. The object of the efforts of such writers is clearly enough seen. Keep all quiet! Do not rouse! Keep still! Keep down! Let those who perish, perish in silence! It will, however, be out of the power of these Quacks, with all their laudanum, to allay the blood which is now boiling in the veins of the people of this Kingdom, who, if they are doomed to perish, are at any rate, resolved not to perish in silence . . . There is nobody so callous and so insolent as your sentimental quacks and their patients. How these “decent fire-side” people would stare, if some morning, they

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50 | Part One were to come down and find them occupied by uninvited visitors!1 (emphases in original)

Magwitch, of course, is just one such underdog whose blood boils within him, who cannot ‘keep down’ and ‘keep quiet’ but presents himself as an uninvited visitor at Pip’s decent fire-side. Another analogy would be ‘the active resistance of the English working-men’ noted by Engels, in taking strike action even when the prospect of success was hopeless. They strike . . . simply because they must protest against every reduction, even if dictated by necessity; because they feel bound to proclaim that they, as human beings, shall not be made to bow to social circumstances, but social conditions ought to yield to them as human beings; because silence on their part would be a recognition of these social conditions, an admission of the right of the bourgeoisie to exploit the workers in good times and let them starve in bad ones. Against this the working-men must rebel so long as they have not lost all human feeling.2

Rebellious protest against injustice is a basic human instinct, active already in infancy. As Rousseau memorably recounted: I shall never forget seeing one of these troublesome crying children beaten by his nurse. He was silent at once. I thought he was frightened and said to myself, “This will be a servile being from whom nothing can be got but by harshness.” I was wrong, the poor wretch was choking with rage, he could hardly breathe, he was black in the face. A moment later there were bitter cries, every sign of the anger, rage and despair of this age was in his tones. I thought he would die. Had I doubted the innate sense of justice and injustice in man’s heart, this one instance would have convinced me.3

But why then does Magwitch feel so obsessively ashamed and apologetic about his emotionally valid reaction? And is there a sense in which he is right – as well as wrong – to feel ashamed? Magwitch first apologises to Pip for his ‘lowness’ after he had snapped his fingers at the judge in his wig and colonist a stirring up the dust, and cried ‘blast you all!’ as he looked round Pip’s book-lined room – thus momentarily betraying his identification of Pip with the gentry he cannot help blasting. And immediately he realises that this is to forget what is ‘due’ to Pip – “I forgot myself half a minute ago. What I said was low” (Chapter 40). As he says later to Herbert Pocket: “I ain’t made Pip a gentleman, and Pip ain’t a-goin’ to mek you a gentleman, not fur me not to know what’s due to ye both. Dear boy, and

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‘Warmint’ and ‘Gentleman’ in Great Expectations | 51 Pip’s comrade, you two may count upon me always having a gen-teel muzzle on. Muzzled I have been since that half a minute when I was betrayed intro lowness, muzzled I am at the present time, muzzled I ever will be.” (Chapter 41)

In other words, it is Pip-the-gentleman’s ‘due’ not to have to listen to an embarrassing, class-conscious, anti-gentry tirade. Hence the need for a ‘genteel muzzle’ on the dunghill dog now that he is at last face to face with ‘his’ gentleman, and, moreover, wanting him to out-gentleman all the rest. But it goes much deeper than this. Pip is not only Pip-the-gentleman to Magwitch, he is also Pip the ‘dear boy’, the beloved son – ‘more to me nor any son’ (Chapter 39). And there is one sense in which it is ‘low’ of Magwitch to triumph at his ‘owning’ of Pip. “If I ain’t a gentleman, . . . I’m the owner of such” (Chapter 39). Pip has been merely his thing, his possession, in as much as had had made Pip a gentleman not simply for Pip’s sake but for his own sake, “to show ‘em all”. And it is some dim realization on Magwitch’s part that he had been wrong thus to use Pip as a weapon in his own class-war, which causes him to be so abjectly sorry, again and again, for having been ‘low’. There is one plane of human life where it is valid, even inevitable, that we relate to each other as members of a group – sex, tribe, class, nation, race, religion. But there is also always that other plane of life, the personal, on which we are not parts of a larger whole but ourselves wholes, comic and pathetic, bare, forked animals hurrying about our little planet together for a short while. The part of Magwitch that truly loves Pip is able to intuit that Pip is an end in himself. It is not his artificially constructed, manipulated class-role, but his own emotional needs that really matter to anyone who loves him. Magwitch’s ‘lowness’ is the tainting of his personal relationship with Pip with precisely that same exploiting ‘ownership’ from which he himself had suffered at the hands of Compeyson and Estella had suffered at those of Miss Havisham. That he condemns himself for this lowness prevents the reader from doing so. Although we cannot wish Magwitch not to have his ‘low’ response of class-antagonism in relation to the judge and the colonist, we also cannot wish him not to be ashamed of it in so far as it has tainted his personal relationship with Pip. He has momentarily forgotten what is ‘due’ to Pip as a human being with feelings, in that sense a ‘gentle’ man, to whom Magwitch should be gentle too. But that is still not all that I believe Dickens wants us to see in Magwitch’s relationship with Pip. There is the ultimate irony that the ‘low’ owning of a gentleman by a Magwitch is not just emotionally ambiguous, it is also a broad social truth. In what I take to be the crucial speech in the climactic 39th Chapter, Magwitch boasts exultingly:

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52 | Part One “Yes, Pip, dear boy, I’ve made a gentleman on you! It’s me wot has done it! I swore that time, sure as ever I earned a guinea, that guinea should go to you. I swore arterwards, sure as ever I spec’lated and got rich, you should get rich. I lived rough, that you should live smooth; I worked that you should be above work. . . . that there hunted dunghill dog wot you kep life in, got his head so high that he could make a gentleman – and, Pip, you’re him!”

And in saying that, he utters a far, far greater truth than he knows. Of course Magwitch has had his own self-regarding motives as well as his genuinely generous ones for ‘making’ a gentleman out of Pip. But what Dickens has forced us to see from this passage, though Magwitch himself cannot see it, is that all gentlemen are ‘above work’ because the Magwitches (and the Jo Gargerys) work hard; all gentlemen live smooth because the Magwitches live rough. As Robert Stange has pointed out: ‘Dickens has subtly led us to speculate on the connections between a gentleman and his money, on the dark origins of even the most respectable fortunes.’4 The operative word is ‘connections’. We should not, for example, miss the ‘connection’ in Joe the blacksmith having to foot the bill incurred by a Finch of the Grove for the products of the goldsmith and silversmith. Dickens always saved his pity and indignation for the bare, outrageous fact of England’s social inequality. We think of Oliver Twist born naked and destitute in the Workhouse, yet indistinguishable from a newborn Prince, or Will Fern and Margaret Veck compared with Alderman Cute and Sir Joseph Bowley in The Chimes, or Stephen Guest juxtaposed with Bounderby in Hard Times. But now, for the first time, Dickens has penetrated to the enabling cause of this fact of inequality. All ladies and gentlemen owe every minute of their leisured existence to the sweat of those who are not ladies and gentlemen, but despised common labourers and dunghill dogs. The gentleman is thus, in a sense, the real criminal. It is not fortuitous that, as John Hagan, Jr. has pointed out ‘the prime mover . . . of the entire courses of events which the novel treats immediately or in retrospect is a man by the name of Compeyson, a man who adopts the airs of a ‘gentleman’.5 Thus it is Compeyson, villainous ‘professional gent’, confidence trickster and swindler, ‘the worst of scoundrels among many scoundrels’ (Chapter 50) of whom Magwitch on the marshes might truly have been thinking when he said: “There’s a young man hid with me, in comparison with which young man I am a Angel”, who has just as broad and significant a social representativeness as has Pip and Magwitch and Joe Gargery. But, it is asked, by Humphrey House and others6 what then of the truly gentleman-like gentlemen in the book, Matthew and Herbert Pocket? And what of the accession of genuine sensibility and refinement in Pip himself by the end of the work? Dickens is not so blindly doctrinaire as to insist, any more than does Chekhov, that there are no real gains for civilization

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‘Warmint’ and ‘Gentleman’ in Great Expectations | 53 through the existence of true ladies and gentlemen. Therefore he includes the Pockets’ charm, their self-deprecating humour, their integrity, sensitivity and culture. But what Dickens also makes us ask after we have finished the book, as Chekhov does when the curtain falls on The Cherry Orchard, is whether the price paid for such admittedly genuine civility is not, perhaps, too high? For in order for such a small elite to exist, there must necessarily also be a lower mass of the common, coarse, ignorant labouring poor, and below them again, the hardened ‘warmints’. And how can the civilized elite bear such a state of affairs except by believing quite sincerely that the poor are hardened to it? ‘[The] rich console themselves for the harm done by them to the poor, by the assumption that the poor are too stupid to feel.’7 Similarly, the law-abiding need to believe that criminals are ‘warmints’, that is, not fellow-humans but vermin, – ‘wild beasts’, dunghill dogs’, – ‘feral’ in 21st century-speak. ‘“This is a terrible hardened one they says to prison visitors, picking out me.”’ Hence the enormous significance of Pip and Herbert’s gradual discovery of Magwitch’s not hardened but softened nature: the revelation of his capacity for feeling is what forces them to feel for him. Dickens was not the first writer to perceive the evil consequence of the governing-class assumption that the lower classes are not quite fully human, but rather something akin to vermin. William Hazlitt had already probed the roots of English social cruelty in his article on ‘Capital Punishments’ for the Edinburgh Review in 1821 – an article which Dickens might well have read at a later date, given his admiration for Hazlitt,8 his own later connection with the Edinburgh Review and his obsession with the subject of Capital Punishment: To treat men as brute beasts in our speculations, is to encourage ourselves to treat them as such in our practice; and that is the way to make them what we pretend to believe that they are. . . . And when we see the lower classes of the English people uniformly singled out as marks for the malice or servility of a certain description of writers – when we see them studiously separated, like a degraded caste, from the rest of the community, with scarcely the attributes and faculties of the species allowed them . . . when we see the redundant population (as it is fashionably called) [i.e. by the Neo-Malthusians] selected as the butt for every effusion of paltry spite, and as the last resource of vindictive penal statutes . . . when we are accustomed to hear the poor, the uninformed, the friendless, put, by tacit consent, out of the pale of society – . . . when they are familiarly spoken of as sort of vermin only fit to be hunted down, and exterminated at the discretion of their betters: we know pretty well what to think, both of the disinterestedness of the motives which give currency to this jargon, and of the wisdom of the policy which should either sanction, or suffer itself to be influenced by its suggestions.9

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54 | Part One In contrast to this dehumanization of ‘the underclass’, Dickens, of course expresses Magwitch’s real, vulnerable, fellow-humanity by giving him the name ‘Abel’, the murdered, unacknowledged brother, whose blood cries out from the ground. And it is Joe Gargery who first expresses a kind of brotherly sympathy for Magwitch: “We don’t know what you have done, but we wouldn’t have you starved to death for it, poor miserable fellow-creature. – Would us, Pip?” (Chapter 5)

Magwitch himself never asks whether the cost of making ladies and gentlemen is not perhaps too high. For all his outbursts of ‘lowness’ when he suddenly bellows in rage against the vicious injustice of the class system which first starved him as a child and then beat and chained and imprisoned and scorned and condemned him as a man, Magwitch cannot set himself a higher or wider goal than to produce yet another smooth-living gentleman who should be above work. One of his motives is to achieve a vicarious equality with his enemies, the judge and the colonist: “I mustn’t see my gentleman a footing it in the mire of the streets; there mustn’t be no mud on his boots. My gentleman must have horses, Pip! Horses to ride, and horses to drive, and horses for his servant to drive as well. Shall colonists have their horses (and blood-‘uns, if you please, good Lord!) and not my London gentleman? . . . I’ve come to the old country fur to see my gentleman spend his money like a gentleman. That’ll be my pleasure. My pleasure ‘ull be fur to see him do it.” (Chapter 40)

But his other aim is to save little Pip from the possibility of his own fate of growing up from hungry boy to hunted man, in jail and out of jail. A ‘gentleman’ was clearly so much better a thing to be. It is not in the end seen to be so either by Pip or by us. In the end, all that matters to Pip is the realization that Magwitch is ‘a much better man’ (my emphasis) than he had been to Joe. And, following that recognition, it is possible for Pip to recover from breakdown and to reintegrate his present self with his past self as little Pip, loving and loved by Joe. Both Pip and the reader discover that it is more deeply necessary for us all to be feeling men and women than to be cultured ladies and gentlemen. But Magwitch, as Pip himself realizes, never sees this. Responsive though he is to Pip’s growth of real feeling for him – “You’ve been more comfortable alonger me, since I was under a dark cloud, than when the sun shone. That’s best of all” (Chapter 56) – he never frees himself from the need to believe that Pip will be a rich gentleman. Hence the importance of Pip’s last words of comfort to him on his deathbed. At the very last, Pip brings himself to tell Magwitch that his daughter “lived and

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‘Warmint’ and ‘Gentleman’ in Great Expectations | 55 found powerful friends. She is living now. She is a lady and very beautiful. And I love her!” (Chapter 56). Magwitch dies under the illusion that his two children are both safe from the harsh struggle for existence waged by the poor and that they love each other and will live happily ever after, with Magwitch’s last attempt to kiss Pip’s hand as a father’s blessing on them. But we know, and even Pip knows, the real, bitter truth. The ‘powerful friends’ Estella found were Jaggers and Miss Havisham, witch, rather than fairy godmother, who, Pip knew, did ‘a grievous thing in taking an impressionable child to mould into the form that her wild resentment . . . found vengeance in . . . Better . . . to have left her a natural heart, even to be bruised or broken’ (Chapter 49). And it was this heartless little ‘lady’ Estella, who had first set Pip upon the path of being ashamed of the forge. It was really for her, and not for ‘the convict, guilty of I knew not what crimes’ (Chapter 39) that Pip had deserted Joe. Thus for all his several ‘low’ outbursts against the ladies and gentlemen whose luxurious lives meant the degradation of his own, Magwitch himself never revolted against the whole class-system. On the contrary, he accepted it so completely that he was glad to have his daughter become a lady and his adoptive son a Finch of the Grove. Dickens, however, means us to see the full pathetic irony of this. He leaves us at last brooding more darkly, and with a fiercer ‘lowness’ than Magwitch ever did, and without apology, on our callous acceptance of that social inequality which first creates and then deludes and finally dehumanizes both ‘gentleman’ and ‘warmint’ in our society. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Cobbett’s Weekly Register, November 2, 1816. See Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the English Working Class, 1845. Rousseau Emile, 1762, Book One. ‘Expectations Well Lost: Dickens’ Fable’, for ‘History Time’, College English, XVI, October 1964. ‘The Poor Labyrinth: the Theme of Social Injustice in Dickens’ Great Expectations’ in Nineteenth Century Fiction, IX, December 1954. The Dickens World, London, Oxford University Press, 1941. Rousseau, Emile, Book Four, 3rd Maxim. In 1848 Dickens made a literary pilgrimage with John Forster to Hazlitt’s Winterslow Hut. Hazlitt, ‘Capital Punishments’, Edinburgh Review, July 1821; reprinted P. R. Howe, Collected Works of William Hazlitt, vol. 19.

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PART T WO

Enter the Women

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CHAPTER

5 ‘Ourstory’ by Carole Satyamurti Let us now praise women with feet glass slippers wouldn’t fit; not the patient, nor even embittered ones who kept their place, but awkward women, tenacious with truth, whose elbows disposed of the impossible; who split seams, who wouldn’t wait, take no, take sedatives; who sang their own songs, went uninsured, knew best what they were missing. Our misfit foremothers are joining forces underground, their dusts mingling breast-bone with scapula, forehead with forehead. Their steady mass bursts locks; lends a springing foot to our vaulting into enormous rooms.



From Striking Distances by Carole Satyamurti (Oxford University Press, 1994). Reprinted in Satyamurti, Stitching the Dark: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2004).

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CHAPTER

6 Introduction to ‘Which Dead Should Awaken?’ From the Collective Biography of Women in Britain, 1550–1900 ‘Niemand ist tot solange man über ihn spricht.’ (So long as one is still being talked about, one is not dead.) OLD JEWISH SAYING

Already in 1929 Virginia Woolf articulated one part of the feminist historical project: ‘We think back through our mothers if we are women.’1 By ‘mothers’, it becomes clear, she meant mould-breaking foremothers. But where do we find such mothers? And who were the mould-breaking forerunners to whom they looked back, and the mould-breakers before them? One answer is suggested by the frontispiece to this book showing the historian Catherine Macaulay as a child reading in her father’s library. Girls and women in earlier centuries read books by men about men and women. And some of these young women at least, like the members of every other culturally repressed and intellectually despised group, made an effort first to discover and then to transmit inspiring counter-examples to the depressing, reductive, stereotype. As long ago as 64 BC, in China, for example, the first book of women’s history was Biographies of Several Thousand Women. In 1869 the pioneer German feminist Luise OttoPeters brought out her work of collective biography, Einflussreiche Frauen aus dem Volke (Influential Women of the People). And in the late 19th century, the Arab women intellectuals Zainab Fawawaz and Maryam al-Nahhas catalogued selected biographies of Arab women pioneers going back to the early Islamic period. In The Origins of Patriarchy (1986), Gerda Lerner’s fierce and justified indictment of men for systematically excluding women, century after First published London and New York, Continuum, 1999.

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Introduction to ‘Which Dead Should Awaken?’ | 61 century, from society’s institutions of knowledge, she attributes the failure of women to become intellectual system-builders to their absence from history – especially from male intellectual history. Men have been able to build on the thought of men before them, whereas women, according to Gerda Lerner, have had to re-invent the wheel of women’s history generation after generation. Women, in her view, have had to inhabit a mental world of temporal discontinuity – whereas men could live within history – a world that knew the concept of progress. Whilst I agree with Gerda Lerner in deploring the absence of women from most men’s idea of history, I am less convinced than she about the beneficence of intellectual ‘systembuilding’. Moreover, I believe that she has seriously underestimated women’s persistent presence in that often naive but always influential mode of history – the collective biographies of Western Europe, most of them written by men. As far back as Plutarch’s Lives, and his On Virtuous Women, circa AD 100 on to accounts of the Early Christian Martyrs, the Lives of the Female Saints, Boccacio’s De Claris Mulieribus (written 1375 – publ. 1473), Christine de Pisan’s City of Women (c.1400) and Antoine Dufour’s Les Vies des Femmes Célèbres (1509), it has been possible for women readers in Western Europe to learn about remarkable, mouldbreaking women who were not content to live out their lives unquestioning, mute and confined either to the paternal or the marital home. Indeed, as Gerda Lerner herself has acknowledged in her The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: For centuries, we find in the works of literary women a pathetic, almost desperate search for Women’s History, long before historical studies as such exist. Nineteenth-century female writers avidly read the work of eighteenth-century female novelists; over and over again they read the ‘lives’ of queens, abbesses, poets, learned women. Early ‘compilers’ searched the Bible and all historical sources to which they had access to create weighty tomes with female heroines.2

Precisely. Caroline Heilbrun in her Writing a Woman’s Life seems to me to have been quite wrong to suggest that biographers have largely ignored women as subjects, . . . Female biographers, . . . if they wrote about women, chose comfortable subjects, whose fame was thrust upon them, [who] posed no threatening questions, . . . provided no disturbing models for the possible destinies of other women. . . . Only the female life of prime devotion to male destiny had been told before; for the young girl who wanted more from a female biography, there were, before 1970, few or no exemplars.3

This bibliography is a refutation of that view. A great many women have not been ‘hidden from history’ as orthodox feminist historiography

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62 | Part Two has so often maintained. We, at the end of the twentieth century may no longer know about the lives of all too many of our mould-breaking foremothers – but that does not mean that they did not know about theirs. However, what also emerges from this bibliography is that the collective biographers of women over the centuries, whether men or women, have not agreed about which women deserved to be remembered. Therefore this work covers three very different categories of collective biography – encyclopaedic collections of Great Lives, both male and female; collections of heterogeneous women’s biography; and collective biographies of particular categories of women from saints to criminals as well as many sub-divisions within those broad headings, most of which relate to religious affiliation. The book is organized chronologically in order that a history of the collective biography of women produced in England before 1900 may begin to emerge. It is clear that all the most significant encyclopaedic collective biographies 1550–1780 were compiled by male clerics who included very few women. Heterogeneous, women-only biography, 1550–1770 consisted basically of men’s listing of the names of great women who should not be forgotten. Mary Scott was the first woman to attempt such a listing herself in 1776. Collective biographies focussing on particular kinds of women – scholars, saints, witches, poets, actresses – had little historical or feminist content until George Ballard’s Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain . . . celebrated for their writing or skill in the learned languages, arts and sciences in 1752. Ann Thicknesse was the first Englishwoman to compile a ‘specialized’ collective biography of women – her Sketches of the Lives and Writings of the Ladies of France (1780). A statistical analysis of the first, most general category, Great Lives of Men and [a few] Women, reveals that the number of such collective biographies produced in the eighteenth century more than doubled the number produced in the seventeenth century; that the first half of the nineteenth century equalled the number produced in the whole of the eighteenth century, while the second half of the nineteenth century, even excluding the 66 volumes of the Dictionary of National Biography, nearly doubled the number produced between 1800 and 1850. Regarding collections of women-only biography, both heterogeneous and special category, there were only a dozen in the 17th century and a dozen in the 18th century. That number doubled in the first half of the 19th century and then was six times greater again between 1850 and 1900. Clearly there was now a huge market for such collective biographies of women, a fact which may in part be explained by the new market in Books for Girls, especially as School and Sunday School Prizes. No fewer than a quarter of the collective biographies of women 1850–1900, many of them written by Grub Street hacks, were explicitly aimed at the girl reader. In order to analyze the coverage of particular categories of women, the reader is directed to the Category Index at the back of this

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Introduction to ‘Which Dead Should Awaken?’ | 63 volume. In terms of historical period there were more entries covering Tudor women, spanning just one century, than there had been under Mediaeval women over ten centuries; there were more entries under seventeenth-century women than Tudor women; many more eighteenthcentury women than seventeenth century and far more nineteenth century than eighteenth century.4 In terms of religious affiliation, most biographical attention has been paid to Protestants – whether martyrs of the Reformation, Puritans, Nonconformists of all kinds, or Victorian women missionaries. Catholic women had to wait nearly two hundred years after the Reformation before beginning to read their own counter-tradition of collective biography. As regards class, not surprisingly, royal and aristocratic women have had infinitely more individual attention paid them than the poor – unless they happened to be notorious criminals. In terms of chosen occupation, again Virginia Woolf was right. ‘Writing was a reputable and harmless occupation . . . No demand was made upon the family purse.’5 Thus we find that ‘writers miscellaneous’, together with novelists, poets and playwrights, constitute the most frequently mentioned occupation. Next are the actresses and singers, enthusiastically remembered by their male devotees. And finally, in the late nineteenth century, women social reformers, educators and medical women begin to come into their own. More generally, what the Category Index demonstrates is the surprisingly wide range of categories for women before 1900. There are artists, composers, martyrs, political heroines, travellers and adventurers as well as the saints, ‘witches’ and learned women who were not to be forgotten. As regards which works were by ‘[thinkers] against the current’, and feminist either in intention or effect, I have marked with an asterisk all those authors whom I consider to have been affirming of women, aware of their cultural repression and eager to encourage their girl or women readers to think, to speak and to act for themselves. In statistical terms, I consider there were a dozen such feminist works – all written by men – between 1550 and 1780. In the ‘revolutionary’ period 1780–1830 there were another dozen, eight of them compiled by women. From 1830 to 1850 there were half a dozen, and that figure quintupled in the second half of the 19th century – both inspiring and accompanying the growth of feminist historical consciousness at that time. What general interpretative conclusions dare I offer, however tentative? I would suggest that practitioners, historiographers and theorists of women’s history might do well to look much more closely at the range of collective biography of both men and women written by men before 1780 as well as at women-only collective biography written by men before 1900. For what one finds there is both an astonishing array of mouldbreaking foremothers and a surprising number of feminist male historians. I would also recommend a more probing reading of non-feminist Victorian collective biography to which it is all too easy to condescend. Even when there is explicit adherence to Separate Spheres

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64 | Part Two domestic ideology in a preface or a particular chapter, paying lip-service to the political correctness of that day, 19th century collective biographers, whether male or female, may nevertheless still surprise a modern reader by their covert, subversive inclusion of independent-minded women subjects who exemplify alternative values and life-paths. In addition I would emphasize that, as with every other attempt at establishing a history, what one discovers in compiling collective biographies of women in England 1550–1900, is not one history but many different and even conflicting histories. If the woman reader had been Anglican she would not have learned of Dissenting or Catholic heroines; if Catholic, she would not have read the (dominant) tradition of Protestant women’s biography. And within that broad category of ‘Protestant’, there were, of course, further exclusive sub-divisions into Anglican, Calvinist, Methodist, Quaker and Unitarian biography, – each very different and all of them enormously influential and inspiriting to their separate readerships. It is largely because so many of us no longer find it possible to be Christian, that we have lost touch with many of the heroines of our differently-thinking ‘mothers’, for whom Christian faith had been central, 1550–1900. Who were the women through whom our forebears thought back? Not surprisingly, it was the women who had been important in political history, i.e history that affected men, who originally constituted General Knowledge of Great Women. Cleopatra, Boadicea, Joan of Arc, Margaret of Anjou, Isabella of Castile, Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Catherine Parr, Lady Jane Grey, Mary Tudor, Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, Queen Christina of Sweden, the Duchess of Marlborough, Flora MacDonald, the Empress Catherine II of Russia, Marie-Antoinette, Charlotte Corday, Mme. Roland, these, together perhaps with Nell Gwynn, Sarah Siddons, and Grace Darling were the women of whom ‘every schoolgirl’ had heard. But the frequency of appearance in the Names Index indicates rather more. By the time of Jane Austen’s death in 1817, a cultivated English woman interested in discovering ‘remarkable women’ could hardly fail to know something of Anne Askew, Mary Astell, Mrs. Barbauld, Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Carter, the Duchess of Newcastle, Susanna Centilevre, Hester Chapone, Susanna Cibber, Kitty Clive, Catherine Cockburn, Mrs. Delany, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Mrs. Jordan, Catherine Macaulay, Mary Delarivière Manley, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Nance Oldfield, Katherine Philips, Laetitia Pilkington, Elizabeth Rowe, Anna Maria van Schurman, Frances Sheridan, Charlotte Smith, Mrs. Thrale Piozzi, Ann, Countess of Winchilsea and Peg Woffington. And by 1900, such a woman reader would also have discovered Jane Austen, Joanna Baillie, Barbara Bodichon, Rosa Bonheur, Frederika Bremer, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Carpenter, Anne Damer, Maria Edgeworth, George Eliot, Millicent Fawcett, Elizabeth Fry – the heroine of the nineteenth century, Margaret

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Introduction to ‘Which Dead Should Awaken?’ | 65 Fuller, Mrs. Gaskell, Frances Ridley Havergal, Felicia Hemans, Caroline Herschel, Elizabeth Inchbald, Lucy Hutchinson, Anna Jameson, Swift’s Stella, Angelica Kauffmann, L.E.L., Harriet Martineau, Mary Russell Mitford, Hannah More, Florence Nightingale, Caroline Norton, Amelia Opie, Rachel, Lady Rachel Russell, Mrs. Nassau Senior, ‘Sister Dora’, Elizabeth Smith, Mary Somerville, Mme. de Stael, Lady Hester Stanhope, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mme. Vestris, Mme. Viardot, and Susanna Wesley. Through how many of the above can we still ‘think back’ now? And whom did our foremothers not know? – Mary Collier, Dorothy Wordsworth, Harriet Taylor, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Eleanor Marx, Emily Dickinson? Or about whom did they know very little? – Mary Shelley, Josephine Butler, Mary Ward? Our own sceptical, ironic culture has little place for ancestor worship of any kind. Together with our loss of faith in God has come a loss of faith in humanity by the end of the twentieth century. The very concept of ‘Exemplary Lives’ has come to seem not merely ‘old-fashioned’ but dubious if not outright pernicious – concealing all manner of humbug. In part this is the fault of the ‘Exemplary Lives’ genre itself. As Donald Stauffer so admirably put it: [The] polite school of biography . . . [sprang] from the exemplary lives of [17th century] clerics. Yet it became secularized, and dominated the theory of biography to such an extent that Carlyle in the nineteenth century still [cried] out in rabid wrath: “How delicate, how decent is English biography, bless its mealy mouth! . . . The suppression of faults can easily lead to the suppression of peculiarities . . . [The] study of eminent virtue includes only the typical, not individual, traits, for they alone are to be emulated.”6

A film of dull, pietistic varnish covers all too many of the accounts of outstanding women listed in this bibliography, obscuring their real vitality and force of personality. One has only to compare the dullness of 18th and 19th century entries on of Lady Gethin, with the far more lively entry in Blain, Clements and Grundy (1990).7 Among the rare exceptions to the low literary level of this genre I would instance Foxe, Besse, Challoner, Cibber, Louisa Costello, Julia Kavanagh, M. Betham-Edwards, Lina Eckenstein, and the contributors to the DNB – notably Jennet Humphreys who wrote forty-seven articles on women and Sir Sidney Lee’s sister Elizabeth who wrote over a hundred.8 Ultimately, the 19th century overdosed on hagiography and the inevitable reaction set in. Lytton Strachey, Freud, World War One, the sickening personality cults of mad 20th century dictators and the apparently ubiquitous corruption in high places in every nation, all have contributed their mite to our seeing only the feet of clay in our famous dead. Most recently, fashionable scepticism concerning ‘the continuous self’, the creative genius and the very possi-

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66 | Part Two bility of disinterestedness have, together, dealt the final blows to the concept of ‘Noble Lives’. Our eager iconoclasm has only omitted to include the proponents of iconoclasm themselves. Irreverence towards our dead is something upon which we rather pride ourselves. ‘With us, heroism is at a discount. . . . a symptom to be analysed rather than a virtue to be emulated’.9 ‘Much easier than your works/ To sell your quirks’ as D.J. Enright noted in his poem ‘Biography’. Or, as Tim Hilton wrote of a recent exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery: Not a single artist in this show truly takes on the problem of grandeur. For good or ill, the idea that painting might accord great respect to an admirable human being has disappeared. Today’s portraits are about fun, and they are shot through with irony and knowingness.10

There are, of course, pitfalls in Heroinism. Not only may it involve untruthful idealization and hence the promotion of totally unrealistic models for emulation, but it also risks, through its focus on extraordinary individuals, ignorance of the lives of the ordinary, representative women in each generation. But do we have to choose between writing social history of the nameless millions and biography of those whose names have been recorded? I believe the risks entailed by No-Heroinism to be still more damaging than the pitfalls of hagiography. Just as individual identity is inseparable from – and dependent upon – individual memory, so collective identity is inseparable from collective memory. And the collective memory of the socially subordinate, culturally disadvantaged majority of human beings known as women needs to accumulate positive examples of mould-breaking foremothers in order for us to enlarge our ideas of what is humanly possible for women. Models of some kind we have to have in each generation, and Madonna, Margaret Thatcher and Princess Diana are but poor substitutes for Anne Askew, Mary Ward, Mary Fisher, Elizabeth Gaunt, Susannah Arne, Mrs. Delany, Caroline Herschel, Elizabeth Fry, Catherine Wilkinson, Mary Carpenter or Agnes Jones. This bibliography is intended not only as a contribution to British historiography 1550–1900 but also as an aid and stimulus to further 21st century research in women’s history. Then, when it is our granddaughters’ turn to confront the venal and the inhumane in the decades to come, they will know that there were countless women of integrity, creativity and courageous sympathy before them. Thinking back through such ‘mothers’ should give them strength. Notes 1 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Hogarth Press, London, 1929, p. 114. It is interesting that Virginia Woolf herself had only a very limited knowledge of the mothers through whom her mother’s mothers had thought back. 2 Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy, Oxford University Press, 1986,

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Introduction to ‘Which Dead Should Awaken?’ | 67

3

4

5 6 7 8 9

10

ch. 11, pp. 224–5: and see also ‘The Search for Women’s History’ in her The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, Oxford University Press, 1993. Ballantyne Books, New York, 1988, Introduction, pp. 21 and 26. For another perspective on women biographers see Rohan Maitzen’s interesting essay on Victorian Women’s Historical Biographies, ‘This Feminine Preserve’, focussing principally on their histories of Queens and the contemptuous masculine reception, in Victorian Studies, Spring 1995. Cf. Virginia Woolf: How, then, does Affable Hawk account for the fact which stares me, and I should have thought any other impartial observer, in the face, that the seventeenth century produced more remarkable women than the sixteenth, the eighteenth than the seventeenth, and the nineteenth than all three put together? (‘The Intellectual Status of Women’, New Statesman, 9 Oct. 1920, Appendix III, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. II.) ‘Professions for Women,’ 1930, first published in Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth, 1947. English Biography before 1700, Oxford University Press, 1930 – ‘A Critical Survey,’ pp. 250–2. Blain, Clements and Grundy, The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, London, Batsford, 1990. See Gillian Fenwick, Women and the Dictionary of National Biography, Scolar Press, 1994. David Marquand, review of Clive Ponting’s biography of Churchill, Independent on Sunday, 8 May 1994, p. 34. See also R. Skidelsky, ‘Only Connect: Biography and Truth’ in Homberger and Charmey, The Troubled Face of Biography, Macmillan, 1988 and Ben Pimlott, ‘Artists of the Lives – the future of political biography in an anti-heroic age’, in The Independent on Sunday, 14 August 1994. ‘Farewell grandeur, hello fun’, The Independent on Sunday, 21 November 1993.

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CHAPTER

7 A ‘Strong-Minded Woman’ – Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, (1827–1890) The ‘mother’ of the 19th century British women’s movement Before 1855 there had been no Women’s Movement in Britain. There had been individual women who had become national figures – Elizabeth Fry the prison reformer, Caroline Chisholm the emigration organizer, Mary Carpenter the rescuer of street children and juvenile delinquents, and there had been several women writers who had protested against many aspects of women’s intolerable situation, including the sweating and prostitution of working-class women, the exploitation of governesses, and the infantilization of all those unmarried middle-class women not allowed to seek serious education or trained employment. One thinks of Harriet Martineau writing on the ‘Political Non-Existence of Women’ in her Society in America (1837), Marion Reid’s A Plea For Women (1843), Anna Jameson’s Essays (1846), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Shirley (1849), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) and Harriet Taylor’s On the Enfranchisement of Women in The Westminster Review (1851). But between 1855 and 1870 there arrived on the scene: 1. A Committee to organize a Petition for Married Women’s Property Rights (1855). 2. A Society of Women Artists (1856). 3. A National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (1858). 4. An Englishwoman’s Journal (1859). 5. A Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (1859). First published in Gulliver 34: Victorianism Re-Visited; Geschlechter-verhältnisse in Kultur und Literatur, Argument-Verlag, Hamburg, 1993.

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A ‘Strong-Minded Woman’ – Barbara Smith Bodichon | 69 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

A Portfolio Club for women writers and artists (1863). The Kensington Political Debating Society (1865). A Committee to petition Parliament for women’s suffrage (1866). A National Association for Women’s Suffrage (1866). The first Women’s University College at Hitchin, later Girton, Cambridge, (1869).

All these new societies and institutions were the result of organized, collective participation by women – whether in committee or in association, in a club, on an editorial board, or in a college. What they also had in common was that they had all been inspired by, participated in, organized by or financed by one woman – Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. And yet none of our schoolchildren and very few British students – only those studying 19th century British women’s history – have ever heard of her. She is certainly nothing like the national figure that is Elizabeth Fry or Florence Nightingale. And yet, although it was in the very nature of her project for the multifaceted liberation of British women that she should not try to achieve it on her own but rather enlist, encourage and enable a great many other women to become effective in the common cause, nevertheless, none of this would have been possible without her. Who was she? The problem is that there is still a great deal of unresolved mystery both about Barbara Leigh Smith’s background and about her adult life as Madame Bodichon. We know that she was the eldest, illegitimate daughter of a wealthy, radical MP Benjamin Leigh Smith and a 17-yearold milliner’s apprentice, Anne Longden. Her mother died of tuberculosis at twenty-four, having borne five children in seven years. Why her father did not marry her mother, what her mother was like, what her daughter Barbara felt for her or thought about her pitifully short life – none of this we know. What we do know is that Barbara’s illegitimacy meant that she had a childhood belonging to the ‘Taboo’d Smiths’: her first cousins, Florence Nightingale and Hilary Bonham Carter, being forbidden to associate with her. We know that she was educated at a Westminster Infant School – a so-called Ragged School, founded and financed by her father and run on Owenite Utopian Socialist lines where she mixed with poor children, mixed race children and boys as well as girls. The ethos of the school was co-operative, not competitive, and encouraged learning related to life in true Rousseauist fashion. We know that Barbara grew up to be extraordinarily independent-minded and questioning on all matters relating to women. She was a serious student and practitioner of art, both as a girl and as a woman. She defied 19th-century dress conventions – refusing to wear a corset or neatly braid her hair. She even, it was alleged, put on breeches when wading through mountain streams to find the right pigment for her landscapes. And from the moment that she became politically conscious, Barbara Leigh Smith was alive to the condition-of-

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70 | Part Two women question. Already in 1849, at the age of 22, she had written the following notes on John Stuart Mill’s Political Economy: Philosophers and reformers have generally been afraid to say anything about unjust laws both of society and country which crush women. There never was a tyranny so deeply felt, yet borne so silently, that is the worst of it . . . But now I hope there are some who will brave ridicule for the sake of justice to half the people in the world.l

It is possible, as Jacquie Matthews suggests, that Barbara Leigh Smith was fired to make those comments because of her personal memories of her mother’s short, overburdened life and her own social stigma of illegitimacy; but it is also possible that Barbara Leigh Smith possessed a passionate, disinterested sense of the justice long overdue to women who were far more disadvantaged than herself. In fact, from the age of twentyone, Barbara Leigh Smith was in a better economic position than most other women in Britain. Her father allowed her an income of £300 a year – an economic independence exactly as if she had been a son of twentyone. And it was with that £300 a year, combined with her considerable earnings from the later sale of her paintings, that Barbara Leigh Smith was to go on to finance so many aspects of the British Women’s Movement of the 19th century. Her first act was to set up an extraordinary, experimental Elementary School, inspired by the ideas of Rousseau, Robert Owen, Pestalozzi, Swedenborg and Froebel. It was cheap, charging only six pence a week, co-educational, and it offered its children music, art, gymnastics, and visits to Museums and the countryside as well as ordinary lessons. There was no religious teaching and no corporal punishment was allowed – perhaps the only school in England at that time where that was true. The children included the children of atheists, Irish Catholics, Jews, middleclass children, working-class children, even the son of Garibaldi was a pupil. That school, Portman Hall, is still discussed in histories of progressive education in Britain. It is interesting to remember that Mary Wollstonecraft, in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, fifty years earlier, had argued that co-educational basic education was the very first essential step in the liberation of women because it would prove girls’ equal intellectual potential. Barbara Leigh Smith’s next act was to draw up and publish (in 1854), A Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women. That summary made it brutally clear that under British Common Law a married woman’s body belonged to her husband, as did her money and her children. A rich woman could have an individual ‘settlement’ made on her, giving her and her children some financial independence from her husband – but for the mass of middle-class and working-class women, anything they earned could be legally appropriated

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A ‘Strong-Minded Woman’ – Barbara Smith Bodichon | 71 by their husbands. It is a mark of Barbara Leigh Smith’s disinterestedness that she, an economically independent, unmarried woman, should have been so incensed about married women’s lack of legal, basic, human rights. She went on to call a meeting of concerned women at her home in Blandford Square in order to draw up a Petition, and circulate it for signatures before presenting it to Parliament, in the hope of reforming the law. It was also typical of Barbara Leigh Smith’s unusual social radicalism – her ability and her determination to cross the class barrier – that the Petition should have been addressed to women of all classes ‘because of the numbers of women employed in manufacturing, as sempstresses, laundresses, charwomen and in other multifarious occupations.’ When the Petition was presented to Parliament in 1856 it had 26,000 signatures – including those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Harriet Martineau, Marian Evans (i.e. Barbara’s great friend George Eliot) and Elizabeth Gaskell. By the following year 60,000 signatures had been collected. But the Married Women’s Property Bill, establishing the right of married women to own property and keep their own earnings, was thrown out by the men in the House of Commons. ‘It would put married women in too strong-minded a position’! That first Married Women’s Property Petition Committee, however, became the nucleus of the British Women’s Movement; it was the beginning of their network. Barbara Leigh Smith’s next act, emerging from her own struggles as a professional artist and landscape watercolour painter, was to help found the Society for Women Artists, hoping to arrange exhibition space and reviews. Then came the most exhilarating, forthright piece of writing that she ever published – her pamphlet Women and Work (1857): We want work . . . We must each leave the world a little better than we found it . . . [Working] for the salvation of this world . . . is the duty of all, rich and poor, of all nations, of both sexes. No human being has the right to be idle . . . Women must . . . be trained to do some work in the world. Women may not take a man as a god: they must not hold their first duty to be towards any human being. Never, since the world began, have women stood face to face with God. Individual women have done so, but not women in general. They are beginning to do it now . . . Young women begin to ask at the age of sixteen or seventeen, “What am I created for! Of what use am I to be in the world?” . . . Among the rich, music, languages, drawing fill up much of life, and stop the questionings and discontent of heart. Insofar as they do this they are pernicious . . . It is better far to hear the voice of the hungry soul loud and crying. It is better to have the bare fact of idleness, than to be busy always doing nothing. . . .

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72 | Part Two We do not mean to say work will take the place of love in life, that is impossible; does it with men? But we ardently desire that women should not make love their profession. Love is not the end of life . . . If we work, love may meet us in life; if not, we have something still beyond all price.

What useful paid work had Barbara Leigh Smith in mind for women? She had no end of suggestions, beginning with medicine – though medicine with a difference. She quoted the pioneer doctor Elizabeth Blackwell whom she had met: ‘I think it most probable that women will modify the practice of medicine; they will, probably, practise in groups, taking different branches’. Then Barbara Leigh Smith recommended the learning of book-keeping, elementary arithmetic and accountancy in order that young women might set up shops together. Finally: Apprentice 10,000 to watchmakers; train 10,000 for teachers for the young; make 10,000 good accountants; put 10,000 more to be nurses under deaconesses trained by Florence Nightingale; put some thousands in the electric telegraph offices over all the country; educate 1,000 lecturers for Mechanics’ Institutions; 1,000 readers to read the best books to the working people; train up 10,000 to manage washingmachines, sewing-machines, etc. Then the distressed needlewomen would vanish; the decayed gentlewomen and broken-down governesses would no longer exist.2

That rousing pamphlet, Women and Work, was greeted with a sneering reception from the anti-feminist, influential Saturday Review.3 Undeterred, Barbara Leigh Smith’s next enterprise was to found a women’s journal. She became the major shareholder in the Englishwoman’s Journal Company in 1858 which backed a new women’s periodical, deliberately un-trivial and serious, edited by Barbara’s oldest friend Bessie Parkes, like her the daughter of a radical MP. Co-workers on the Journal were Matilda Hays, the English translator of George Sand, and Emily Faithfull who would soon found the first women’s printing press -The Victoria Press and the Victoria Magazine. Other women who wrote for the Journal included the minor poets Adelaide Procter and Isa Craig, and the social reformers Mary Carpenter and Louisa Twining. Employment was the periodical’s key topic: concomitant issues were the necessity for women’s education and training, and the commitment to social intervention by women.4 Alas, the Journal did not sell enough copies and had to close down in 1863. However, its successor, The Englishwoman’s Review was founded in 1865 and survived under the control of Jessie Boucherett until 1910. Meanwhile, Barbara Leigh Smith had become Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. She had said of herself in a letter in 1857:

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A ‘Strong-Minded Woman’ – Barbara Smith Bodichon | 73 I am one of the cracked people of the world and I like to herd with . . . queer Americans, democrats, socialists, artists, poor devils or angels; and am never happy in an English genteel family life. I try to do it like other people, but I long always to be off on some wild adventure – go to see the Mormons, or ride off into the interior on horseback alone and leave the world for a month.5

Her husband, Dr. Eugene Bodichon, was, appropriately enough, another of ‘the cracked people of the world’ – in flight from his rigid, Catholic, aristocratic, Breton background. He was a doctor, explorer and anthropologist with revolutionary Saint-Simonian ideas, who had settled in Algeria. Henceforth, Barbara Bodichon would live six months of the year in Algiers with her husband, painting, and six months in London without him, giving herself to projects associated with the women’s cause. Of her Algerian life we know very little, except what can be deduced from her painting.6 Their honeymoon was characteristically unconventional. They went for six months to America where Barbara painted and made contact with Abolitionists and Women’s Rights Movement leaders, including the Quaker Lucretia Mott and one of the first American women doctors, Doctor Harriet Hunt – ‘the very pluckiest creature I ever saw. I loved her.’7 Meanwhile Doctor Bodichon talked religion and politics with like-minded men and washed his own shirts. But it was not only Dr. Bodichon whom his wife had first met in Algiers. By one of the quite fortuitous coincidences of history, she had happened to be in Algiers at the same time as another Englishwoman was staying there, nursing her dying brother. That woman was Emily Davies who immediately became one of Barbara’s most effective converts – and apostles – in the British Women’s Movement. Hitherto Emily Davies had felt isolated in resentful frustration at her lack of education and of connection to the world of work. But from the moment that Barbara talked to her in Algiers, describing the group of women in London then starting The Englishwomen’s Journal and the work already attempted for Married Women’s Property Rights and the great need for women to fight for education and employment, Emily Davies knew that she had found her own life’s work. After the deaths of her brother and her father, she moved to London and assisted in all the projects that were by then radiating out from Langham Place. For Langham Place was not only the headquarters of the editors of The Englishwomen’s Journal. It also had a Ladies’ Reading Room, an Employment Agency, an Emigration Information Office and adult women’s education classes in book-keeping and law-copying, attached. The last-mentioned projects were the offshoots of the Society for the Promotion of the Employment of Women, founded in 1860 by Jessie Boucherett, Maria Rye and Emily Faithfull – and backed, of course, by Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. Eventually the women’s adult classes also

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74 | Part Two included apprentice training in printing, compositing, lithography, engraving, photography and typewriting. All of which helped to widen job opportunities for lower-middle-class women less hampered by considerations of caste than were the ladies of the gentry.8 Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon’s last two spheres of seminal influence focused on Women’s Education and Women’s Right to Vote. Already in her paper presented to the Social Science Congress on ‘Middleclass Schools for Girls’ (1860) she had criticised the abysmal level of education then on offer to middle-class girls from teachers who were themselves demoralized and ignorant. Instead, she advocated a massive raising of day-school standards, a generous endowment policy, the entry of girls to University, Local Entrance Examinations and the Inspection of girls’ schools. Many of these measures were in fact to be brought into effect by the hard work of her devoted friend Emily Davies and, later, by the Girls’ Public Day School Company. And it was also Emily Davies who carried through the next logical step or project – the founding of the first women’s University College in Britain.9 However, there would have been no Girton College, Cambridge without Barbara Bodichon’s initial £1,000 or her generous benefactions thereafter. She would leave all the income from her paintings and her savings of £10,000 to Girton. In a letter to John Stuart Mill’s step-daughter, Helen Taylor, she had written: ‘[Ever] since my own brother went to Cambridge [and she of course could not go] I have always intended to aim at the establishmet of a college where women could have the same education as men if they wished it.’10 After helping to found that College, she supported both austere Emily Davies and the young, often rebellious, pioneering women students under her. One such student, Hertha Marks, a scholarship girl from a poor Polish Jewish family, became her quasi-adoptive daughter. Later, as Hertha Ayrton, she would become a feminist, a highly distinguished scientist and a close friend of Marie Curie, as well as the mother of Barbara Bodichon Ayrton – who would, in her turn, grow up to be a young suffragette and eventually a Labour MP. That Barbara Bodichon’s little namesake should have become an MP in 1945, was an especially fitting detail of women’s history. For it was Barbara Bodichon – of course – who had initiated the struggle for women to have the vote in Britain. It was she who, in 1865, had asked the fifty strong Kensington Society of London feminists to say whether or not they should campaign for suffrage – and, challenged by her, almost all had said ‘Yes’. Then she organized a committee to gather signatures for a petition in· favour of women’s enfranchisement and also to work for the election of John Stuart Mill to Parliament. (She had gained Mill’s agreement to present their petition to Parliament once he was elected.) In 1866 Barbara Bodichon presented a paper to the Social Science Congress in Manchester: ‘Reasons for the Enfranchisement of Women’. A woman called Lydia Becker was in the audience – a botanist, half-German by birth, who was

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A ‘Strong-Minded Woman’ – Barbara Smith Bodichon | 75 so inspired by this first encounter with English feminism – ‘it marked an epoch in my life’ – that she became the National Organizer for the Women’s Suffrage Movement for much of the rest of the 19th century. Mill’s Bill to extend the franchise to women was defeated, of course, in 1867 and British women would not win even partial suffrage for another fifty years. It is clear that Barbara Bodichon had a genius for setting important, necessary changes in the lives of women in motion. She was a great inspirer and instigator and encourager of others. Some commentators have criticised her for leaving so much of the detailed, humdrum struggle to other women to carry on, but none of the women left to do that work at the time complained about her. They seem to have been genuinely glad to have had the life-changing experience of encountering Barbara Bodichon and only too happy to have found, through her, a cause worth serving for the rest of their lives. It is something of an historiographical scandal that the writers of general 19th century British history should have so overlooked her importance. But the moment that women are seen to matter as the subjects of history, then Barbara Bodichon is seen to matter too. Notes 1 Unpublished notes in Leigh Smith Papers, Girton College Library, quoted from Jacquie Matthews, ‘Barbara Bodichon: Integrity in Diversity (1827– 1891)’ in Dale Spender, ed., Feminist Theorists, London, Women’s Press, 1983, p. 92. This is still the best essay on Barbara Bodichon. The most detailed recent biography is by Pamela Hirsch, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Feminist, Artist and Rebel, London, Chatto and Windus, 1998. 2 Candida Lacey, ed. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the Langham Place Group, London, Routledge, 1986, pp. 37–44. 3 Hester Burton, Barbara Bodichon, London, John Murray, 1949, p. 101. 4 Rendall, Jane, ed., Equal or Different, Women’s Politics 1800–1914, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1987, ch. 4. 5 Burton, 1949, p. 92. 6 B.L.S.B. exhibited c. 250 pictures over 30 years with several solo exhibitions, see Frances Gandy, Kate Perry and Peter Sparks, eds., Catalogue of Barbara Bodichon Centenary Exhibition, Girton, Cambridge, 1991. 7 Joseph W. Reed, ed., Barbara Bodichon, an American Diary, 1857–1858, London, Routledge, 1972, entry for 3rd June 1858. 8 Diana Worzala, The Langham Place Circle: The Beginnings of the organized Women’s Movement in England, 1854–1870, D.Phil. Thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1982, ch. 4 and Conclusion. 9 Margaret Forster, Significant Sisters: The Grassroots of Active Feminism 1839–1939, London, Penguin, 1984, ch. 4. 10 Matthews, 1983, p. 111.

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8 Introduction to Jeanie, an ‘Army of One’ Mrs. Nassau Senior (1828–1877), the first woman in Whitehall On January 26, 1875 The Times published a leader regretfully attacking a lady. The lady in question was ‘Mrs. Senior’, the first woman Civil Servant in Britain. Her remit, as Government Inspector of Workhouse Schools, had been to report on the effect of their education on pauper girls – the overlooked Olive Twists. Unfortunately Jeanie Senior had not only threatened the closed shop of the male Civil Service by being a woman, she had also enraged the Old Guard Inspectorate by condemning many aspects of the huge ‘Barrack Schools’ that they themselves had established. She could not be allowed to get away with it. The Times accused her and her deputies of having used ‘dark and irresponsible’ methods and of producing inaccurate, scandalous gossip about the fate of the pauper girls. “Mrs Senior must withdraw her Report” thundered the Chief Poor-Law Inspector, E. C. Tufnell, in The Times’ correspondence columns. She refused. Jeanie Senior’s ground-breaking appointment in Whitehall, her critical Report and her written defence of it, both in The Times and to Parliament, make her as significant a figure in 19th century British women’s history as the first women university students and the first woman doctor. She is the missing link between Josephine Butler, Octavia Hill and Florence Nightingale – who saluted her as ‘a noble Army of one’. The steel in Jeanie Senior had been tempered by long years of frustrated energy and idealism. Growing up during the climacteric of Victorian domestic ideology, her wings had beaten against the cage as she turned this way and that trying to give her life meaning. She did her very best to find meaning in ‘normal’ ways – marriage, motherhood, the needs of her From a biography of the same title, published by Sussex Academic Press, Brighton, Portland, Toronto, 2008.

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Introduction to Jeanie, ‘an Army of One’ | 77 large extended family, respectable philanthropy. And she also sought fulfilment through the less usual routes of passion, music, radical political commitment and religious questioning. But the need in her to address the needs of still more desperate others remained banked up inside her for many years. Her ardent self demanded, in George Eliot’s words, a ‘life beyond self’. And at last, in the 1870s, she found it. First the sick and wounded on the battlefields of the Franco-Prussian War, then the destitute little girls in British Workhouses and finally the exploited ‘maids of all work’, skivvying or selling themselves for a living, would find in her a rescuer. She would also eventually be acknowledged by Dr. Barnardo as the true founder of Fostering and Adoption in England.1 Her Victorian contemporaries were not sure how to regard ‘Mrs Nassau Senior’. Was she one of the fearsome ‘Strong-minded Women’ battalion, or was she an ‘Angel’, altogether too good for this world? In her own lifetime and for over a quarter of a century afterwards, ‘Mrs. Nassau Senior’ was often bedevilled by her reputation as an angel. It did not help that she was tall, with wavy, corn-gold hair and unforgettable blue-grey eyes – and that she sang like an angel: I never look back on her as an ordinary woman who lived in this world. Her beauty of form and character always seemed to me as something not of this world at all . . . It was marvellous the power she had of keeping[her large household] in perfect harmony. . . . She simply threw a glamour over every one. . . . 2 ‘Surely a more beautiful life has scarcely ever been lived’. . . . 3

. . . And so this noble and brave Lady turned From glad life, luxury and thronging friends That hung on her sweet Voice, and only yearned To guide her holy work to Useful ends.4

The crescendo of unremitting hagiography came in 1905: ‘Mrs. Nassau Senior used her power of attraction as a gift from God to enable her to influence and help all whom she met on her way through life.’5 A quasi Christ-like claim was then made for her: ‘One can only say how she attracted every one, of whatever rank or condition, and how when she died it seemed (as was said at the time) as if a hundred people had died and as if the sun were darkened in the heavens.’6 How can one not feel resistant to such a fanfare of unqualified adora-

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78 | Part Two tion? What an impossible ‘Angel in the House’ Mrs. Nassau Senior sounds. Virginia Woolf has said it all: [The Angel in the House] was intensely sympathetic. . . . She was utterly unselfish. . . . She soothed, conciliated, sacrificed herself, took the hash if there was only chicken enough for one, and in short was so constituted that she never had a wish or a mind of her own but preferred to sympathise with the wishes and minds of others. . . .

But, Virginia Woolf goes on to insist, This creature – . . . never had any real existence. . . . She was a dream, a phantom – . . . The Angel in the house was the ideal of womanhood created by the imaginations of men and women . . . to lure them across a very dusty stretch[of the journey].7

It is my task to remove the ‘angelic’ mask placed so reverently (and sincerely) over Jeanie Senior. I try to reveal the much more interesting, complex, vulnerable, frustrated human being underneath who, of course, had plenty of wishes and ideas of her own, whose home-life was not miraculously harmonious and who, far from throwing a glamour over all in contact with her, actually met with ferocious disapproval, sneers, and public vilification, being called a scandal-monger and a liar. One reason for the attacks on her was precisely that she was not an Angel in the House but had left her home for an office in Whitehall. The first British woman ever to do so. A senior Civil Servant in the Treasury, alert to this alarming female precedent, immediately wrote a Memorandum stating that ‘the Government must take a view’. What could have made a beautiful, gifted Victorian woman leave the conventional safety of domestic ‘Angeldom’? Why did being a wife, a mother and a lady philanthropist not seem enough for her? And why, if she really was so important in British history – ‘her premature death’, being, in Florence Nightingale’s words, ‘a national and irreparable loss’, has she been forgotten? For over a century there did not seem to be any surviving materials for more than footnotes about her in the biographies of her contemporaries, including her famous brother Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays. But in December 2000 ‘Mrs. Nassau Senior’ suddenly reemerged in the British press. Sotheby’s auctioned twenty-five letters to her from her friend George Eliot – letters deemed important enough to be placed under an export ban and bought for the nation by the British Library. That scholars’ treasure trove, the Milne Collier Papers, became accessible, and was discovered to hold hundreds of letters to Jeanie Senior from famous contemporaries including G. F. Watts, Jenny Lind, Anny Thackeray, Prosper Mérimée, Cardinal Manning, many leaders of the

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Introduction to Jeanie, ‘an Army of One’ | 79 Women’s Movement and the reformers Lord Shaftesbury and Octavia Hill – as well as from Florence Nightingale herself. Above all, thousands of Jeanie Senior’s own startlingly outspoken, confidential ‘journal letters’ written to her son, 1857–1877, have survived, documenting her struggles both within her family and in the public world outside. This book tells the story of those struggles whenever possible in her own eloquent, hitherto unpublished words. As her friend George Eliot would write in her ‘Prelude’ to Middlemarch: ‘Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond’. This particular cygnet was born Jeanie Hughes. Notes 1 ‘Boarding out is an idea only of the last twenty years or so, and really owes its introduction in England to the indefatigable labours of the late Mrs. Nassau Senior.’ Dr. Barnardo, c.1890, Something Attempted – Something done, a compilation of passages from his notebooks. 2 Anonymous tribute from Jeanie Senior’s former paying guest and singing pupil, Jessie Hazelhurst, quoted in Frederick Douglas How, Noble Women of Our Time (London: Isbister and Co., 1901), p. 160. 3 Excerpt from anonymous tribute quoted by Walter Money, FSA, in his ‘Recollections of the Hughes Family’, in Newbury Annals, 1877. 4 Extract from ‘Jane Elizabeth Senior In Memoriam’, a poem almost certainly written by Tom Taylor for Punch, April 1877. 5 How, Noble Women, p. 160. 6 Ibid., p. 161. 7 Virginia Woolf, ‘Speech of January 21, 1931’ in Mitchell A. Leaska, ed., The Pargiters, The Novel-Essay Portion of The Years (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), pp. xx–xxi.

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9 Introduction to International Woman Suffrage News (Ius Suffragii), 1906–1914 The Importance of Ius Suffragii The International Woman Suffrage News (originally Ius Suffragii) was the monthly periodical of the early twentieth century world-wide women’s movement. It informed literate women working for equal citizenship in one part of the world about the oppression of women and the struggle against that oppression elsewhere, and it also reported the contemporary achievements of women. Overwhelmingly, although not exclusively, white and middle-class, consonant with the condition of organized feminism at the time, it contains source material found nowhere else that is invaluable for researchers in women’s history and feminism in over thirty different countries – Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bohemia, British India, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Galicia, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Portugal, Rumania, Russia, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Uruguay and the USA. And it is also a treasure trove of biographical information on the outstanding individual leaders of the women’s movement in these countries, many of whom are long overdue for resurrection by historians of the twentieth century. Although its print run was only in hundreds – 700 English copies and 200 French copies in 1910, 1,400 copies in English in 19211) Ius Suffragii reached all the leading feminists of its day and they, in turn, disseminated its most salient contents in their own national and regional press. Ius Suffragii, from 1913 under its new editor, Mary Sheepshanks, covAbridged Introduction to facsimile edition of Ius Suffragii, published as Women’s Suffrage News, 1913–1920, ed. Oldfield, Routledge, London, 2004; Vol. I, International Woman Suffrage, July 1913–October 1914, pp. 1–29.

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Introduction to International Woman Suffrage News | 81 ered such controversial and still topical subjects as the age of consent for girls, alcohol control, care of children in need, education of girls, new employment openings for women, trade union rights, divorce law reform, health insurance for mothers, maternity benefits, minimum wages, prostitution, women medical workers, women police, women politicians, as well as women’s right to vote and women’s war experience, all meticulously indexed. Not even World War One could close Ius down – women’s news from otherwise incommunicado belligerent nations would be sent via neutral countries to the editor, who would also manage to bring out special, illustrated, articles on women and the Russian Revolution of 1917 and on women and the German Revolution of 1919. The last person to be surprised that Ius Suffragii is being reissued now, nearly a century later, would have been Mary Sheepshanks herself. Already in October, 1916 she had written of her Ius Index of the previous year – ‘As an international record of Suffrage progress and of the steps that have brought about the extraordinary recognition of women’s value in the work of the State, it is a valuable work of reference, and no Suffrage library should be without it.’

Ius Suffragii’s Start in Life For all its real and lasting importance in early twentieth century women’s history, eventually covering almost the whole world, Ius Suffragii could hardly have had more modest beginnings. Its first number, headed ‘International Woman Suffrage Alliance Bulletin or Monthly Correspondence 15 September 1906’, consisted simply of sixteen pages of type-written, smudgily carbon-copied communication between the national suffrage presidents. The International Alliance of Woman Suffrage Campaigns, (referred to henceforth as the IWSA), had been founded in Berlin in 1904. Eight countries – Australia, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the United States formed the initial Alliance. . . . Martina Kramers of the Netherlands, who succeeded Johanna Naber on the executive in 1904, became the sole editor of Ius Suffragii from September 1906–July 1913.2

Ius Suffragii, October 1906–July 1913 On 15 October 1906 the first printed number (No. 2) of the IWSA Bulletin came out. It was to be re-titled Ius Suffragii, on its 5th number, January 1907, and would be published later also in a French edition from Geneva until April 1920. Its monthly format was to remain the same for the next seven years. No illustrations, but on its front page the medallion of the IWSA, flanked by quotations from leading thinkers on the emancipation of women, e.g. George Eliot’s ‘It never will rain roses; when we

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82 | Part Two want more roses, we must plant more trees’, and John Stuart Mill’s ‘Men, as well as women, do not need political rights in order that they may govern, but in order that they may not be misgoverned.’ The paper consisted simply of a country by country report on progress towards achieving woman suffrage. Ius Suffragii, 1906–1913, is held in the Woman’s Library Archive, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK and, because of its rarity, it is necessary to give an overview here of its most important reportage.

Great Britain Given the proliferation of suffrage societies in Britain and the differences between them, there was soon not just one report from the British campaign but three or more in each number. It is clear from Ius’ international contextualization of the British women’s movement that the British women were regarded as world leaders in feminist activism: ‘The British suffrage pioneers are a model to all who suffer from tyranny and oppression’(Anna Kalmanovitch, Petersburg, November 1910). The militant suffragettes, of course, were widely regarded as the leaders of the leaders – although in some countries their extremism was caricatured and only served the forces of reaction. The constitutional, non-violent National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) reported their Sisyphusian effort of organizing huge public rallies and processions, lobbying Parliament, trying to influence every by-election and General Election and their shifting political allegiance from Liberal to Labour. The Pankhurstled Suffragettes’ Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) sent in dramatic reports of their members in prison enduring ‘23 hours’ solitary confinement, one hour’s silent shuffle round a yard, . . . eating unpalatable food with a wooden spoon out of unsavoury tins’ (February 1908), even before their hunger strikes and forced-feeding. And the Women’s Freedom League (WFL) described the violence and abuse meted out to their leader Mrs. Despard and her arrest for picketing 10 Downing St. Despite brutal police treatment and the years of political frustration suffered by British suffrage campaigners, the unstoppable momentum of their many-voiced, highly organized mass movement – and its accompanying exhilaration – were clearly an inspiration to the pre-war international readership of Ius.

The United States Each state within the United States had to be won over to women’s suffrage singly and in every case the women were opposed by ‘the three strongest powers in the country – ‘the ‘trusts’, the liquor interests and the

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Introduction to International Woman Suffrage News | 83 political ‘machines’’ (March 1910). The women’s cause was as embattled as was that of exploited, non-unionized labour. Nevertheless, ‘Hurrah for Washington!’ (November 1910) ‘Hurrah for California!’ (October 1911), ‘Hurrah for Arizona, Kansas, Michigan and Oregon!’ (December 1912) and ‘Hurrah for Alaska!’ (May 1913).

Canada The woman suffrage movement in Canada was notable for not being limited to the suffrage, which was seen merely a means, not an end: ‘Are you interested in temperance, in city playgrounds, in suppressing the white slave traffic, in preventing child labour, in pure water, clean streets or anything else that makes for social betterment? Then join a suffrage organization’ (October 1909). The International Council of Women then meeting in Toronto backed ‘Peace and arbitration, social purity, removing legal disabilities of women and women’s suffrage . . . if the last reform were established the others would follow as a natural sequence’ (October 1909) [emphasis in the original].

New Zealand and Australia New Zealand had been the first nation state to enfranchise women – in September 1893; in June 1908 Ius reported on the New Zealand leader Kate Sheppard’s summary of reasons favourable to women’s suffrage established by NZ experience over the past fifteen years. In Australia, in January, 1910, Vida Goldstein, was nominated for the Senate at the next Parliamentary election. She stood for equal marriage and divorce laws, and against the development of the military spirit in the boys of Australia where ‘the new Defence Bill provides for military training by means of the cadet movement from 12 years of age’.

Finland and Scandinavia Finland was the first country ever to elect a woman MP, Fru Annie Furuhjelm, in 1907. Perhaps because Finland was therefore a beacon for woman suffragists,3 there was particular outrage in Ius’s pages in 1910– 11 over the threat from Tsarist Russia to annex part of Finland. In June 1911 the International IWSA Congress was held in Stockhom, accompanied by great suffrage processions and addressed by the Swedish Nobel laureate for literature, Selma Lagerlöf. In October pro-suffrage parties won the election in Sweden. In Norway in July 1907, single women over 25 in the towns who paid

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84 | Part Two taxes had won the vote, but universal adult suffrage was still not achieved by 1913. Similarly in Iceland, women had had the municipal vote since 1907 and had even elected four women to the Reykjavik town council in 1908, but, as in Denmark and Norway, adult parliamentary suffrage had still not been won by 1913.

Netherlamds Dutch feminists, led by the pioneer doctor and birth control campaigner Dr. Aletta Jacobs, were consistently frustrated in this pre-War period. They struggled not only for the vote but also for women’s right to participate in the Dutch Reformed Church. In September 1909 the Dutch Synod rejected women’s ordination by a margin of one vote and in September 1910 they refused, also by one vote, to allow women to vote in Church matters. In July 1909 Aletta Jacobs had already reported ‘bad news – the election brought in Clerical parties therefore there is no hope [for women’s suffrage] for another four years’. At the end of that period the Government proposed to extend the suffrage to all male householders of independent means – “we ignore the women”. Outraged, the National Woman Suffrage Association called on ‘Dutch women of all opinions and classes to join in a protest against this arbitrary and iniquitous action of the Government that stamps the whole female sex with inferiority’ (May 1913).

Germany Prussia-dominated Germany was deeply prejudiced against the emancipation of women. In February, 1908 the Supreme Court of Prussia refused women the right even to municipal suffrage. In March 1910 there were indignation meetings of women in Berlin and Frankfurt protesting against the limitation of Free Assembly and the rejection of electoral reform. After petitioning the Reichstag for parliamentary suffrage for women on the same terms as that for men, in autumn 1912, the German middle-class suffragists had to be relieved that parliament did not reject it outright (April 1913). Meanwhile socialist women, led by Clara Zetkin, were agitating for universal adult suffrage with, if possible, even less success.

France France had a bewildering array of small women’s groups – nine in June 1907 – including Le Suffrage des Femmes and women teachers’ unions.

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Introduction to International Woman Suffrage News | 85 In November 1909 it was reported that French women suffragists were divided on party political lines and they certainly appeared to work almost exclusively via sympathetic male Parliamentarians. There would also seem to have been a split between constitutional non-militant suffragists and the more radical Congrès Permanente du Féminisme Internationale (e.g. April 1910).

The Austrian Empire, including Bohemia, Hungary, and Serbia The last years of the Austrian Empire were marked by extreme reaction rooted in political nervousness, corruption and economic distress (Ius, May 1912). Already in July 1907, it was reported from Vienna that it was judged illegal to form a women’s suffrage association – merely to aim at political activity was too ‘political’. In November 1907 the food shortages and ever-rising prices there strengthened the women’s cause, especially the socialist women led by Adelheid Popp. In Hungary in October 1908 the supposedly radical Social Democrats still refused even to mention women in their platform. From Prague, young Franciska Plamenkova – who would die in World War Two, executed by the Nazis – reported on behalf of Czech women feminists; and there were already fierce arguments about the use of Czech or German as the ‘official’ language at a women’s conference (April 1912). More ominously still, Serbia, which sent in its first women’s report from Ellen Losanitch in August 1909, followed this up the next month with: ‘The woman question has to be dropped at present because of more pressing national questions’. (Voteless) women volunteers were being accepted into the Serbian army. By November, 1912 Rozika Schwimmer tried to alert the international women’s movement to ‘the horrors of the Balkan War’ and in January 1913 she was hoping Hungary would not be dragged in. In May 1913 Serbia could not send in a report because all the women leaders had ‘gone to volunteer as nurses all over the conquered regions.’

Italy The pre-war Italian women’s movement would seem to have consisted of outstanding women leaders but no mass following in a country dominated by the Roman Catholic Church. Professor Teresa Labiola co-edited the resurrected review La Voce della Donna (December 1907); in April 1909 Teresa Moglia reported from Turin; in September, 1909 there was a report from Prof. Eminia Montini, in July 1910 the Italian novelist Grazia Deledda was invoked and in February 1911 a National Committee for Women’s Rights was formed consisting of Eva de Vicentis, Maria Gibello,

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86 | Part Two Maria Grassi, Elisa Lollina and Bice Sacchi. In May 1913 they sent a deputation to the Government petitioning for women’s enfranchisement without success.

First reports from Turkey, Argentina, Egypt, British India, Portugal and China It is interesting to note at what point a hitherto unmentioned country first reports to Ius Suffragii about its women’s status and struggle for political rights. Turkey, for example first sent a message – in French – in September 1908. Argentina in February 1909. From Egypt it was reported in September 1909, via the British Votes for Women, that the first Egyptian woman, the wife of a Bedouin Sheikh, had publicly addressed two hundred ladies from the most distinguished harems of the capital, demanding monogamy, reform of the divorce law, the higher education of girls and legal equality of the sexes. In October 1910 Ius published the first message from the women of British India. In September–October 1911 there came the first reports from Portugal and in May 1912 the report of a Petition for Women’s Rights in Nanking, China.

Russia By far the most stirring and significant reportage from a single country, in my view, was that sent in by Zineide Mironovitch from Tsarist Russia after the reaction following the defeated revolution of 1905. Presumably undetected by the Tsarist censor, year by year she sent out her passionate, scathing indictments of the regime in eloquent English: The meetings of the Russian Union for Women’s Rights are almost everywhere forbidden and persecuted. . . . Lectures on the women’s movement are also forbidden in many towns. [I] was forbidden to lecture on the women’s movement in England by the Head of Police as it might have a bad (!) influence on local women workers (August 1907). . . . The Georgian Union for Women’s Rights was founded but forbidden to propagandize among peasant women. Martial law was imposed, meetings of any kind forbidden, . . . the horrors committed by the Cossacks included summary executions and hundreds of women and children violated and murdered (October 1907). It is not permitted to distribute any pamphlet . . . The worst of all is that we cannot appeal to the law – all laws having been put aside in the towns which at present are under the military authorities (April 1908). Women are forbidden to study at universities (December 1908). Lectures on the women’s movement [still] arbitrarily forbidden, especially in the Crimea (February 1910). Why is it that even

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Introduction to International Woman Suffrage News | 87 the most liberal men expect women to put off all their claims till the moment comes (which will hardly ever come) when the claims presented by men are all satisfied? . . . The English Suffragettes are misunderstood as ‘selfish anti-Liberals’ in Russia’ (March, 1910). ‘Reaction reigns more than ever, but interest in the women’s question is growing. . . . The darkness cannot last forever’ (June, 1910). But all female university students are locked out by Government Order (September, 1911). Women try to alleviate ‘a terrible year of famine in many provinces’ (November, 1911).

Once again the benefit of hindsight serves to depress, especially when Anna Kalmanovitch reports from St. Petersburg in February, 1910 that ‘the Socialists oppose us without taking the pains of trying to be informed of the aims of our movement. . . . [and] even the Progressive press mocks English suffrage demonstrators as ‘all ugly . . . hysterical old maids’ (December 1910). Clearly ‘bourgeois’ women’s demands for civil rights would get no better hearing from the new church of Leninist Marxism than they did from the old régime (August 1911, February 1912, January 1913). Zineide Mironovitch herself died in Moscow 26 August 1913. Her obituary in Ius, 1 October 1913 praised her not only as a pioneer Russian feminist but also as a historian of the French Revolution and as a democratic political activist in the brief period when political activity was allowed. In the December 1913 number of Ius there is reference to the Memorial evening held in her honour.



The IWSA President’s Fact-finding World Tour (December 1911–October 1912) Carrie Chapman Catt’s reports on women’s status world-wide constitute the other most fascinating series of articles in the early issues of Ius.4 From South Africa she not only noted the continuing ‘racial antagonism’ between Briton and Boer but also spelt out her disquiet about the whites’ exploitative condescension to the blacks. ‘The heavy work is done by the natives . . . the children of the human race’ South Africans call them, but they are doing the work of men’ (December 1911). It was all too significant that in November 1908 white women South African suffragists had expressed indignation and fear of the Cape Coloured vote as opposed to ‘the intelligent white vote’ and to ‘the insult offered by white men to the women of their own race’ in not distinguishing them from the ‘child peoples’ (June 1909). Carrie Chapman Catt went on to report from the Holy Land and Egypt (May 1912), India and Burma (June 1912), Java, (September 1912) and China (October 1912). All these articles deserve reprinting as a monograph.5 The historic importance of Mrs. Catt’s meet-

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88 | Part Two ings with feminist leaders from the Middle East and Asia was that delegates from Egypt, India, Burma, China, Japan and the Philippines were then all invited to attend the International Congress of the IWSA in Budapest in July 1913: ‘For the first time in the woman movement it is expected that Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, Mohammedan, Jewish and Christian women will sit together in a Congress, uniting their voice in a common plea for the liberation of their sex from [religious and political] discrimination’ (January 1913). It was in that same issue that Mary Sheepshanks was first mentioned as the new Honorary Secretary of the International Committee and she would become the new editor of Ius.

Conclusion: Ius Suffragii, October 1906–July 1913 Seen from the internationalist perspective of Ius, the pre-war struggle for women’s suffrage emerges as a patchwork of triumph and of much more frequent frustration. It was a struggle led by extraordinarily energetic and articulate women who were all convinced of their eventual, even imminent victory. ‘Darkness cannot last forever.’ These first issues provide many leads for further collective and individual biographical research into twentieth century women’s history, especially for all those researchers from outside Britain eager to discover who were their own counties’ ground-breaking woman leaders in the eyes of the international community of feminists then.



The New Editor Mary Sheepshanks was the 41year-old atheist daughter of an evangelical Bishop. 6 She had read French, German, Politics and Economics at Newnham College, Cambridge, 1891–5 and had then become a pioneer social worker in the East End of London after training at the Southwark Settlement. In October 1897 she was appointed Vice-Principal – but de facto Principal – of London’s Morley (Evening ) College for Working Men and Women, where, for the next fifteen years, she would combine her commitment to Further Education with support for women’s suffrage. In 1908 Mary Sheepshanks had attended the IWSA Congress in Holland and by 1913 she was known to be such a well-informed supporter of the cause – as well as a good linguist – that she was invited to undertake an IWSA suffrage lecture tour of Europe, beginning in Brussels and ending in Budapest. Her detailed letters to Bertrand Russell – whom she had known since Cambridge – reporting on how the prewar international women’s movement had to engage with rival

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Introduction to International Woman Suffrage News | 89 nationalisms, militarism, authoritarianism, anti-Semitism and the secret police, are an important, little-known historical source. It was at the June 1913 IWSA Congress in Budapest that Mary Sheepshanks was offered and accepted the post of IWSA Secretary, both running its London HQ and editing Ius. (The former editor, Martina Kramers, had been made to resign, ostensibly for health reasons, but really because her well-known ‘free love’ private life with a married male socialist had become an embarrassment to her public role in the international women’s movement.7) Politically, Mary Sheepshanks was a democratic socialist and pacifist as well as a feminist. Personally, her defensiveness could make her combative and ‘touchy’; throughout her life her colleagues would weigh her ‘difficultness’ against her exceptional abilities. The moment that Mary Sheepshanks took on Ius, she made important changes, helped by increased funding. She introduced the addition of photographs, usually women’s individual or group portraits; she introduced a contents listing at the beginning of each number and, on occasion, a signed editorial. More importantly, she greatly enlarged the political and socio-economic scope of what was entailed in the struggle for woman’s suffrage and this ‘social feminism’8 is made clear in her introduction of a meticulous annual Index to the contents of Ius, referring to places, names and subjects. It is these Indexes that enable researchers a century later to track developments on such topics as child care, girls’ education, female employment, the ordination of women, cruelty to animals, divorce laws, the State ‘regulation’ of prostitution and women’s pay – as well as political citizenship – in countries as diverse as Cuba and China, Iceland and Hungary. Some idea of the formidable energy and method that Mary Sheepshanks brought to her editorship as she collected, analysed and summarised all relevant materials on the international women’s movement, can be seen from her earliest Editorial Notes: All presidents [i.e. of national suffrage societies] and correspondents are urged to send all important news to the International Headquarters at once. The cost of telegraphing, when necessary, will be refunded . . . Inquiries [re worldwide suffrage events] are made at our Headquarters, and it is important that we should be able to answer them with accuracy and authority, and, above all, that we should have good up-to-date news in our monthly paper. Reports should, when possible, be sent in by the 20th of each month, though they can be received up to the 25th. If news is unavoidably delayed beyond the 25th, correspondents are requested to let the Editor know that they will be sending a report; space will then be reserved for it (1 October 1913). . . . Translators are needed for papers from Bohemia, Poland, Iceland, Norway, and Denmark . . . Residents in London, with a knowledge of

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90 | Part Two these languages, are invited to communicate with Miss Sheepshanks (1 November 1913).

Before the outbreak of World War One, Mary Sheepshanks foregrounded her socialist feminism rather than her pacifism. Admittedly, in September 1913 her editorial note had declared that “La guerre contre la guerre” is one of the great battle cries that stir the hearts of women’ and she had printed a report from the Hungarian pacifist feminist, Roszika Schwimmer, on IWSA representation at the Hague International Peace Congress, August 1913. For the rest, however, she focussed on the advancement of women, country by country, including not merely their struggle for political rights but also for improved economic status and access to employment. In October and November 1913 she had published the replies from twenty countries on women’s situation vis-à-vis entry into the legal profession; in November 1913 she had published the answers from thirteen states concerning the right of women to study and practise medicine. In February 1914 she printed the replies from Europe and the United States on women’s eligibility to practise dentistry. In April 1914 she had published the responses to the questionnaire on women’s employment as typesetters from Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Galicia, Germany, Great Britain (very different in England and in Scotland), Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Romania, South Africa and Sweden. In that same issue, 1 April 1914, she had written a spirited editorial on ‘La carrière ouverte aux talents! – Women’s Economic Struggle and the Vote’ where she had asserted the right of a Suffrage paper to give expression to women’s dissatisfaction at the arbitrary limitations and difficulties they have to struggle against, to remove which is one of the objects of the Suffrage movement. ‘Their struggle for the right to live is the most serious that women have to face. In order to carry it on fairly the vote is essential.’ Two months earlier, in January 1914, Mary Sheepshanks had targeted the specious reasons that male lawyers gave for keeping their profession closed to women, i.e., male judges and barristers would be influenced by women lawyers’ physical attractions. ‘It is the old Mohammedan principle, women must be secluded, lest men fall into temptation.’ Mary Sheepshanks had also included several international reports on child labour and the attempt to regulate or even abolish it. In February 1914 she had summed up the shocking findings from England’s occupational census: [There] are in England and Wales 146,417 little children from 10 to 14 years engaged in wage earning and of these 31,823 are under 13. Little girls from 10 to 13, who ought to be at school, are in service, or working in metal trades, chemicals, paper-bag making and no fewer than 8,833 in textile factories.

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Introduction to International Woman Suffrage News | 91 In January and February 1914 she had published long articles on the exploitation of the woman factory worker in Russia and in June and July 1914 she had published outspoken reports on the intervention of a thousand women voters in Colorado when they succesfully demonstrated against the State militia’s killing of striking miners and their families, and who had then demanded immediate federal intervention to stop the bloodshed in the coalfields. In addition to this socio-economic reportage, Ius Suffragii had included positive accounts of the dramatic fall in infant and maternal mortality in those countries, especially Australasia, where women had already won the vote. Answering her own rhetorical headline ‘What Women Want’ Mary Sheepshanks declared in July 1914: ‘Women are above all concerned with the health and happiness of human beings’ and for evidence gave a rousing account of the recent triumphant Women’s Co-operative Guild Annual Congress in Birmingham which had demanded State provision of maternity care, divorce law reform and the abolition of half-time child labour in Britain. Ius Suffragii had continued, of course, to carry monthly reports on the progress or non-progress of the suffrage struggle itself, country by country – including reports from both the nonviolent and the militant campaigners in Britain. What it had not done was monitor the escalating ethnic tensions and international power struggle in contemporary Europe. But Ius was not alone in that blindness. Not even Margaret Moscheles’ obituary on Bertha von Suttner, in Ius, July 1914, had noticed that, for all her subject’s great work for peace, world peace was about to come to an end. Only the most alert of its foreign observers, Rozika Schwimmer, had written an emotional article for Ius, published 1 August 1914, which must have been received by 25 July, headed ‘The Bankruptcy of the Man-made World – War’: ‘A whole world is now blazing with the flames of the wildest human hate.’ How could a pacifist internationalist like Mary Sheepshanks, not have noticed the approaching cataclysm? Quite simply she had been able to think of nothing but organizing the arrangements for the IWSA’s International Board of Officers’ meeting in London, 7–14 July, including their visit to the House of Commons and later hospitality to the women’s leaders from France, Germany, Hungary, the United States, Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland, Netherlands, Austria, and Sweden. She had focussed so absorbedly on the successful internationalism of the women’s movement that she had not seen just how fragile such internationalism had suddenly become in the world of men.

Mary Sheepshanks’ Controversial Editorial Policy in War-time If the 1 August 1914 number of Ius Suffragii had contained no hint of

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92 | Part Two imminent world war, the 1 September issue contained nothing but shocked, protesting reactions to the war. It published on its front page Millicent Fawcett’s message to the IWSA: ‘We women who have worked together for a great cause have hopes and ideals in common . . . We have to show that what unites us is stronger than what separates us.’ Had women been equal political citizens in Europe, she believed that ‘international disputes [would have been] referred to law and reason, and not to the clumsy and blundering tribunal of brute force’. Next to this Mary Sheepshanks published ‘The International Manifesto of Women’ drawn up in her own office, delivered to the Foreign Office and the Foreign Embassies in London on 31 July on behalf of the world’s organized women’s movement and signed by Mrs. Fawcett for the IWSA: We, the women of the world, view with apprehension and dismay the present situation in Europe, which threatens to involve one continent, if not the whole world, in the disasters and horrors of war. . . . Whatever its result the conflict will leave mankind the poorer, will set back civilisation, and will be a powerful check to the gradual amelioration in the condition of the masses of the people . . . We . . . appeal to you to leave untried no method of conciliation or arbitration for arranging international differences which may help us to avert deluging half the civilised world in blood.

That prophetic appeal of course went unheeded. Mary Sheepshanks had to announce the suspension of the normal work of the IWSA on the outbreak of the war and the conversion of her London office into a relief centre for women of all nationalities now stranded in Britain without money or work. Some were dismissed foreign governesses or office workers; others the penniless English born wives of Germans now called up to fight for Germany. [Naturally the majority] of those in difficulties are German and Austrian, applications for help have also come from Poles, Russians, Swiss, Danes and Norwegians. The flood of homeless Belgian [refugees] is so great that . . . a special fund has been raised to help them. . . . national policy makes or mars women’s lives as well as men’s.

Mary Sheepshanks’ own herculean relief efforts in aiding Belgian refugees from Antwerp, were reported in Ius on November and December 1914, January 1915, and March 1915. It was her conviction that international politics directly affected the lives of women, that lay behind Mary Sheepshanks’ policy to make the phenomenon of war in general an issue for discussion in Ius Suffragii for example in the articles by C.K. Ogden, Norman Angell and Romain

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Introduction to International Woman Suffrage News | 93 Rolland in 1915. As for her own editorial stance regarding this particular war, she had already made her own neutrality startlingly plain on 1 October 1914: The editorial office being in a belligerent country, all news from other countries is subject to censorship . . . It appears almost inevitable . . . that news from England, America and neutral countries should predominate, and though, of course, the policy and sympathy of the paper is and must be entirely international and untainted by national or partisan bias, it will be difficult to maintain its all-round character. We appeal earnestly to readers in neutral countries to furnish news and articles, especially news of women’s doings in Germany and Austria, and if the paper reaches our German and Austrian subscribers, we appeal to them not to attribute the dearth of news from their countries to anything but its true cause, the impossibility of obtaining news. (My emphasis

In the event, Mary Sheepshanks did successfully organize the transmission of women’s news between Britain and ‘enemy’ countries, as well as regular copies of Ius Suffragii itself, via neutral Scandinavia, Netherlands and Switzerland, for the duration. The Lyceum Club duly blackballed her for ‘treason’ .As for her stance on the rights and wrongs of World War One, Mary Sheepshanks concentrated on the impossibility of legalized murder ever righting any wrong. In other words she was a pacifist opponent of the war. On 1 November 1914 she published her signed editorial ‘Patriotism or Internationalism’ – a trenchant and prescient declaration which stressed the irony of the whole-sale self-immolation. . . . Each nation is convinced that it is fighting in self-defence, and each in self-defence hastens to selfdestruction. . . . In all this orgy of blood, what is left of the internationalism which met in congresses, socialist, feminist, pacifist, and boasted of the coming era of peace and amity? The men are fighting; . . . [the women are] binding up the wounds that men have made. . . . The world is relapsing into a worse, because a more scientific, barbarism than that from which it sprang. Women must not only use their hands to bind up, they must use their brains to understand the causes of the European frenzy, and their lives must be devoted to putting a stop for ever to such wickedness. . . . Armaments must be drastically reduced and abolished, and their place taken by an international police force. Instead of two great Alliances pitted against each other, we must have a true Concert of Europe. Peace must be on generous, un-vindictive lines, satisfying legitimate national needs, and leaving no cause for resentment such as to lead to another war. Only so can it be permanent. (My emphasis)

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94 | Part Two Throughout World War One Mary Sheepshanks consistently published as much news as possible from the two enemy sides as would present the human face of each to her women readers of whatever nationality. But Mary Sheepshanks’ intensifying problem as editor of the voice of the IWSA soon became clear – the majority of her British fellow-suffragists, including her leader Mrs. Fawcett, all, as she believed, pacifist internationalists like herself, were now declaring themselves ‘patriots’ and were as shocked by her pacifism as she was by their patriotism. For her part, Mary Sheepshanks was a feminist because she was a humanist; she was a ‘social feminist’, wanting to see everyone, including every woman, able to think, speak and act freely in fulfilment of their own best selves, in order to contribute fully to the life of the world. One enemy of such human selfrealization for both sexes was economic oppression; another was war. Hence, for Mary Sheepshanks and her fellow pacifists, the absolute priority was to end World War One as soon as possible and in such a way as to prevent there being a Second. But Mrs. Fawcett and her followers in the NUWSS had quickly come round to the belief that the absolute priority was Allied victory, followed by the victory of woman suffrage in a Britain whose women had supported the national war effort: ‘Women, your country needs you.’ The conflict between the two women first surfaced on 1 January 1915 when Mrs. Fawcett put it on record in Ius that an international meeting of women [such as that mooted by Rozika Schwimmer and Dr. Aletta Jacobs] while the war is still raging, is highly undesirable. . . . We should run the risk of outbursts of uncontrollable Nationalism, as opposed to Internationalism, and we might very probably see something like the scandal which has sometimes marred Peace Congresses, where the delegates . . . have . . . come to blows with their hands and umbrellas.

Nevertheless, on 1 March 1915 Mary Sheepshanks went ahead with the publication in Ius of Dr. Jacobs’ famous ‘Call to the Women of All Nations’ to hold an International Congress of Women at the Hague at the end of April, together with its draft programme. British feminists throughout Britain, Europe and the United States were bitterly split over this projected Congress. None of the national suffrage societies of the belligerent countries affiliated to the IWSA sent delegates but outstanding personalities from the woman’s movement of every country did support the Congress; for example Jane Addams, Emily Balch, Lida Gustava Heymann, Anita Augspurg, Rozika Schwimmer, Maude Royden, and Charlotte Despard. Mary Sheepshanks was on the preparatory Congress Executive and she was also one of those who waited at Tilbury in vain when Winston Churchill at the Admiralty ‘closed’ the North Sea to British shipping at the vital time for British women to sail to Rotterdam. The

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Introduction to International Woman Suffrage News | 95 Women’s International League, later the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, founded at that Hague Congress, would, in fact, become the radical alternative to the IWSA in the decades to come. Mary Sheepshanks reported in the June 1915 Ius the Hague Congress Resolutions, some of the speeches and debates, ‘A German View of the Congress’ by Lida Gustava Heymann, and the important decision to send women delegates to every foreign ministry of both the belligerent and the neutral nations, asking the former to declare their war aims and the latter to set up a continuous conference for conciliation. But it was also in June that Ius had had to publish the fact that both the mainstream French Women’s Movement and their counterparts in Germany, just like Mrs Fawcett and her British NUWSS supporters, had actually boycotted the Congress. On 1 August 1915 Ius then had to report the unsatisfactory findings of the envoys Emily Balch and Chrystal Macmillan to the Scandinavian countries and Russia. In fact all the women delegates from the Hague Congress were to be more or less politely waved aside by the different Foreign Ministers – although the Hague Congress Resolutions were to influence Woodrow Wilson’s subsequent ‘Fourteen Points’. Meanwhile the Great Powers’ armies continued on their doomed march to the battles of the Somme, Verdun, Ypres and Paschendaele. On 1 October 1915, Ius Suffragii itself, and in particular Mary Sheepshanks’ editorial policy, became the targets of bitter criticism within its correspondence columns. The French Suffrage President, Mme. de Witt-Schlumberger, and her whole Executive on the French Women’s Suffrage Union wrote in protest: We wish to ask you that Ius Suffragii, since it is the official organ of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, and not just a feminist jourrnal, should be and remain a purely Suffragist organ, instead of becoming more and more a pacifist organ . . . (Emphases in the original)

The fundamental issue at stake was: ‘What is meant by being a Suffragist?’ Was the vote an end in itself, symbolizing sex equality within a society, or was it only a means to socio/political ends? On November 1 1915, Mrs. Fawcett wrote in support of the French view: It is . . . with increasing apprehension that we observe that recently the international organ, Ius Suffragii, has more and more identified itself with the advocacy of another political object – the inauguration of an active pacifist campaign. The October number, for example, contains no fewer than five articles, covering eleven closely printed pages, all dealing with and advocating pacifism . . . . The IWSA is a Suffrage Society, and its organ ought to confine itself to Suffrage.

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96 | Part Two On 1 November 1915 Mary Sheepshanks published strong criticisms of her editorial policy from both the NUWSS and from the Women’s Freedom League for not concentrating exclusively on suffrage; but she also spelt out her defence. She pointed out that Ius was the organ of twenty-six countries, including several now at war with one another where suffrage activity had been suspended for the duration of the war. Therefore there had been almost no suffrage news from Europe to report. Instead, suffragists had sent her in reports of their war work, their relief work and their work for international reconstruction. As an international organ, Ius could not print any national statements concerning the war but only suffragists’ international actions in laying the foundations for future peace. She ended by pointing out that Ius had published writers of world -wide reputation including Romain Rolland and Ellen Key, thereby greatly increasing the general interest in the paper. On 1 December 1915, the Irish women’s trade union leader and founder of the Irish Women’s Suffrage Federation, Louie Bennett backed Mary Sheepshanks: I should like, on behalf of a group of women in Ireland, to be allowed to express the great regret we feel that there is danger of a change in the policy and tone of Ius Suffragii. Since the war began your paper has been . . . an inspiration and a consolation, . . . It seems to us that the attempt to restrain Ius Suffragii from publishing articles which strengthen the international element of our movement, or which . . . prepare for international reconstruction on a sounder basis in the future, is thoroughly reactionary.

On 1 February 1916 Mrs. Fawcett replied to this and other defences of Mary’s stance: Nothing . . . to my mind can be clearer than that the Alliance and its organ, existing as they do for the sole purpose of promoting the cause of the enfranchisement of women, must be un-sectarian and non-party, and must consequently avoid identifying themselves with any political propaganda on which Suffragists are divided. . . . On October 9, 1915, . . . the following resolution was passed unanimously by Headquarters Committee: That the IWSA and its organ, Ius Suffragii, having been formed to promote the enfranchisement of women, and for no other object, Headquarters Committee is of opinion that during the war other controversial political objects, such as pacifism, on which Suffragists are divided in opinion, should not be advocated in the paper.

Mary Sheepshanks, however, was not one to wait to be enfranchised; she had already enfranchised herself as a citizen of the world and as such

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Introduction to International Woman Suffrage News | 97 she had opened Ius Suffragii’s pages to internationalist abhorrence of the World War and to discussion of how it might be brought to the swiftest possible end by a negotiated, just, Peace Treaty. She had also, of course, played fair by publishing many declarations of national loyalty by nonpacifist women suffrage leaders from all the belligerent countries. She was supported in her editorial policy by the pioneer woman law graduate, Chrystal Macmillan, in Ius, 1 March 1916: [There] is no question, more especially no political question, with which Woman Suffrage is not concerned. At the present moment the political question which holds the stage to the exclusion of all others is that of international relations. As a living political organization, therefore, it is the duty of the Alliance and of its organ . . . to bring Woman Suffrage in relation with this international political question on which the eyes of the world are fixed . . . A large body of Woman Suffragists consider that Woman Suffrage and peace are based on the principle that the world should be governed by right rather than might.

In other words, Woman Suffrage was inseparable from a woman’s movement that aimed to make the world a better place, more just and less violent. As we have seen, there had already begun to be an IWSA tradition before World War One that not only suffrage but many other vital socio-political issues were its concern including prostitution, peace, equal pay and the right to employment. Mary Sheepshanks had her own last ‘say out’ on this fundamental issue of contention in her editorial 1 June, 1916, ‘Is Internationalism Dead?’ She defined internationalism as: the feeling that humanity is a stronger bond than mere racial or political boundaries . . . and that co-operation should be [our] object and motive, not destruction. What is the alternative to this gospel of peaceful development, mutual help and fruitful intercourse? . . . [Race] hatred and national jealousy, leading to tariffs, militarism, armaments [and] mutual butchery . . .

She concluded by contrasting the barbarism of war with women’s nonviolent, even greater struggle against the barbarism of sex oppression: Un-enfranchised, unequal before the law, suffering from innumerable disabilities and injustices, [women] will preserve the bond of their common sisterhood. The ideal which unites them is a greater one than any for which men have fought; it is no less than the spiritual freedom of half the human race. The immemorial, the world wide wrongs of women transcend those that have ever inspired warriors or poets; no mere national wrongs can touch them in duration or extent.9

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98 | Part Two

Conclusion Mary Sheepshanks had hoped to make Ius Suffragii ‘a perfect expression of the International Women’s Movement’.10 Perfection is a tall order and opinion would be sharply divided within the IWSA as to whether or not Mary Sheepshanks had indeed expressed the movement as members wished during her editorship in World War One. But the trajectory of that movement itself was far from perfect. By 1920, some of the suffragists’ high hopes in 1913 of a better world through woman suffrage had already been dashed. Russian women, theoretically enfranchised, now found themselves at the receiving end of a dictatorship instead of a benighted autocracy. German women could vote but had a struggle to eat. Moreover World War One itself had ‘permanently disrupted the . . . unified, closeknit, active sisterhood [of the IWSA]. Aside from suffrage, peace had come into its own as a concrete feminist issue.’11 Mary Sheepshanks herself would discover during World War One that she “she was a pacifist first and a feminist second.”12 But far from all feminists were pacifists then. And the bitter controversy over Mary Sheepshanks’ neutral but anti-war editorial stance in Ius in 1915–16 mirrored the contemporaneous personal and political rupture between the pacifist feminists and the patriots within the British NUWSS as well as within the other national suffrage movements of the belligerent Powers. Mrs Fawcett would comment later: ‘The painful events of the spring of 1915 . . . are really the only part of my 50 years’ work for Women’s Suffrage which I wish to forget . . . Perhaps the best thing I can do is to try to remember to forget.’13 And the fall-out from that deep rift, still perceptible in 1920, meant that there would then be a wide gap in political priorities between pacifist feminists – now in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom – and some of the leaders in the IWSA. The energies of Mary Sheepshanks, Ethel Snowden, Helena Swanwick, Kathleen Courtney, Chrystal Macmillan, Dr. Hilda Clark, Maude Royden and Dr. Aletta Jacobs, for example, would all focus by 1920 on worldwide disarmament and global economic justice rather than on suffrage.14 It is noteworthy that whereas the Women’s International League would gather for its first post-war Congress in Zurich already in June 1919, the IWSA did not feel ready to take on the risk of trying to relegate Europe’s murderous national animosities to the past, until a whole year later. It was also significant that Mary Sheepshanks herself would resign from the editorship of Ius by August 1919 when she believed that the suffrage struggle was widely won and that famine and post-war national hatreds were what now demanded most urgent attention – from politically aware women as well as from men – if the world were to avoid a World War Two. However, it is also possible to read the history of Ius and of international feminism 1913–1920 more positively.

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Introduction to International Woman Suffrage News | 99 Coming together at organizational headquarters, at committee meetings, and at periodic congresses or making contact through the written word [my emphasis], feminist internationalists . . . forged an identity that cut across traditional loyalties. They did this not by submerging all differences. On the contrary, almost nothing happened without conflict. Debating everything, internationally minded women formed a community as much through struggle as though agreement.15

The world’s leading, organized feminists of that time did manage to put some women’s issues on the League of Nations’ agenda. ‘Although women remained seriously under-represented and likely to be segregated in areas considered feminine, they would not have made even the limited progress they did [in the League] without the agitation of the international women’s organizations’.16 And from our own perspective in the twentyfirst century, UNIFEM’s current championing of women’s rights as human rights17 has its historical taproot in the pages of Ius Suffragii. For a ‘recognition of women’s universal economic disadvantage and the multifaceted manifestations of violence against women’18 not only lives on in the 21st century but was first articulated as a global phenomenon by Mary Sheepshanks in her Ius editorial of June 1916: ‘The immemorial, the world-wide wrongs of women transcend those that have ever inspired warriors or poets; no mere national wrongs can touch them in duration or extent.’ Notes 1 L. J. Rupp (1997), World of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, p. 177. This valuable study contains the fullest bibliography to date of manuscript collections, conference proceedings, organizational periodicals and other primary and secondary sources on the early history of the IWSA and WILPF. 2 M. Bosch, and A. Kloosterman, eds. (1990), Politics and Friendship: Letters from The International Woman Suffrage Alliance, 1902–1942, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 8–9, 287–8. 3 A. Whittick (1979), Woman into Citizen, London: Athenaeum with Frederick Muller, p. 19. 4 M. G. Peck (1944), Carrie Chapman Catt, New York: H.W. Wilson, Co. 5 Rupp, op. cit., pp. 58, 76–7. 6 For Mary Sheepshanks, see Sybil Oldfield (1984), Spinsters of this Parish: The Life and Times of F. M. Mayor and Mary Sheepshanks, London: Virago, Chs. 1–4 and 7. 7 Bosch and Kloosterman, op. cit., pp. 125–9. 8 N. Black (1989), Social Feminism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 9 For a more detailed account of Ius Suffragii 1914–1919, see Sybil Oldfield, ‘Mary Sheepshanks Edits an Internationalist Suffrage Monthly in Wartime,’ Women’s History Review, Vol. 12, no. 1, 2003, pp. 119–131.

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100 | Part Two 10 Rupp, op. cit., p. 178. 11 Bosch and Kloosterman, op. cit., p. 142. 12 Personal communication to the author from Dame Margery Corbett Ashby, aged 97. 13 R. Strachey (1931), Millicent Garrett Fawcett, London: John Murray, p. 296. 14 See G. Bussey and Tims, Pioneers for Peace: Women’s International League For Peace and Freedom 1915–1965, London: WILPF, ch. 2; and J. Alberti, (1989), Beyond Suffrage: Feminists in War and Peace 1914–1928, London: Macmillan, Introduction and ch. 7. 15 Rupp, op. cit., p. 208. 16 Rupp, op. cit., p. 217. 17 See K. Tomasevski (ed.) (1993), on behalf of the UN-NGO Group on Women and Development, Women and Human Rights, London: Zed Books. 18 Rupp, op. cit., p. 226.

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CHAPTER

10 Eleanor Rathbone MP (1872– 1946) and Indian Girls Cultural imperialist or friend to women?

The leading feminist of her day in Britain, Eleanor Rathbone MP risked – and encountered – the anger of nationalist Indian women in the 1930s by challenging Indian women feminists to prioritize the plight of India’s girl children. Since then, Western feminist historians have also criticized her for her ‘cultural imperialism.’ Today, however, many Third World women’s voices are heard agreeing with Eleanor Rathbone’s stance in refusing to adopt a national liberation politics that ignores or postpones, indefinitely, the liberation of girls and women. And both UNICEF and UNIFEM now share Eleanor Rathbone’s view that women’s rights are human rights. Who was Eleanor Rathbone before she publicly addressed the oppression of the women of India in 1929? Born in 1872 into a wealthy Liverpool family with a long tradition of radical reformist campaigning – its motto ‘Whatever ought to done, can be done’ – Eleanor Rathbone became a social worker and social analyst after reading Philosophy at Oxford. One of her first books was How the Casual Labourer Lives (1909), a study of the destructive effect of (un)employment patterns in the Liverpool docks. She was then elected the first woman Liverpool City Councillor and consistently campaigned on women’s issues, including the struggle for the franchise. In 1913 she published The Condition of Widows under the Poor Law in Liverpool and in 1917 she founded ‘The Family Endowment Committee.’ This marked the start of Eleanor Rathbone’s thirty-year campaign in Britain for financial independence for wives and mothers funded by a State-paid family maintenance allowance First published in Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, 1997, Volume 3, No. 3, pp. 157–68.

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102 | Part Two for their children – an alternative to the tradition of paying men a notional ‘family wage’ with which to ‘keep’ their ‘dependants.’1 In 1924 Eleanor Rathbone published her study The Disinherited Family to make the theoretical social, economic, and feminist case for paying women this alternative ‘Family Allowance’. She was not thereby advocating the confining of all married women to the home but allowing women a choice, either of being paid for the child and invalid care they provided or else paying others to do that job while they worked outside the home. Her central feminist position was defined in her attack on the idea that the husband should be the economic provider for and therefore controller of his family – ‘A man has no right to want to keep half the world in purgatory, because he enjoys playing redeemer to his own wife and children.’2 Between 1920 and 1929 in her position as elected President of the National Union of Societies for the Equal Citizenship of Women (NUSEC), in other words as leader of the British Women’s Movement, Eleanor Rathbone articulated in her Presidential Addresses the her concept of a ‘New’, woman-centred Feminism that did not seek ‘Equality’ in the sense of identity with men but rather a new social order that would take account of women’s needs based on women’s experience: “I want women to build up their own status, liberties and opportunities free from men’s restrictions, but not necessarily identical with those of men.”3 Especially notable was her attack on our excessive patience with sufferings we do not ourselves endure – ‘the world’s inexhaustible patience of wrongs that only torment others.’4 It was this woman who in the summer of 1927 found herself reading Mother India by the American feminist traveller and journalist Katherine Mayo. Eleanor Rathbone’s first biographer and friend, Mary Stocks, tells us how it affected her: Miss Mayo’s chapters on Indian widowhood, child-marriage and unskilled midwifery inflamed [Eleanor’s imagination] beyond bearing. . . . There was a terrible authenticity about Miss Mayo’s . . . reportage [on premature child-birth] from hospitals, [and] accounts by women doctors. On the other hand there was about the book an intermingled flavour of political special pleading and high-pressure journalism. The moral which Miss Mayo apparently intended to convey was that India was a nation degraded by unpleasant religious taboos, in view of which the impotence of the civilized British Raj was understandable if not excusable. This, however, was not the moral which Eleanor drew from her reading of Mother India.5

Precisely because Britain had assumed political responsibility for the Indian subcontinent, Britain could not, in Eleanor Rathbone’s view, just sit back and shake its head over the allegedly, ‘unhelpable’ backwardness

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Eleanor Rathbone MP and Indian Girls | 103 of Indians. ‘Whatever ought to be done, can be done.’ Therefore Eleanor Rathbone sought election to Parliament, in the hope of being able to do something effective for the health, education and status of Indian women. However, at first she got it badly wrong – at least in the view of some upper-class educated Indian women then living in London who themselves had campaigned against child marriage. In their view it was quite unacceptable, as well as ineffective, for Eleanor Rathbone, a member of the British governing class that was still denying India national independence to ‘arrange a conference on Indian social evils in London.’6 Moreover, she seemed to be too closely associated with the offensive Miss Mayo. These upper-class Indian women considered that they were already assuming the responsibility for the necessary social reforms in India themselves. And the commitment to the men’s nationalist agenda took priority over social reform for Indian girls and women at a time when the British were imprisoning all the leaders of Indian Civil Disobedience. For Eleanor Rathbone, however, nothing could have greater, or more urgent, priority than actual avoidable mass suffering – especially that of women and children – anywhere. Subsequently she was to be the tireless champion of Arab girls in Palestine, Chinese girl-slaves in Hong Kong, Kikuyu girls in Kenya, Basque refugees from Franco’s Spain, Czech and Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe, and starving German civilians after World War Two. But now, in 1930, she had to speak out for Indian girls. However, she also had to learn how to do so in a way that would not be rejected out of hand by their leading fellow countrywomen. Hence in 1934 she dedicated her book – Child Marriage: The Indian Minotaur – an object-lesson from the past to the future – ‘To all Indian Women who have suffered from or are struggling to remedy the evils discussed in this book.’ Throughout the book she cited none but Indian eye-witness reports as evidence. In her Preface to Child Marriage Eleanor Rathbone challenged Indian women to play the part of the mythical hero Theseus and slay the ‘Minotaur’ of girl-child sacrifice. She then summarized in her Introduction all the other gender-specific conditions under which Indian women were then suffering –‘an utter insufficiency of medical, nursing and midwifery services; illiteracy and a preposterously small share of educational opportunities; unfair marriage laws; . . . the Hindu widow’s lot and purdah.’ She accused herself and her fellow Britons of having ‘accessory responsibility [for] struggling too weakly’ against these evils. And she indicted the male institution of the British Raj for its historical record of having taken too little care of the women and girls of India out of fear of alienating Indian men: Go to any good reference library [for] the innumerable books on India by . . . ex-Vice-Roys, ex-Governors, and the lower ranks. . . . Look up the index under ‘women,’ ‘marriage,’ ‘purdah.’ You will find sometimes nothing, sometimes a few paragraphs or sentences. . . . That is not the

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104 | Part Two way men write of a subject that has set . . . their heads aflame. . . . There can be no doubt that the general tendency of the all-male British administration, and the advice openly tendered to its new recruits has been to ‘keep off the woman question,’ as likely to cause trouble and bring odium on [British] Government.

In 1891 the age of consent for both married and unmarried Indian girls had been raised by the British to twelve years. But that Act was neither enforced nor even widely known. In 1928 the all-Indian Joshi Committee was set up, including just one British woman doctor, to spend a year travelling over India; it interviewed four hundred witnesses and issued nearly eight thousand questionnaires. Its Conclusion stated that too early childbirth was a great evil, causing infant and maternal mortality, damaging the young girl’s health and generally weakening the physique of Indian children. Forty-two percent of Indian girls were married under the age of fifteen and 10% of them died in childbirth each year. Such deaths, in Eleanor Rathbone’s words were not natural but rather ‘nothing less than deaths on the rack, due to the straining of muscles and sinews, nerves and tendons, in the body’s effort to perform a function for which it was too weak, immature or ill-formed.’ And the mental trauma of girls after marital rape or premature childbirth, even if they survived, could lead to insanity. However the recommendations of the Joshi Report (Age of Consent Committee, 1929) that (a) the age of consent should be raised to fifteen for married and to eighteen for unmarried girls; and that (b) the celebration of marriage of a girl under fourteen should be prohibited and penalized, but not made invalid, were judged as being ‘not practicable under present conditions.’ Instead, the well-intentioned Sarda Act, passed in October 1929 but coming into effect in April 1930, turned out to be a complete failure that actually, indirectly, caused ‘a colossal increase in the evil it sought to remedy.’7 The Sarda Act did prohibit the marriage of girls under fourteen, but a Court could proceed against offenders only if a complainant gave security to pay 100 rupees compensation if the prosecution failed. In two and a half years of the Act’s existence there were only 167 successful prosecutions in the whole of India. Worse, in the six months before the Bill actually came into effect, money-lenders and priests spread the lie that the Government was not prohibiting marriages of girls under fourteen but all marriages for fourteen years. Hence there came an absolute spate of child-marriage. The 1931 Census revealed an increase of wives under fifteen from eight and a half to twelve and a quarter million. The number of wives under five nearly quadrupled. And that was an underestimate, given the false return of over a million allegedly unmarried girls in order to avoid prosecution. Eleanor Rathbone ended her book Child Marriage with a characteristically constructive chapter called ‘Future Remedies’. First, she advocated giving Indian women themselves the means ‘through their [suffrage] status

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Eleanor Rathbone MP and Indian Girls | 105 in the new Constitution, of freeing themselves from the evils which we have so signally failed to free them.’ At that time there were fewer than one woman voter to twenty men. Eleanor Rathbone backed the view of articulate Indian women that, in the absence of complete adult suffrage, ‘nothing less than the ratio of one woman voter to four and a half men’ as proposed by the Lothian Committee (Indian Franchise Committee, 1932) could be acceptable. She and they backed the basic literacy qualification, seeing it as a spur to future primary education for girls. In addition, Eleanor Rathbone with her lifetime of feminist agitation behind her, advocated a nation-wide, all-India media campaign led by Indian women, using not just the press but also the radio, in order to educate public opinion as to the terrible suffering caused girl-children by premature marriage. To the officially expressed view that ‘public opinion was not ripe,’ Eleanor Rathbone riposted: “What are they doing; what is anybody doing to ripen it?” She pointed out that Gandhi himself, while mocking Indian women’s interest in campaigning for female suffrage, had called, in Young India, October 7, 1926, for brave women leaders to ‘work among the girl-wives and girl-widows, and . . . take no rest and leave none for men, till girl-marriage became an impossibility.’8 Why had no such Indian woman leader arisen, when thousands of Indian women were being arrested for their political defiance of the British and for their devotion to the Congress movement? . . . [What] an example of the queer misfit between human activities and human needs that the thing that has broken the age-long silence of the Indian woman and brought her into revolt is not her sense of the unjust laws and cruel customs which beset her own lot, but a demand for ‘responsibility at the centre,’ ‘dominion status,’ ‘complete swaraj’ (selfrule). The explanation, perhaps, is that the women who have revolted have not been those who have suffered.9

It was yet another example of ‘the world’s inexhaustible patience with the wrongs that only torment others.’ Politically conscious and active Indian women agreed with their men in blaming British Imperialism for all the wrongs of India, while ‘the [imperialist] cavemen who follow Mr. Churchill’ [ i.e. in opposing Indian Independence], in Eleanor Rathbone’s words, blamed only the corruption, callousness and male supremacism of Indians. And in the meantime 20,000 young Indian girls were dying unnecessarily in premature childbirth every year. If only an Indian woman would lead a general uprising of Indian women against child-marriage and its sister evils [she] would do more to forward the cause of Indian self-government and to raise the repute of India in the eyes of the world than any other single thing that it [was] in the power of women to accomplish.10

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106 | Part Two For the politically active Indian women in the 1930s, however, ‘Freedom’ meant simply ‘Freedom from the British.’ But for Eleanor Rathbone the rallying-cry ‘Freedom!’ always sparked the question: ‘Freedom for whom to do what to whom?’ She could never back a campaign for National Independence that she did not believe really had the independence of girls and women high on its agenda. But both at the time and ever since, Eleanor Rathbone and other like-minded women were seen by some commentators and historians as being mere imperialist cultural hegemonists, blithely unaware that their intervention was counter-productive, invalidated by their race, nationality and class.11 Eleanor Rathbone’s interventionist, humanist feminist perspective has, however, been championed recently, if indirectly, in some surprising places. At least three very different novels have been written by women on national independence struggles and their relation – or non-relation – to the liberation of a nation’s girls and women: – FettoumaTouati’s Desperate Spring: Lives of Algerian Women (1987); Javady Alley, ‘dedicated to the young girls of Iran,’ by Manny Shirazi (1984); and Beka Lamb by Zee Edgell, (1982). In Fettouma Touati’s deeply pessimistic work, Desperate Spring, we see Algerian women who are made scapegoats, victims of the suffering of their men in the struggle against France. And no one could claim today that Algerian women’s participation in that bloody struggle has been rewarded with universal access to education and work outside the home, let alone with the right to dissent. Women, says Touati, are now the colonized in the ‘post-colonial’ Muslim states. In Manny Shirazi’s Javady Alley, we witness a mass demonstration against the Shah and his Western backers; the statue of the Shah on horseback is actually toppled from its monument, but, unnoticed in the huge crowd, a mullah is using the opportunity to commit digital rape on a little girl whom he is kindly allowing to sit on his shoulders for a better view of the freedom struggle. In Zee Edgell’s Beka Lamb there is another mass national independence rally, this time in Catholic Belize against the colonial British and here we see that on the outskirts of the excited crowd a young girl is desperately trying to find her boy-friend to tell him he has made her pregnant and discover whether he will help her. Of course he abandons her, promptly, and Zee Edgell makes us realize that there can be no true ‘independence’ for any society which does not address the nonindependence of its girls and women. ‘In our age of generalized de-colonization, the vast world of women remains a colony in many respects.’12 Or, as Buchi Emecheta trenchantly put it: Like women in southern Africa, most African women are expected to wait until our menfolk are free before we start talking of our own freedom. But maybe by the time they get their own freedom, and then decide that it is time for us to get ours, we’ll be dead. Why make women wait for these attitudes to change?13

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Eleanor Rathbone MP and Indian Girls | 107 Western feminists since Eleanor Rathbone’s death in 1946 have been on the timid side about ‘interfering’ in other societies’ patriarchal and misogynist traditional practices, however cruel they may be to women. It has taken an Indian woman, Meera Syal, living in Britain, to excoriate this self-protective timidity: Someone has to reflect, analytically and dispassionately on Asian Culture in Britain. . . . And it won’t be western liberals. Too afraid of charges of racism. I remember when the issue of female circumcision was raised and all these western women were saying, ‘We don’t like it. But we don’t want to judge it through white imperialist eyes.’ It took a black woman, it took Alice Walker to say: this is not an issue of culture, this is an issue of humanity.14

Eleanor Rathbone’s perspective of humane solidarity with all women debarred from adequately championing themselves has now, in fact, been taken up by the United Nations. For the first time UNICEF has recently included in its annual Progress of Nations report, a specific section on discrimination and violence against women: There is a new category, ‘gender crime’ to include bride-burning, dowryrelated crime, domestic battering – no one seems to be worrying any more about accusations of cultural imperialism. . . . [The Peruvian director of UNIFEM] Roxanna Carillo points out, ‘We are talking about killings and beatings. These are fundamental human rights abuses and for that, I don’t accept any excuses.’15

It is for Indian women themselves to say how far Indian feminists are leading a successful struggle against the continued oppression of the mass of Indian women. For my own part, I am haunted by the concluding session of the International Women’s Studies Conference in London in July 1997. At the very end an aged, frail Somali woman, walking slowly with a stick, took the microphone to entreat us to help end the misinterpretation of Sharia law. She said that no woman under fifty-five is allowed to leave Somalia unless chaperoned by a suitable male guardian – father, husband or brother. Hence only someone as old as herself could come to us and speak. Of course we all clapped her warmly – but I do not think any of us there believed that we white Western feminists could take on the male supremacist version of Islam now in power in so many lands. She could have done with an Eleanor Rathbone. Notes 1 See Suzie Fleming’s important Introduction to Eleanor Rathbone, The Disinherited Family (1924), reprinted Bristol, Falling Walls Press, 1986. 2 Rathbone, op. cit. (1924/1986), p. 345.

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108 | Part Two 3 Rathbone, Presidential Address at the Annual Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship, 6 March 1923, published in Eleanor Rathbone, Milestones – Presidential Addresses, 1920–1929 (Liverpool, 1929, p. 16). 4 Rathbone, Presidential Address, 8 March 1921 in Rathbone, Milestones, 1929, p. 9. 5 Mary Stocks, Eleanor Rathbone, London, Victor Gollancz, 1949, p. 124. For an example of Kathleen Mayo’s perspective and style: As for the reason why India’s women cannot teach India’s children . . . Indian women of child -bearing age cannot safely venture, without special protection, within reach of Indian men. It would thus appear clear that if Indian self-government were established to-morrow, and if wealth tomorrow rushed in . . . India, unless she reversed her own views as to her ‘Untouchables’ and as to her women, must still continue in the front line of the earth’s illiterates. 6 Barbara Ramusak, ‘Cultural Missionaries, Maternal Imperialists, Feminist Allies: British Women Activists in India, 1865–1945’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 1990, pp. 309–321, quoted in Joanna Alberti, Eleanor Rathbone (London: Sage Publications, 1996), p. 106. 7 Eleanor Rathbone, Child Marriage: The Indian Minotaur, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1934, p. 43. 8 M. K. Gandhi, Young India, 7 October 1926, p. 12; publ. Indian Franchise Committee 1932. 9 Eleanor Rathbone, op. cit., 1934, p. 104. 10 Eleanor Rathbone, op. cit., 1934, p. 114. The scandal has still not gone away, either in India or in Africa: Child-marriage is a one-way ticket to a life of poverty, illiteracy and powerlessness for girls . . . Their education and prospects in life are stunted and their health imperilled by early pregnancy which risks their death and that of their baby. Complications during pregnancy and childbirth are the largest killer of girls aged 15–19. . . . Sarah and Gordon Brown propose a new global fund for education to support government programmes to keep young girls in school. ‘Gordon Brown launches campaign to reduce number of child brides’, Guardian, 9 March 2012. 11 See discussion in Barbara Ramusak, op. cit.; Antoinette Burton, ‘The White Woman’s Burden: British Feminists and the Indian Woman, 1866–1915,’ in Women’s Studies International Forum, 1990; Susan Pedersen, ‘National Bodies, Unspeakable Acts: The Sexual Politics of Colonial Policymaking’, in Journal of Modern History, vol. 63, 1991, pp. 647–80; and Joanna Alberti, op. cit., 1996. 12 Germaine Tillion, The Republic of Cousins: Women’s Oppression in Mediterranean Society, 1966, translated into English, 1983, London: Al Saqi Books, p. 166. 13 Buchi Emecheta, Our Own Freedom, dedicated ‘For the Women of Africa,’ Photographs by Maggie Murray; Introduction and comments by Buchi Emecheta, London: Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1981, p. 9. 14 Meera Syal, cited by Susan Mackenzie, ‘Passage from India,’ The Guardian Weekend, 6 April 1996, pp. 13–16. 15 Ros Coward, ‘Sign of the Crimes,’The Guardian, 24 July 1997, G2: p. 5.

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Eleanor Rathbone MP and Indian Girls | 109 References Age of Consent Committee (1929), Report of the Age of Consent Committee (Joshi Report), Calcutta: Government of India Central Publication Branch. Alberti, Johanna (1996), Eleanor Rathbone, London: Sage Publications. Burton, Antoinette (1990), “The White Woman’s Burden: British Feminists and the Indian Woman, 1866–1915,” Women’s Studies International Forum, 13 (4): 295–308. Edgell, Zee (1982), Beka Lamb, London: Heinemann. Fleming, Suzie, ed. (1986), Eleanor Rathbone – The Disinherited Family, Bristol: Falling Wall Press. Gandhi, M. K. (1926), Young India, October 7: 101–2. Indian Franchise Committee (1932), Report of the Indian Franchise Committee (Lothian Report), London: HMSO. Mayo, Kathleen (1927, six impressions), Mother India, London: Jonathan Cape. Pedersen, Susan (1991), ‘National Bodies, Unspeakable Acts: the Sexual Politics of Colonial Policymaking’, Journal of Modern History, 63: 647–80. Ramusak, Barbara (1981), ‘Catalysts or Helpers? British Feminists, Indian Women’s Rights, and Indian Independence’, The Extended Family, ed. Gail Minault, Delhi: Chanakya. —— (1990), “Cultural Missionaries, Maternal Imperialists, Feminist Allies: British Women Activists in India, 1865–1945’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 13 (4): 309–21. Rathbone, Eleanor (1909), How the Casual Labourer Lives, Liverpool: Liverpool Women’s Industrial Council. —— (1917), The Condition of Widows under the Poor Law in Liverpool, Liverpool: Liverpool Women’s Industrial Council. —— (1924/1986), The Disinherited Family, Bristol: Falling Wall Press. —— (1929), Milestones – Presidential Addresses at the Annual Council Meetings of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship, 1920–1929, Liverpool. —— (1934), Child Marriage: The Indian Minotaur, London: George Allen and Unwin.

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PART T HREE

Twentieth-Century Women and the Problem of War

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CHAPTER

11 England’s Cassandras in World War One In February 1915 Aletta Jacobs, Holland’s first woman doctor, pioneer of birth control and leading suffragist, cabled women’s organizations all over the world calling for an International Women’s Congress to protest against the ‘Great War’ and to try to prevent any recurrence: ‘We feel strongly that at a time when there is so much hatred among nations, we, women, must show that we can retain our solidarity.’ Four months later, in June 1915, a list was published in London1 with the names of 156 British women who had supported Dr Jacobs in holding that Women’s International Congress at The Hague at the end of Apri1.2 The Congress had set out two aims: 1. 2.

To demand that international disputes shall in future be settled by some other means than war. To claim that women should have a voice in the affairs of the nations.

At first I assumed that those 156 names represented all the British women who had wished to attend the Congress at The Hague; however, a fellow researcher, Hilary Frances, of Harrogate, Yorkshire, then discovered another annotated list, consisting of 180 names, among the Catherine Marshall Papers in Cumbria Public Records Office, Carlisle, and headed in Catherine Marshall’s handwriting: ‘Private: for Mr McKenna’ (the Home Secretary), 17 April 1915. It was this second list that in fact gave the names of all those women who had applied for Exit Permits to cross the Channel in wartime in order to attend the International Congress in neutral Holland. My previous list, I now realized, consisted of those British women willing to come out in public in support – including finanFirst published as Chapter 8 of Sybil Oldfield, ed., This Working-Day World: Women’s Lives and Culture(s) in Britain 1914–1945, Taylor and Francis, London and Bristol, PA, 1994, pp. 89–100.

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114 | Part Three cial support – of this anti-militarist initiative. Some women were on both lists, others only on one. (It became clear, on analysis, that poorer women delegates could not afford to be financial sponsors, while some of the latter were too old, or too committed to the care of sick relatives or children to be free to attend in person.) Collating the two lists yielded 283 names. Subtracting official reporters and observers left 275. Of these, some were very well-known: for instance, Mrs Despard, Eva Gore-Booth, Emily Hobhouse, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Mrs Pethick-Lawrence, Sylvia Pankhurst, Maude Royden, and Olive Schreiner. Others would have been well known in their own organization or locality but have since been forgotten; still others were obscure then as now. Believing that to dissent in public from Britain’s war-fever in 1915 was the hardest and most vital act of moral courage that any citizen could then undertake, and that it was particularly difficult for women to seem ungrateful towards the men then volunteering for mutilation and death,3 I have attempted to analyze all the names on the two lists. So far I believe that I have correctly identified 200 of the 275. Several questions had to be addressed concerning the composition of this dissident group and their political ideologies. A study of their class background suggested that 50 per cent came from the professional, educated middle class, 27 per cent from the wealthy upper middle class, 15 per cent from the gentry and aristocracy, 5 per cent from the working class and 3 per cent from the lower middle class. Such a solid preponderance of educated and/or professional women is not surprising. What is astonishing is the high proportion, relative to the general population, of very wealthy and/or upper-class women who crossed the traditional political class-divide at this time of national crisis and identified themselves as dissidents. One explanation emerged when the women’s religious background was uncovered, since many came from a network of rich Quaker families. That disproportionately few women came from lower-middleclass or working-class backgrounds is not evidence for a lack of support among poorer women in Britain for moves to end the first world war as soon as possible by negotiation – one has only to remember the Women’s Peace Crusade led from Glasgow, 1916–19184 and Ada Nield Chew,5 Selina Cooper,6 Hannah MitchelI,7 and Alice Wheeldon.8 But those women had almost no money and this particular transnational idealistic initiative, involving huge travel charges and organizational expenses, could only be backed by women with access to some disposable income of their own – with the exception, that is, of the few working-class delegates from large organizations such as the Women’s Co-operative Guild or the Women’s Labour League. It would, therefore, be a serious distortion of the truth to claim that the backers of the Women’s International Congress at The Hague were the Women’s Peace Movement in Britain in World War One. What they did constitute was simply its most socially prominent leadership and prophetic voice.

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England’s Cassandra’s in World War One | 115 Regarding their work, either paid or unpaid, 10 per cent of the women were fully occupied in the home as young mothers or elderly wives and grandmothers, thirty-two of the two hundred women being over 60. At least 50 per cent worked voluntarily outside the home in various branches of social reform such as the improvement of inner-city housing conditions, adult literacy classes, the liberalization of penal policy towards young offenders, initiatives relating to alcoholism, the organization of Youth Clubs for factory girls, or the establishment of refuges for homeless women (plus ça change). Ten per cent of the women held elected unpaid positions as Poor Law Guardians, local councillors, political workers or trades unionists – for example, Councillors Margaret Ashton, Susan Lawrence, Eva McLaren, and Ada Salter; the Poor Law Guardians Henrietta Barnett and Sarah Reddish; the Hon. Secretary of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, Kathleen Courtney, and the Hon. Secretary of the Women’s Co-operative Guild, Margaret Llewelyn Davies. Ten per cent were health workers, including the midwife Edith Pye, the nurse Violet Tillard, and five doctors – Elizabeth Knight, Ettie Sayer, Barbara Tchaykovsky, Henrietta Thomas, and Ethel Williams. Finally, 20 per cent could be loosely categorized as intellectuals, including many teachers and the outstanding classicists Melian Stawell and Louise Matthaei, the mathematicians Julia Bell and Frances Hardcastle, the expert on international labour law Sophy Sanger, the historian Alice Clark, the theologian Olive Wyon, the artists Beatrice Collins, M. SargentFlorence and Janet Robertson, the musicians Winifred Holiday and Marjorie Kennedy Fraser, and, finally, such writers and journalists as Evelyn Sharp, Molly Hamilton, Caroline Playne, and Irene Cooper Willis. Political analysis of the 200 women is rather more complex. Since they were all anti-militarist feminists and on the liberal/left side of the party political divide it might seem sufficient simply to term them all ‘radical suffragists’ or ‘pacifist feminists’. But they do not in fact fit into any such unitary category. Some of the women, for example Sylvia Pankhurst, Maud Joachim, Alison Heilans, Dorothy Evans, and Muriel Matters, had been militant suffragettes, not constitutional suffragists, before 1914. And far from all of the women were absolute pacifists. Even more important, although they were all radicals and feminists, by ‘coming out’ as anti-militarists in the middle of World War One, they had to break away not only from the great majority of their fellow radicals in the Liberal and Labour Parties but also from the great mass of the Women’s Movement. “Women, your country needs you”, said Mrs Fawcett – and most women in Britain went along with her appeal to their life-sustaining patriotism on the home front. When the pacifist women in leadership positions in the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, Catherine Marshall, Kathleen Courtney, Maude Royden, Helena Swanwick, and Crystal Macmillan, among others on The Hague Congress list, resigned in protest against Mrs Fawcett’s taking the Women’s Suffrage Union into the national war effort,

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116 | Part Three they were all subsequently defeated in their attempt to get re-elected onto the NUWSS’s Executive on an internationalist, antimilitarist platform. Clearly these suffragists wore their feminism with a difference by 1915. If one asks how these 200 women would have identified themselves ideologically before August 1914, in my view 45 per cent would have declared themselves to be feminists first and foremost, and another 10 per cent would have called themselves socialists. Possibly as many as 25 per cent would have said that they were practising Quakers for whom faith in the Inner Light within all people was the central tenet of their lives. And the last 20 per cent would have had to be labelled ‘idealistic humanitarians’ – women with a compulsion to intervene in any and every case of remediable suffering not just women’s suffering – that crossed their path – for example Emily Hobhouse, the campaigner against British concentration camp policy in the Boer War, or the Christian Socialists Henrietta Barnett, Dorothy Buxton, and Mary Hughes. What then happened in the months immediately after August 1914 was that the 55 per cent who had hitherto been feminists or socialists first went over to join forces with the other 45 per cent of Quakers and humanitarians – even at the cost of breaking with their own former friends and comrades. They were convinced that the need to end World War One – and in such a way that it would not cause a World War Two – was the supreme issue for our whole species. As the feminist Helena Swanwick wrote in retrospect: ‘If I had felt driven to fling myself into the movement for the vote, I was even more ruthlessly compelled to discover the truth, as I saw it, about war in general and this war in particular.’9 Helena Swanwick and all her fellow anti-militarists who supported the Women’s International Congress at The Hague were, of course, pilloried in the popular press as ‘pro-Hun peacettes’, ‘feminine busybodies’, ‘hysterical women’, ‘babblers, folly in petticoats’, ‘peace fanatics’, ‘mischievous, futile, blundering Englishwomen’, etc., etc. But they were also extremely unpopular among their previous allies in the campaign for the vote. As the suffragist Wilma Meikle wrote in 1916: . . . [If] over here the pacifists had had their way and had succeeded in identifying the various suffrage societies with their own cause, the result would certainly have been the total and lasting collapse of the suffrage movement. Fortunately, that identification was never effected. The faint voices of the pacifists had cried in a wilderness and 1915 found thousands of women offering themselves for war-work.10

Among those ‘criers in the wilderness’ were a few women, all supporters of the Congress at The Hague called by Dr. Aletta Jacobs, who felt compelled to speak out like Troy’s Cassandra, prophesying to deaf, mocking ears that the governments of the Great Powers were leading the

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England’s Cassandra’s in World War One | 117 world into chaos and perhaps ultimate extinction. The first such note of horrified foreboding occurs in the unpublished journals of Beatrice Webb’s forgotten sister, Kate Courtney, the wife of Leonard Courtney, the veteran pacifist Liberal peer. Already in July 1911, during the Agadir crisis, Kate Courtney had realized that Italy’s seizure of Tripoli from the Turks would ‘put back the Peace . . . movement terribly and set a precedent which will greatly strengthen mutual suspicion and add to armaments.’ She recognized the danger inherent in all the guilty imperialisms, with Germany growing more and more bitter as ‘a poor lion without a Christian’. By 1912 Kate Courtney noted in her diary all three factors that would soon contribute to catastrophe – secret cabinet government which could mobilize the country without warning; secret international diplomacy based on fears and animosities; and the uncontrolled armaments race between the rival Powers. On 1 August 1912 she wrote: One or two bad [Parliamentary] debates on Navy [i.e. ordering more Dreadnought battleships]. It is almost enough to make one despair – the Government’s poverty of resource or effort towards a real understanding with Germany. It seems as if we were assisting at a Greek tragedy and some terrible catastrophe was nearing us every day -and for no reason – just blind fate – insanity.11

Very soon after World War One broke out, a second Cassandra emerged: Mary Sheepshanks, the editor of the International Women’s Suffrage Movement periodical Ius Suffragii. In a signed editorial headed ‘Patriotism or Internationalism’, Mary Sheepshanks denounced the irrational killing-competition on all sides: ‘Each nation is convinced that it is fighting in self-defence, and world is relapsing into a worse, because a more scientific barbarism than that from which it sprang’. She concluded her article in November 1914 with the urgent warning: Armaments must be drastically reduced and abolished, and their place taken by an international police force. Instead of two great Alliances pitted against each other, we must have a true Concert of Europe. Peace must be on generous, unvindictive lines, satisfying legitimate national needs, and leaving no case for resentment such as to lead to another war. Only so can it be permanent.12

A third Cassandra who supported the Congress at The Hague was the art historian Vernon Lee, of whom Irene Cooper Willis wrote: It was rare, in the pre-war period, to find a writer and an aesthete so in touch with European liberal opinion . . . and so alive to the various national policies which led to the Great War. . . . She felt the war deeply,

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118 | Part Three and was torn by it more than most people, because she had roots in Germany, as well as in England, Italy and France.13

All her attempts to warn liberal opinion of the pitfalls of nationalism in her letters and journalism in all her four countries having failed, Vernon Lee was indefatigable in her entreaties that the war be ended immediately and in such a way as not to be the inevitable cause of a sequel. On 17 September 1914 Vernon Lee published a message to Americans in the New York Nation, in which she countered H.G. Wells’ plea to Americans in the Daily Chronicle of 24 August to ‘STOP VICTUALLING OUR ENEMIES’. Wells was asking neutral America to lend England ‘the weapon called famine and famine-sprung disease’, wrote Vernon Lee. And if America were to help to end the war by destroying Germany, all that would be achieved would be the reinforcement of Prussian militarism and absolutism and its drive for revenge. On 3 October 1914 the New York Evening Post published Vernon Lee’s open letter to Rozika Schwimmer – who was to be one of the driving forces behind the Women’s International Congress at The Hague the following April. In that letter Vernon Lee supported Rozika Schwimmer’s call for continuous mediation between neutrals ‘to stop the international massacre at the earliest possible moment.’ Vernon Lee complained that she had been refused the opportunity to try to warn her compatriots against their deluding myth of total self-righteousness and the total war guilt of the other side, ‘by the once liberal and radical . . . papers of my country. . . . Similar self-justificatory myths . . . have doubtless arisen in every one of the belligerent countries.’ Only the ILP and its paper, the Labour Leader, were willing to let her speak. ‘We in England have no chance of hearing the truth except from the lips of neutral . . . nations. . . . This war has strangled truth, and paralyzed the power and wish to face it.’ Already in October 1914, less than eight weeks into the Great War, Vernon Lee was prophesying: ‘It is not the diplomatists and soldiers who can end . . . this butchery and destruction . . . otherwise than in some new sowing of dragon’s teeth.’ Therefore she begged: It is the peaceful interests which have been sacrificed, the human affections which have been violated; it is the network of international cooperation in trade, in art, in science, and in progress which has been rent and trampled in blood and mud; it is those who need peace and believe in peace through peace who alone should end this war.

On 1 April 1915 Vernon Lee published her internationalist-humanist credo in the Labour Leader, warning her fellow citizens against the folly of regarding the Germans as anything other than our German selves:

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England’s Cassandra’s in World War One | 119 [What] we are treating merely as a nuisance to us, is a creature as like ourself as our own image in the glass; . . . strike out at it, and it strikes back at you . . . I note with satisfaction that Miss Christabel Pankhurst and her militants with their idiotic destructive heroism are up in arms against German militarism. Their spirit is now in the whole nation – the spirit which overlooks the fact that your adversary is human like yourself, and will not yield to methods you yourself would never yield to.

Already in 1915 Vernon Lee anticipated an Allied victory that would impose a crushingly punitive settlement on Germany. Therefore she felt driven to publish what she knew would be a very unpalatable prophecy of doom. She called her pamphlet Peace with Honour – Controversial Notes on the Settlement. Her publisher, the Union for Democratic Control of Foreign Policy, prefaced it with the disclaimer that it did ‘not necessarily adopt as its own every statement or opinion therein contained.’ Among her unpopular propositions were: 1 The decision by arms proves nothing except that the victor is the victor and the vanquished the vanquished. 2 Therefore in the erroneously called . . . arbitrament of war, [the victor] unites the position of judge, jury, policeman and plaintiff in demanding compensation from the vanquished. 3 War compensations and penalties [including imputation of war-guilt] are really nothing but advantages extorted by the victor. 4 A huge war-indemnity imposed upon a defeated Germany would be both self-defeating in its damage to her trading partners and, far from ‘crushing’ German militarism, England and her Allies [would have] hit upon an infallible recipe for giving it a new lease of life. A humiliated, insecure, or hemmed-in Germany would . . . mean a Germany arming once more for a Leipzig after a Jena.

How could Vernon Lee have been so certain of her ground in thus warning her compatriots so precisely against the as yet unwritten stipulations of the Treaty of Versailles? She anticipated the question by insisting in her pamphlet that The question is a mainly psychological one, it is one of probable feelings, desires and effects. And psychology is merely the study of human nature by means of observation of our own thoughts and feelings. . . . We have therefore [only] to ask ourselves ‘How should we feel and behave if a victor . . . tried to crush us?’

In likening us to ‘the enemy’ and them to us, Vernon Lee was acting upon her a priori assumption that all humans are profoundly alike, and never more tragically alike than when postulating the existence of a

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120 | Part Three devilish ‘Other’. In fact, Satan the Waster or War-Bringer lives inside our own heads and is happy to recruit even our most tender feelings of pity and indignation whenever necessary to validate righteous hatred and our own mass killings.15 In 1917 a new voice, that of the Quaker idealist Marian Ellis,16 expressed her prophetic fears concerning the post-war decisions soon to be made by victors and losers alike. Starting from the principle that every human being on earth makes a unique contribution to the world and that therefore human justice is incompatible with the institutionalized killing of humans, Marian Ellis reminded her readers: History is full of instances of an ideal being lost through the methods of its advocates. We are always trying to cast out Satan, if not by Satan exactly, at least by one of the smallest of his angels. . . . Nations are but communities of men and women. . . . Can we make an effective appeal to [the] Inner Voice in the heart of the other man, in the hearts of the people of the other nation, if our [own] hands are full of the instruments of destruction, even in the supposed interests of justice?17

To Marian Ellis, disarmament was not a millennial goal but rather the immediate next step – if humanity is to be saved from its misguided rulers: At the end of this war the world will have to decide which way it desires to go, towards disarmament or destruction; there will be no middle course. The choice is really between basing our civilization on faith or on fear, and the question of armaments stands at the parting of the ways The world will be weary to death of war when this war is over But however great the reaction against war may be, it will not suffice to bring about the state of mind which produces disarmament, unless it is rooted in a positive faith that can overcome fear. . . . [For armaments] are the visible and tangible sign of our lack of faith in . . . our fellow men. . . . The armies and navies stand now between the opposing nations like a great barrier preventing the vital realization of the unity of the spirit. . . . Disarmament is not merely scrapping our guns and our battleships. It is the working out of a national policy which, being inspired by love for all men, cannot be antagonistic . . . [It] is the problem of India, of Ireland, of our relations with Russia and Persia, Germany and Belgium, as God would have them to be.18

Addressing herself to what was being perpetrated by Britain in 1917, Marian Ellis denounced the anti-Christian cruelty and humbug of her own side: ‘We pray that we may love our enemies, and meanwhile we are involved in the crime of starving [German] women and children. We pray God to turn their hearts, while our men slay their bodies.’19 She aligned herself with the absolutist Quaker stand on pacifism articulated by the

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England’s Cassandra’s in World War One | 121 Meeting for Sufferings in London, January 1917, as it warned, in words that she helped to draft, ‘we must either stand for an un-weaponed faith, the abolition of armies and navies, and reliance upon spiritual forces alone, or resign ourselves to a still more complete organization of the world for war.’ What it felt like to have been an unheeded, derided Cassandra during World War One has been best described by another supporter of the Women’s International Congress at The Hague, Helena Swanwick. On 4 August 1914 she attended a women’s protest meeting that called on British women to ‘down tools’ and so effect a general strike against the sudden war. But Helena Swanwick knew all such calls to be futile – women would never strike against their own helpless dependants, their children, their sick or their elderly. In her memoir, I Have Been Young, of 1935, Helena Swanwick recalled her own compulsion to resist the engulfing war-fever and her simultaneous certainty that all such resistance was useless: Fighting in me on that evening and for four years to come was, on the one hand the conviction that all we [women protesters] said and did would be treated by the mass of our fellow-countrymen at best as ‘twittering’ (Mr Asquith’s word), at worst as treachery, and on the other hand, the conviction that ‘I could do no other.’ I was ‘driven’, as I had been in 1906 [to speak out for women’s suffrage]. But whereas then there had been unquenchable hope and buoyant comradeship, there was now a rending pity, a horror of black darkness, and in my brain, almost physically audible at times and never ceasing, something like a monotonous bell for ever tolling: ‘Wicked! Wicked! Wickedly silly! Cruel! Silly! Silly’ . . . But I was quite sure (and said so on countless platforms and wrote it in many articles) that the [so-called] ‘knock-out’ [blow] would end in ‘an inconclusive peace.’ I was quite certain that a prolonged war, ending in a decisive victory for one side or the other, would result in brutal demands for ‘Annexations and Indemnities’, and I trusted our politicians, and especially Mr Lloyd George, to disguise them under the suaver names of ‘Mandates’, ‘Self-determination’, ‘Reparations’ . . . I spoke a great deal in public during the four years that followed, but I never said a hundredth part of what I thought and felt. Not because I was afraid of abuse or violence – I experienced plenty of both – but because I was afraid of failing altogether to be comprehensible. It was lonely in those days . . . We failed. We could not overtake the lies; the disastrous knockout blow had the anticipated consequences from which the world will suffer for a century or more.

Even after the punitive clauses in the Peace Treaty of 1919 were published, these Cassandras and their fellow anti-militarists in Britain and on the Continent attempted to make one last concerted attempt to avert a second ‘Great War’ in Europe. They held another Women’s International

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122 | Part Three Congress, this time in Zurich, in 1919, at which they were the first people in the world to identify the fatal weaknesses in the proposed League of Nations. The non-admittance of Germany and the Soviet Union at the start, the non-implementation of the promised general disarmament clauses, and the unworkable sanctions provisions – each of these factors leading to the failure of the League was spelt out in advance by the women in Zurich. They cabled President Woodrow Wilson and the other leaders at Versailles, warning them that The terms of peace can only lead to future wars. . . . By the financial and economic proposals a 100 million people of this generation in the heart of Europe are condemned to poverty, disease, and despair, which must result in the spread of hatred and anarchy within each nation.

Kate Courtney prophesied on 9 January 1920 in a letter to The Daily Mirror: The cruel and unwise conditions of the Peace Treaty insisted on by France will have results [which] will be suicidal to France . . . and disastrous to all Europe . . . M. Clemenceau is a great Frenchman, as Bismarck was a great German. Both in their hour of victory have done an evil thing for their respective countries and for the world.

Simultaneously, the Quaker Joan Fry, working to organize the feeding of German civilians still suffering from the effects of the Allies’ economic blockade, was prophesying that the Allies were creating more and more reactionaries in Germany. And just three years later she reported to the Society of Friends: ‘150 million Deutschmarks for a quarter of a pound of butter. Martial Law in Berlin. In Nürnberg I saw seven men in the new Hitler uniform.’20 Unlike the original Cassandra of Greek mythology, these English Cassandras were not annihilated by the horrors outside themselves or their despair within. Each time that they failed to win a hearing – and they were under no illusion but that they did fail – they summoned up the energy for new effort, both mental and physical. Almost from the first day of the war Kate Courtney worked for the relief of ordinary German civilians, trapped in England as destitute ‘enemy aliens’ between 1914 and 1918, founding an Emergency Committee for War Victims; and at the end of the war it was in her house in Chelsea that Kate Courtney, then aged 71 and recently widowed, helped to found the Fight the Famine Council, out of which grew the Save the Children Fund.21 Both Vernon Lee and Helena Swanwick worked for the radical ‘think-tank’, the Union for Democratic Control of Foreign Policy, discussed and affirmed by A.J.P. Taylor in Troublesome People. Mary Sheepshanks worked for the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of Belgian refugees in Britain for the

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England’s Cassandra’s in World War One | 123 war’s duration and she also continued to edit her embattled because internationalist International Women’s Movement monthly paper, Jus Suffragii, distributing it across enemy frontiers via neutrals throughout the war. Marian Ellis gave away her personal fortune to support the imprisoned ‘absolutist’ conscientious objectors and their impoverished families via the No Conscription Fellowship and the Quaker Friends’ Service Committee.22 Joan Fry became a Quaker Minister to imprisoned Conscientious Objectors, monitoring their conditions and, in certain cases of gross maltreatment, effectively saving some men’s lives by procuring their release just in time. Immediately after the war Joan Fry began her immense four-year-long relief project to feed starving German children and students, which became known colloquially in Germany as ‘Quäkern’.23 There are many different stories to be told about the 200 women, so far identified, who answered Dr Aletta Jacobs’ Call to the Women of the World in February 1915. I have singled out just six who seem to me to have been doomed to have prophesied truly but in vain. The rest of the twentieth century has indeed enacted that Greek tragedy that Kate Courtney saw approaching in 1911. The world has ‘relaps[ed] into a worse, because a more scientific barbarism than that from which it sprang’ as Mary Sheepshanks foretold. Germany was not crushed by the punitive ‘Peace’ but rather won over to a renewed militarism – ‘a Germany arming once more for a Leipzig after a Jena’ as Vernon Lee, Helena Swanwick, and Joan Fry all warned. The ideals, both of liberals in the West and communists in the East, have indeed been lost through the methods each employed and the alternative to disarmament is still destruction – truths even more glaring to us than they were to Marian Ellis in 1917. The positive injunctions of these women may be as worth heeding as their rejected warnings. We do need a disarmament race worldwide; we do need an effective, impartial, and therefore respected international UN policing force. Perhaps we should not withhold aid but rather give to the subjects of dictatorship, acting on the basic principle of fellowhumanity, instead of punishing the victims for the crimes of their rulers. Doubtless they were not saints, these Cassandras, neither perfectly wise nor perfectly good. And yet their words, buried in old newspapers, in unpublished journals and out-of-print books, come across as extraordinarily alive and nourishing. They seem to confirm Simone Weil’s declaration during the Second Great World War that ‘We can find something better than ourselves in the . . . past’.24 Notes 1 The list of names was published on the back page of Towards Permanent Peace: A Record of the Women’s International Congress, June 1915, London. 2 In fact only three Englishwomen managed to reach The Hague because the Admiralty closed the North Sea to British shipping. Nevertheless, a remark-

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124 | Part Three

3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21

able Congress did take place consisting of 1,300 women from twelve countries, presided over by the American, Jane Addams. At its close, the Congress despatched women envoys to all the Foreign Ministries of Europe’s belligerent and neutral nations, asking the belligerents to state their war aims and the neutrals to attempt continuous mediation – of course in vain. See A. Wiltsher (1985), Most Dangerous Women, London, Pandora, as well as the essay on Jane Addams, below. Cf. ‘Even to seem to differ from those she loves in the hour of their affliction has ever been the supreme test of a woman’s conscience’: Jane Addams, in J. Addams, E. Balch, and A. Hamilton (1915), Women at The Hague, New York, Macmillan, p. 125. See J. Liddington (1989), The Long Road to Greenham, London, Virago, pp. 107–30. See D. Nield Chew (1982), The Life and Writings of Ada Nield Chew, London, Virago. J. Liddington (1984), The Life and Times of a Respectable Rebel: Selina Cooper 1864–1946, London, Virago. Hannah Mitchell (1968), The Hard Way Up, London, Faber. Sheila Rowbotham (1986), Friends of Alice Wheeldon, London, Pluto Press. Helena Swanwick (1935), I Have Been Young, London, Gollancz. W. Meikle (1916), Towards a Sane Feminism, London, Grant Richards, pp. 154–5. Kate Courtney’s diaries are held among the Courtney Papers, British Library of Economic and Political Science. See Sybil Oldfield (1984), Spinsters of this Parish: The Life and Times of F.M. Mayor and Mary Sheepshanks, London, Virago, ch. 9. Preface to Vernon Lee’s Letters (1937), privately printed. Peter Gunn (1964), Vernon Lee, London, Oxford University Press, ch. 14. Vernon Lee (1920), Satan the Waster, London, John Lane, praised by Shaw in The Nation, September 1920. Marian Ellis (1878–1952) was one of the heirs to the Rowntree estate and daughter of the Liberal MP John Ellis. After the Boer War she helped Ruth Fry in relief work among South African women; after World War One she became Secretary of the Fight the Famine Council whose Chairman, Lord Parmoor, she married, thus becoming the stepmother of Stafford Cripps. During the 1920s Marian Parmoor became President of the British National Peace Council and of the British Section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. After World War Two she studied nuclear fission in order to speak with some authority concerning the abuse of atomic energy. Two days before her death in 1952 she was helping to draft a Quaker message to the Prime Minister, protesting against the Allied bombing of North Korea. ‘The Spiritual Aspect of International Unity. A Plea for the Principle of Consent’, 1917. Friends’ House Library, London. Marian E. Ellis, ‘Disarmament. (i)’, Friends’ Quarterly Examiner, 1917, pp. 182–7. Ibid. Unpublished letter held in the Joan Fry Archives, Friends’ House, London See Sybil Oldfield (1989), Women Against the Iron Fist: Alternatives to Militarism, 1900–1989, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, ch. 2, ‘Kate Courtney.’

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England’s Cassandra’s in World War One | 125 22 See T. Kennedy (1981), The Hound of Conscience: A History of the NoConscription Fellowship, Fayetteville, University of Arkansas Press. 23 See Joan Fry Archive, Friends’ House Library, London. 24 Simone Weil, Selected Essays, 1934–1943, Oxford University Press, p. 44.

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CHAPTER

12 Caroline Playne (1858–1940) Cultural historian, social psychologist

Caroline Playne, the daughter of George F. Playne, Fellow of the Geographical Society and a Dutch woman, Marietta van den Bosch, was a lifelong internationalist whose tragic, self-imposed task was to document the hostile cultural nationalisms that had helped kindle the First World War. She could not prevent the horror she saw coming and then lived through; all she could do was analyze its causation in retrospect, anticipating the much later UNESCO declaration: ‘Wars begin in the minds of men.’ Caroline Playne’s commitment to international peace, like that of her friend Vernon Lee, her distant relative Kate Courtney, and the Quaker Sophia Sturge, was, unusually among her contemporaries, already manifest before 1914. She was a founder member of the National Peace Council that was constituted as a permanent body in 1908 at the International Peace Congress in London attended by Bertha von Suttner.1 It was also in 1908 that she wrote and published a paper on ‘The Evolution of International Peace.’2 Shining through that pamphlet, based on the words of Kropotkin, L.T. Hobhouse, Grotius, Kant and Tolstoy, is Caroline Playne’ s determination to counter the vulgar social Darwinism of her day that was translating the catchphrases ‘the struggle for existence’ and ‘the survival of the fittest’ into a ‘mad competition between the principal civilized nations of the world in armies and navies.’3 In place of that accelerating arms race, she appealed to the characteristic human animal’s social capacities – for mutual aid and co-operation – and to the evolution of an International Court at the Hague to regulate relations between nations on a basis of peace, equity and justice. She also looked to Britain to be the first to stop the arms race by unilateral disarmament. It may be imagined, therefore just how emotionally and morally devastating the outbreak of the First World War was for Caroline Playne. She Published in Sybil Oldfield, British Women Humanitarians – Doers of the Word, 2001/2006.

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Caroline Playne (1858–1940) | 127 immediately joined the Emergency Committee for the Relief of Distressed ‘Enemy Aliens’; she joined the Union for the Democratic Control of Foreign Policy; she supported the 1915 Women’s International Congress at the Hague; she worked for her local Nailsworth Peace Association Society and for the National Peace Council that arranged a postal service for personal correspondence between the belligerent countries and traced missing persons. A fluent linguist, she translated and published articles from the Berliner Tageblatt appreciating Quaker relief efforts for German civilian internees and POWs; she collected suppressed pacifist pamphlets;4 she gave a paper at the Conference on the Pacifist Philosophy of Life in London, July, 1915;5 she kept notes of the dismal pro-war propaganda in the daily press; and she also kept a private diary of the war years, chronicling her personal depression as she addressed vindictively patriotic women at a branch of the Women’s Co-operative Guild, or attended a sad Christmas service with a whole congregation wearing mourning in 1916, or felt disgusted with herself that she could now see ambulances of the war-wounded or read of the latest battle losses as just ‘part of the day’s routine.’6 The first time I chanced to read that a man, a family connection I had known from boyhood, had been killed, I screamed, I was upset all day, I could not contain myself as I thought of the slaughtered youth and the slaughtering of young men [was] brought home to one. Now one’s emotions are dried up. There is no more sorrow – or indignation, or shame – or pity. You begin to doubt the reality of existence . . . [28 Dec. 1917]7

After the war, and for the rest of her life, Caroline Playne dedicated herself to studying just how such a mad, gruesome competition in mutual massacre could have come about. In other words she deliberately lived in spirit in the cultural pre-conditions for man-made Hell, hoping that her reminder of those culturally determining preconditions might effectively prevent Germans, French and British from being quite so vulnerable to the mass media’s hate propaganda again. Her first study, The Neuroses of the Nations (1925), focussed on the militarism, megalomania and self glorification of the extremist ‘Pan-Germans’ from 1880 onwards (which, as she points out, was much criticized by rational Germans at the time); and on the militarism, megalomania and self-glorification of the ‘PanFrench’ by Action Française and other such groups in France. Her subsequent study, The Pre-War Mind in Britain (1928), focussed on British jingoism and British imperialism, both of which fused crass materialism and exaggerated sentimentalism. She showed how the French and German militarist polemicists were mirror images one of another, as were the historians Spencer Wilkinson, Professor of Military History in Oxford, and Heinrich von Treitschke, Professor of History in Berlin, while

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128 | Part Three Cecil Chatterton was a mirror-image of the hysterical Pan-Germans. Caroline Playne’s deepest loathing, however, was for the millionaires of the popular press who found that nothing sold as well as righteous hate.8 Lords Northcliffe and Harmsworth were her villains, guilty of deliberately infecting the British collective mind with an irrational conviction of mass danger – hence the drive for more and more Dreadnoughts – and with an equally irrational sense of British total decency and German total beastliness. Particularly telling and ironic, therefore, was her demonstration in The Neuroses of Nations of how the Germans had been convinced by the evidence of British atrocities towards civilians during the Boer War that the Germans alone still had a sense of moral decency and that the British were beasts. As for self-proclaimed democratic, civilized France, how could her alliance with the brutal Tsarist despotism of Russia look in German eyes but as a plot to encircle Germany on the continent – while Britain made sure that her mastery of the seas would prevent German expansion abroad forever? Caroline Playne did not deny the significance of materialist, economic motives or the concomitant political factors in international rivalry; what she highlighted was the accompanying, underlying role played by nationalistic popular cultures in so debasing – and indeed unhinging – the collective psyche that August 1914 was greeted with joy. ‘Everywhere among the nations which we have been considering, it was applauding shouts which drowned sane considerations.’9 Her only obituarist remembered her in her seventies: You would meet her shopping with her string bag, and she would tell you that she was leaving tomorrow for Prague . . . to attend a Peace Congress, . . . adding that she might be called upon to act as interpreter in French, German or Dutch. . . . Then came the death of her sister to whom she was devoted, and the outbreak of Hitler’s war; her indomitable spirit was broken.10

Given the still lethal potency of nationalism and religious communalism on every continent at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and the still uncontrolled arms race in weapons of mass-extermination, it might be helpful to reprint Caroline Playne.11 Notes 1 Caroline Playne’s last work was Bertha von Suttner and the Struggle to Avert the World War, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1936, a book she had been thinking of writing ever since 1910. 2 A paper read for the Anglo-Russian Literary Society, Imperial Institute, London, 6 October 1908. 3 Playne, Caroline. ‘The Evolution of International Peace’, p. 1. 4 Now held in the Playne Papers, Special Collections, University of London Library, Senate House, that include her diary and cuttings from Wordl War I.

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Caroline Playne (1858–1940) | 129 5 ‘Bergson and Free Will’ now held in the C.E. Playne collection, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. 6 Mss. journal, Playne Papers, University of London Library. 7 Ibid. 8 Cf. Ugresic, Dubravka on the responsibility of the media for the recent ethnic wars in the Balkans in her The Culture of Lies. London, Phoenix House, 1998, pp. 71–3: Is it possible for the media to provoke war? . . . Justifying themselves by . . . the national myths served up by the media, Serbian nationalists collectively supported the Serbian repression of the Albanians in Kosovo . . . And when the Croatian media also filled with tales of [atrocity] – the preparations were laid for war. [The] media have succeeded in legalizing lies. 9 Caroline Playne, The Neuroses of the Nations, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1933, ‘Summary’, p. 463. 10 B.C. Boulter in The Hampstead and Highgate Express, 6 February, 1948. 11 The check list of Caroline Playne’s writings on peace and war, not already mentioned in Berliner Tageblatt above, includes: ‘The Disarming of Hatred’, translation of article, Friends’ Peace Committee, 1915, held in Friends’ House Library; ‘German pacifism during the War’, London, National Peace Council, 1918/19; Society at War: 1914–1916. London, George Allen and Unwin, 1931; and Britain Holds On: 1917, 1918. London, George Allen and Unwin, 1933.

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CHAPTER

13 Jane Addams, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate (1860–1931) The chance the world missed

‘I have never been sure I was right. I have often been doubtful about the next step.’ (Jane Addams, 1935)

In 1910, the fifty-year-old U.S. citizen Jane Addams – pioneer of social transformation via Settlements in the inner city and successful campaigner against child labour, sweat shops, slum housing, and the political persecution of refugees – was listed in U.S. newspapers as ‘the greatest woman in America.’ In 1915 the American press labelled her ‘a silly, vain, impertinent old maid.’ By 1917 she was called a traitor.1 What caused the considerable difference between these judgments? Was it because Jane Addams had tried, as a private citizen, to influence world politics in significant ways? How do women who are not governmental officials affect world politics? A study of Jane Addams’ efforts provides us with some important clues.

Before 1914 Before World War I, Jane Addams had established not merely a national but an international reputation. In 1913, at the World Conference of the International Union of Women’s Suffrage Associations in Budapest, Hungary, the leaders of the women’s movement who were present ‘realized that[Addams] was the one that was known to the whole world.’2 That worldwide reputation was based both on Jane Addams’ practical work and on her writing. Her work had become an inspiration to reformers in different nations because it was so diverse. She had helped organize Originally published in D’Amico and Beckman, eds., Women in World Politics, Bergin and Garvey, Westport, Connecticut, 1995.

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Jane Addams, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate | 131 garbage collection in poor urban districts, she had worked to provide public libraries and play spaces, and she had supported the rights of women, children, political dissidents, trade unionists, and people of colour. Because her work was grounded in constructive cooperation among the many immigrant communities in the American cities – Italian, German, Russian, Jewish, Polish, Greek, Arab – these efforts became known in the homelands of those immigrants. In addition, Jane Addams’ published books, articles, and speeches before 1914 had established her as an important thinker throughout the English-reading world on how to improve the quality of city life, how to emancipate women, and how to achieve world peace.3 It was inevitable, therefore, that when World War I broke out, the ‘peace-minded’ women of the world should have looked to Jane Addams as their leader. But before tracing what Jane Addams did at that catastrophic moment in world history, it is necessary to understand what she thought. Jane Addams’ early thoughts on war and peace in her first book on the subject, Newer Ideals of Peace, written between 1902 and 1907, could not have been more optimistic. In this she resembled her male counterparts in the peace movement, such as Norman Angell, author of The Great Illusion, who argued that a world war was now impossible. Jane Addams’ years of experience among immigrants from many mutually hostile nationalities in downtown Chicago had proved, she thought, that it was possible to ‘break through the tribal bond.’ For had she not herself witnessed how often, out of ‘primitive pity’, the poor would insist on sharing the little they had with those who had still less? Moreover, these same people, however disparate their origins, were the first to recognize their common need for communal baths, libraries, schools, and open spaces. Therefore, Jane Addams had concluded hopefully in 1907 in Newer Ideals of Peace: It is possible that we shall be saved from warfare by the ‘fighting rabble’ itself, by the ‘quarrelsome mob’ turned into kindly citizens of the world through the pressure of a cosmopolitan neighbourhood. It is not that they are shouting for peace – on the contrary, if they shout at all, they will continue to shout for war – but that they are really attaining cosmopolitan [i.e., international] relations through daily experience. . . . Below their shouting, they are living in the kingdom of human kindness. They are laying the simple and inevitable foundations for an international order.4

There were three strands in Jane Addams’ anti-militarist vision before World War One. First and most fundamental was her basic antiHobbesian perspective on human nature. She could not accept Thomas Hobbes’ view of humans as warring brutes who would always require repressive control by force from above.5 Instead, Jane Addams stressed

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132 | Part Three what were to her the experiential realities of human pity, kindness, and altruism in addition to the realities of human egoism and survivalism. Secondly, there was her conviction, spelled out in the passage above, that progress toward international peace is socially determined and will evolve from perceived practical social needs. Finally, there was her liberal faith in irreversible progress promising her that the global establishment of peace was inevitable. As late as 1913, Jane Addams (like the ‘realist’ Vladimir Lenin) was still confident that working people the world over would reject a world war. But August 1914, of course, was to prove her and her fellow pacifists terribly mistaken. The ‘tribal bond’ was apparently still the strongest bond of all.

The Great War, 1914–1918 Given Jane Addams’ immense standing as a practical reformer and as a high-minded thinker, it followed that an élite band of women reformers and thinkers, both within the United States and outside, should now turn to her for leadership regarding the war in Europe. By the end of 1914, after the battles of the Marne and Ypres, each side had already suffered over half a million casualties and the deadlocked enemy lines faced one another from the Belgian coast to Switzerland to compete in massacring one another for the foreseeable future. Such a ‘reality’ was so insupportable that on January 10, 1915, Jane Addams presided at the founding of the Woman’s Peace Party at a congress in Washington attended by 3,000 people.6 She was made chair-woman of a political party whose central plank was the advocacy of continuous mediation by neutrals to try to bring the war to a negotiated early end. In supporting this women’s initiative, Jane Addams was taking her first, tentative step in transnational idealist intervention. She would soon literally be crossing most of the borders in Western Europe in her efforts to appeal to the world’ leaders. The ideal – our sense of how humans ought to behave toward one another – was, she believed, what we must invoke if we are to find any alternative to the killing fields. In February 1915 Jane Addams received the following cable from the Netherlands: Call to the Women of All Nations From many countries appeals have come asking us to call together an International Women’s Congress to discuss that the women of the world can do and ought to do in the dreadful times in which we are now living. We women in the Netherlands, living in a neutral country, accessible to the women of all other nations, therefore, take upon ourselves the responsibility of calling together such an international congress of women. We feel strongly that at a time when there is so much hatred

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Jane Addams, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate | 133 among nations, we women must show that we can retain our solidarity and that we are able to maintain a mutual friendship. Women are waiting to be called together. The world is looking to them for their contribution towards the solution of the great problems of the day. Women, whatever your nationality, whatever your party, your presence will be of great importance. The greater the number of those who take part in the congress, the stronger will be the impression its proceedings will make. Your presence will testify that you, too, wish to record your protest against this horrible war, and that you desire to assist in preventing a recurrence of it in the future. Let our call to you not be in vain!

The cable was signed by a Dutch woman, Dr. Aletta Jacobs, pioneer in women’s education, suffrage, medicine, birth-control and antimilitarism. Among other voices pressing Jane Addams to lead an American delegation to this Women’s Congress at The Hague were those of the British suffragette leader Emmeline Pethick Lawrence, the Hungarian pacifist feminist Rozika Schwimmer, the German radical feminist Lida Gustava Heymann, as well as all the leading figures in the American peace movement. Initially, Jane Addams had misgivings: Might not an international peace conference of women in the midst of a world war be futile if not outright harmful? She had no illusions that the women could be miracle workers, but she did believe it was fitting for women at least to meet and take counsel to see what might be done. The women who attended or supported this Women’s International Congress at The Hague in April 1915 were a quite extraordinary group of gifted, courageous, and altruistic pioneers. The American contingent included a professor of economics, Emily Greene Balch, later a Nobel Peace Prize winner; Dr. Alice Hamilton, medical specialist in industrial diseases; Julia Grace Wales, a university English teacher; Madeleine Doty, a lawyer and investigator of juvenile courts; and Elizabeth Glendower Evans, a trade-union organizer. The English supporters included women lawyers, artists, mathematicians, classicists, theologians, midwives, radical social reformers, writers, doctors, trade unionists, musicians – the most famous names among them being probably Olive Schreiner and Sylvia Pankhurst. The English press had a mocking field day, calling these women ‘Pro-Hun Peacettes’, ‘ feminine busybodies’, and a ‘shipload of hysterical women’. Theodore Roosevelt called the whole undertaking ‘silly and base’. Winston Churchill actually closed the North Sea to shipping, thus preventing most of the British delegates from attending the meeting. Meanwhile the American women aboard the Noordam had to risk possible U-boat attack on the Atlantic only to meet a British gunboat training a machine gun on them when the British Admiralty forced them

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134 | Part Three to anchor off the coast of Britain. Finally, however, the Americans were allowed to sail for a Dutch port, arriving just in time for the opening speeches at The Hague. Delegates to the Congress had arrived from Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, as well as the United States, and joined 1,000 Dutch Women at The Hague. Messages of support came from women in India, Brazil, Spain, Serbia, Poland, and South Africa. Only Frenchwomen, still enduring German occupation in northern France, were largely hostile. It was agreed beforehand that there should be no opportunity for accusations and counteraccusations concerning the belligerents’ guilt. All minds were to be concentrated on how international affairs must be organized in the future to prevent a similar cataclysm. The original objects of the Women’s International Congress had been (1) to demand that international disputes shall in the future be settled by some other means than war and (2) to claim that women should have a voice in the affairs of the nations. The Congress did rather more than demand some bland, non-specified alternative to war: they worked out a number of very practical alternatives to competitions in massacre. Their final resolutions included several that focused on war prevention via a more just and cooperative regulation of international commercial, nonmilitary trade; open diplomacy instead of covert intrigue and secret treaties; and self-determination for small nations. They also supported the creation of international bodies for arbitration and conciliation once conflicts had broken out. Almost all these resolutions anticipated and even influenced Woodrow Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points. At the end of the congress’s business, Rozika Schwimmer took the rostrum to declare that ‘paper expressions of pious wishes’ were not enough. There must be action. She moved that the Congress immediately send women envoys to all the war capitals and all the neutral nations, asking the foreign ministers of the belligerents to state their war aims and the neutral governments to act as mediators to bring about a cease-fire and a negotiated end to the war. “Brains, they say, have ruled the world. But if brains have brought us to where we find ourselves today, it is time that our hearts spoke also. . . . We must send our women as envoys. To these crowned male heads we must send the women crowned with thorns.”7 If the holding of the Women’s International Congress in the middle of a world war was an act of unparalleled antimilitarist resolve,8 the dispatch of women envoys to all the belligerent and neutral capitals of Europe was even more trans-nationally idealistic and audacious. ‘I know how wild [the plans] must sound in the U.S.A,’ Jane Addams admitted to her lifelong friend Mary Smith. ‘I don’t think I have lost my head. There is just one chance in ten thousand.’ She was deputed to go with Dr. Aletta Jacobs and Dr. Alice Hamilton to the foreign ministries in London, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Bern, Rome, Paris, and Le Havre (the home of the

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Jane Addams, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate | 135 Belgian government in exile). She found the Austrian foreign minister the most ready to envisage a mediated settlement, his French counterpart the least. All the belligerents claimed that they were fighting in self-defence and must carry on to the bitter end. To be seen willing to negotiate would look like weakness. The message from the neutrals seemed to be that they were waiting for a signal from the belligerents and above all from the United States before attempting to intervene. The Germans, however, did not believe in the Americans’ good faith, being convinced that they were not really neutral but on the side of a Britain that was deliberately starving German non-combatants by blockading Germany.9 Jane Addams, exhausted and ill, returned to the United States early in July 1915 and sought to rouse public opinion behind an American effort to end the war, putting her case to President Wilson that he should head such an effort, which the neutral governments were encouraging. However, the very opposite of what she had hoped for ensued. Far from winning over public opinion in America, Jane Addams alienated it; far from trying to stop the war, Woodrow Wilson led the United States into it; far from ending as soon as possible with a just, negotiated peace, the war dragged on through the slaughter of the Somme, Verdun, and Passchendaele to the punitive, doomed Treaty of Versailles. Jane Addams alienated American public opinion by daring to question the ‘heroism’ of war. Even though the people of the United States were not yet actually dying in World War I, they were already fighting, in their imagination, a Germany, one of whose submarines had just sunk the Lusitania. And as Jane Addams herself remarked with rueful wisdom: ‘Even to seem to differ from those she loves in the hour of their affliction has ever been the supreme test of a woman’s conscience.’10 It is the supreme test because it may make those she loves hate her. Jane Addams and her fellow envoys from The Hague Congress had been unique among American women in 1915 in that they had actually seen the ‘barricaded cities, bombed-out buildings, wounded and crippled soldiers of Europe’11 as they crossed many frontiers to hold their unsuccessful interviews with the foreign ministers of the belligerent powers. What had struck Jane Addams most poignantly on her travels, as she reported at Carnegie Hall on July 9, 1915, was the sheer horror of militarism as expressed by young soldiers of all nationalities. More than anything, the soldiers who were sensitive could not bear the command to participate in a bayonet charge: ‘We were told in several countries that in order to inhibit the sensibilities of this type of man, stimulants were given to the soldiers before a bayonet charge was ordered. The men had to be primed with rum or absinthe.’12 Jane Addams was instantly accused of besmirching the heroism of men dying for ‘home, country, and peace itself.’ As usual, war was valorized by the dying that it involved, not invalidated by the crazy killing that it legitimated. Jane Addams’ conviction, based on her interviews in many

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136 | Part Three European military hospitals, that men are not natural killers, was twisted by the American press to imply that she believed men to be incapable of heroic self-sacrifice. On the contrary, of course, it was the refusal of many of the young men in the trenches to be absolutely ruthless that Jane Addams held to be truly self-sacrificial and truly heroic. It was for this that she was labelled a ‘silly, vain, impertinent old maid’, ‘a foolish, garrulous woman’, ‘one of the shrieking sisterhood’, and ‘poor bleeding Jane’.13 Jane Addams did not relish such contemptuous personal abuse and the attacks were made worse by the fact that she was suffering from exhaustion, pneumonia, and tuberculosis of the kidney after her return from Europe. Nevertheless, having failed to persuade Woodrow Wilson to act on his wish to be the pacific mediator in Europe (he was more swayed by the militarist advice of Secretary of State Lansing), Jane Addams went on doggedly, agreeing to testify at a hearing before the House Committee on Military Affairs in January 1916. The House was dealing with a bill to increase the efficiency of the military establishment, and Jane Addams, representing the Women’s Peace Party, testified that in her view America was suffering from irrational ‘war contagion.’ She opposed the advocates of ‘preparedness’ who wanted a massive increase in spending for the Navy. However, she did not make any utopian plea for actual disarmament by the United States; she merely urged that the U.S. government pause and consider the matter for six months rather than rush into a rearmament drive that could foster an arms race with Japan and prevent America from having any moral influence in a post-war, war-weary Europe desperately needing to substitute proportional disarmament for its old habit of building rival standing armies. She lost the military preparedness debate; and as she predicted, a lethal and renewed arms race, both with Japan and within Europe, took place. Even after the United States entered the war in April 1917, Jane Addams maintained her principled commitment to pacifism. But she was increasingly isolated in taking such a stance. Those very Americans, either themselves immigrants or else the children of immigrants, whom she had so recently believed to be evolving into ‘kindly citizens of the world’, now became Super-patriots overnight. Far from transcending nationalism, they overcompensated for the suspicion that they might be less than 150 percent American. Jane Addams was publicly denounced and ostracized and even placed under surveillance by the Department of Justice. She confessed that she now learned, when totally isolated, how a pacifist ‘finds it possible to travel from the mire of self-pity straight to the barren hills of self-righteousness and to hate herself equally in both places.’14 By March 1918 the Los Angeles Times described Jane Addams’ eyes, sanguine no more, as ‘very earnest, very tragic’.15

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Jane Addams, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate | 137

Jane Addams and the Post-war World In January 1919, two months after the guns at last stopped firing in Europe, Jane Addams’ name headed a list compiled by Archibald Stevenson, a lawyer employed by Military Intelligence, of Americans holding ‘dangerous, destructive, and anarchistic sentiments’. She was soon branded a Communist. In May 1919, refusing to be intimidated by this growing hostility and distrust from the American press, Jane Addams went to Zurich to preside over a second Women’s International Congress, again consisting of women from the recently warring nations as well as of neutrals. That Congress was a second remarkable achievement in transnationalism, and it founded the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Its main work was a detailed, prophetic critique of the punitive clauses of the Treaty of Versailles, and Jane Addams delivered that critique in person to the deaf ears of the U.S. ambassador in Paris. In July 1919, Jane Addams joined a Quaker relief mission to Germany to see the conditions of the defeated for herself; for although the war was over, the Allies were still blockading Germany in order to enforce the Treaty of Versailles. She saw the sick, apathetic, skeletal babies and children, and she ate their ‘ersatz’ diet of watery soup and black bread made partly of sawdust and tree bark. On her return to the United States, she wrote and spoke in public about the food crisis in Europe and tried to raise money to feed German children. For this she was called un-American and a traitor. In Detroit alone she was heckled for forty-five minutes before being allowed to speak. By 1920, Jane Addams’ only preoccupation was how to organize postwar reconstruction so that future wars would be prevented, and her thoughts on this problem were published in 1922 as Peace and Bread in Time of War. In this book, which might have been more aptly entitled Peace through Bread, Jane Addams formulated a contrasting, alternative version of Realpolitik to that favoured by Bismarck and all his militarist heirs. To her – and, she insisted, to all ordinary people – the fundamental human reality is not the struggle for power, a struggle only resolvable intermittently by a threatened or actual infliction of death, but rather the reality of our experienced life needs – above all, the need for food. A concomitant reality is our pity for those whom we know to be without food and our resulting urge to feed them. A third reality could be the enactment of that pity and that urge to feed the starving through an organized cooperative internationalism. There [is] something as primitive and real about feeding the helpless as there [is] about . . . fighting. . . . [In] the race history, the tribal feeding of children antedated mass fighting by perhaps a million years. Anthropologists insist that war has not been in the world for more than 20,000 years.16

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138 | Part Three It was at this point in her life that Jane Addams turned to women for hope of a new, more peaceful world order. Because of the age-old social role of women in growing and preparing much of the world’s food each day, it seemed to Jane Addams during World War I that ‘millions of American women might be caught up into a great world purpose, that of conservation of life: there might be found an antidote to war in woman’s affection and all-embracing pity for helpless children.’17 Out of her faith in the possibility of feeding the world’s children through a collective international effort organized primarily by women, came Jane Addams’ vision of the possibility of a new, humane, international world order: [During] the winter of 1916–17, I . . . came to believe it possible that the more sophisticated questions of national grouping and territorial control would gradually adjust themselves if the paramount human question of food for the hungry were fearlessly and drastically treated upon an international basis.18

She was, of course, to be tragically disappointed yet again. Fridtjof Nansen’s pleas to the League of Nations in September 1921 for a coordinated international effort to relieve twenty-five million starving Russians was rejected. Jane Addams did not lose all hope for the world at that point, but she did lose hope for the League of Nations. If the coal, the iron, the oil and above all the grain had been distributed under international control from the first day of the armistice . . . the League could actually have laid the foundations of that type of government towards which the world is striving.19

From our own perspective, with another order dying and another new order yet unborn, perhaps we should give serious thought to Jane Addams’ advocacy of adequate international aid as the essential prerequisite for a more just and, therefore, a more peaceable world. Internationalism, Jane Addams believed, is much too vital to the life of the world to be left to the rulers of the world, for they, in fact, are the very last people on earth capable of conceding the necessary diminution of their ‘tribal’ powers. Our only alternative, according to her, is to rely upon non-governmental agencies to practise internationalism for life’s sake, thereby creating an international order through the ‘internationalism of the deed’ rather than the internationalism of abstract rhetoric. There should be fewer pious invocations of ‘human rights’ and rather more practical carrying out of our own ‘duties of humanity’ in Mazzini’s phrase, thought Jane Addams, social worker from downtown Chicago, whose ‘turf’ was finally the world. As John Dewey, the child-centred educationalist and philosopher, commented in 1945 in his essay ‘Democratic Versus Coercive International Organization – the Realism of Jane Addams’:

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Jane Addams, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate | 139 It has become customary to give the name ‘realistic’ to the kind of organization that is based upon opposition to an enemy and that relies upon armed force to maintain itself. In contrast the road indicated by Miss Addams is . . . infinitely more ‘realistic’.20

Jane Addams had to live to witness both the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. Appalled, and increasingly exhausted, she continued nevertheless to testify to the eventual viability of alternatives to militaristic nationalism, that is, to the practical world organizations that would be rooted in ‘the oneness of humanity and the interdependence of nations’. Of the two central issues of American foreign and defence policy during the 1920s and early 1930s, she persistently advocated the recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States and the withdrawal of U.S. Marines from all foreign bases.

Jane Addams’ Effect on World Politics Jane Addams’ life as an actor in world politics may seem to have been a total failure. All her unprecedented and unparalleled attempts at intervention were foiled. She did not succeed in helping to shorten World War I by persuading President Wilson or any other head of state to initiate continuous mediation by neutral powers in 1915. She did not persuade the House Committee to postpone, let alone cut, massive increases in the naval budget in 1916. She did not persuade the victorious world powers after 1919 to practise ‘internationalism of the deed’, pooling and distributing the essentials of life – grain, coal, iron, and oil – according to the devastated countries’ needs. Nevertheless, her efforts were not without some effect. The Final Resolutions of the Women’s International Congress in 1915 did influence Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, especially on the issues of national self-determination, arms control, open diplomacy, fairer trade, and the pacific settlement of disputes. The organization that Jane Addams helped to found and over which she presided – the Women’s International League – is still functioning today (with national sections in every continent) and is also a respected nongovernmental organization of well-informed professional women at the UN. Above all, Jane Addams’ ideas are still alive. She was the prototype of the ‘social feminist’, a woman who, while never idealizing women as being essentially pacific,21 still respected women’s brains and workaday experience sufficiently to insist that women do have a necessary contribution to make to the joint struggle against war. Women have a clear responsibility to extend their life-nurturing work in the private world to the larger public world, and they should be given the opportunity to exercise such responsibility. ‘There is obviously great need’, she wrote in the middle of World War I, in Women at The Hague, ‘that women should attempt, in an organ-

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140 | Part Three ized capacity, to make their contribution to . . . governmental internationalism and to the long effort to place law above force . . . in the great experiment of living together.’22 In accepting her share of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, Addams expressed her version of Martin Luther King’s dream: It was the mothers who first protested that their children should no longer be slain as living sacrifices upon the altars of tribal gods. . . . I should like to see the women of civilization rebel against the senseless wholesale human sacrifice of warfare.23

The ‘women of civilization’ – modern, educated women, no longer the victims of mass irrationality – were the women in whom Jane Addams put her hope. That Jane Addams should have been granted a hearing on the subject of world politics by so many men in power was owing to the fact that she was a quite exceptional woman. And paradoxically, it was easier for her to gain that hearing precisely because, as a woman, she was an un-enfranchised outsider who did not have to compete against men, on men’s terms. Because she was acknowledged to be exceptional, men could make her an exception. But because she was, in the last resort, ‘only’ a woman – however exceptional and however closely linked to other exceptional women – men in power did not have to heed her. That men in power did not in fact heed her was, in my view, entirely owing to their limitations, not hers. The timid, old-fashioned, cynical ‘realism’ of men in power dared not contemplate acting on her alternative ‘realism’ based on an acknowledgment of our common human needs and our capacity to want to answer such needs. Leonard Woolf’s International Government (1916) divided the world into ‘practical men’ and ‘amiable cranks’, pointing out that those who regard themselves as the former have often been led into the most hideous and disastrous errors while laughing at the latter. Among the ‘amiable cranks’ he included Socrates, Jesus Christ – and Jane Addams. Jane Addams’ legacy to us today is best understood if we look at one woman activist now alive who most carries on her legacy. Inga Thorsson, veteran Swedish economist and former United Nations Special Expert on Disarmament for Development, carries on Jane Addams’ advocacy of peace through bread. Thorsson tirelessly reminds both governments and international organizations that the world’s resources must and can be redistributed ‘so that the fundamental necessities of human life – clean water, food, elementary health care and schooling – are available to all people throughout the world’ as set forth in the UN Charter. Inga Thorsson has done much detailed work on the economic conversion strategies necessary to change from weapons production to ‘civilian’ production without incurring mass unemployment. She has also spelled

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Jane Addams, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate | 141 out the change we need to make in our thinking so that we no longer automatically identify the term ‘security’ as necessarily meaning military security against military attack, but rather as precisely the reverse – nonmilitary security from non-military scourges: destitution, hunger, disease, unemployment, homelessness, and illiteracy. By tackling the conservation of human life and the enrichment of the quality of human life in an internationalist spirit, Inga Thorsson, like Jane Addams seventy years before her, tells us we shall find that we are also, in fact, saving the life of the world from war.24 Given our current situation, with the revival of warring tribalisms in Europe, the growing inequality between nations North and South, and West and East, the lack of effective arms control, the manifold threats to the global ecology, and the rise of increasingly intolerant fundamentalisms – each claiming a monopoly of truth and all of them oppressive to women – Jane Addams may be envied her rest in peace. But in her time, she had her full share of the world’s evils to grieve over and to try to counter and alleviate. Despite the fluctuations in her standing in the American popular press, to almost all who worked with her, Jane Addams was the wisest human being they ever knew. It is just possible that her faith in ‘the internationalism of the deed’ may be vindicated yet. Notes 1 See Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (New York: Oxford, 1973), chap. 14. 2 Maude Royden’s Address at the Memorial Service for Jane Addams, London, 4 June 1935. 3 Jane Addams’ pre-war publications included Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), Newer Ideals of Peace (1907), The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909), Twenty Years at Hull House (1910), and ‘Why Women Should Vote’ (1910). 4 Quoted in Christopher Lasch, ed., The Social Thought of Jane Addams (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 227–28. 5 See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. 1, chaps. 11 and 15. 6 See Daniel Levine, Jane Addams and the Liberal Tradition (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1971), chap. 14; see also Davis, American Heroine, chap. 12. 7 From the report of the Women’s International Congress now held in the Women’s Library, London School of Economics and Political Science. 8 How unthinkable it would have been during the Gulf War for antimilitarist women from Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United States, Israel, Kuwait, Western Europe, Libya, Jordan, and so forth, to have gathered for a Women’s International Congress in Stockholm in 1991. 9 For accounts of the Congress and its activities, see Lela B. Costin, ‘Feminism, Pacifism, Internationalism, and the 1915 International Congress of Women’, Women’s Studies International Forum 5:34 (1982): 301–5, and Anne Wiltsher, Most Dangerous Women: Feminist Peace Campaigners of the Great War (London: Pandora, 1985).

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142 | Part Three 10 Jane Addams, Emily Balch, and Alice Hamilton, Women at The Hague (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 125. 11 Ibid., 73. 12 Quoted in Davis, American Heroine, 226. 13 Ibid., 229 and 223. 14 Ibid., 247. 15 Ibid., 250. 16 Jane Addams, Peace and Bread in Time of War, 1922; reprint, Boston: Hall, 1960, 75. 17 Ibid., 82–83. 18 Ibid., 89. 19 Ibid., 213. 20 Ibid., xviii. 21 In Women at The Hague, Jane Addams wrote: ‘The belief that a woman is against war simply because she is a woman and not a man, cannot, of course, be substantiated. In every country there are women who believe that war is inevitable and righteous; the majority of women as well as men in the nations at war doubtless hold that conviction.’ (127–28) 22 Ibid., 138–41. 23 Emily Cooper Johnson, ed., Jane Addams: A Centennial Reader (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 324. 24 For more on Inga Thorsson, see Sybil Oldfield, Women against the Iron Fist: Alternatives to Militarism, 1900–1989 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), Chap. 9.

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CHAPTER

14 Simone Weil (1909–1943) The wise fool ‘Mais elle est folle!’ (de Gaulle, c. 1942)

It is generally agreed that the French philosopher Simone Weil was an extraordinary phenomenon. To the dissident communist Boris Souvarine, in the 1930s, she was ‘the only brain that the working-class movement has produced in many years’;1 to the Anglo-Catholic T. S. Eliot, in 1951, she had a ‘kind of genius akin to that of the saints’;2 to the humanist Albert Camus, in 1961, she was ‘the only great spirit of our time.’3 Until very recently Simone Weil has been celebrated above all as a religious mystic, but this chapter will concentrate exclusively on her enduring legacy to humanist political thought on the subject of war. The ascetic ‘otherworldly’ Simone Weil in fact spent the greater part of her last years trying to save this world as she struggled to define and articulate an alternative value-system for our world to that favoured by Hitler (and by all his fellow militarists before and since). For war, Simone Weil believed, was the affliction of the twentieth century, just as slavery (and consequent crucifixion) had been the affliction of the Roman Empire.4 Simone Weil was a deeply sensitive, hyper-intelligent child of nearly six when she first came into contact with the suffering caused by war. Her doctor father had been sent to Neufchâteau in December 1914 to work in a military typhoid hospital. Against the rules, his family moved there also and Simone and her mother ‘went almost every day to the hospitals to bring the patients oranges, crackers and newspapers . . . The hospitals [were] packed to overflowing with sick and wounded’.5 Simone became passionately patriotic, learning and declaiming nationalistic verse by heart and at six and a half she ‘adopted’ a French soldier at the front who had no family, sending him letters and packages. On 29 May 1917, when Simone was eight, this adopted soldier of hers arrived Originally published in Oldfield, Women Against the Iron Fist, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, UK and Cambridge, Mass. 1989; revised and republished as Alternatives to Militarism, 1900–1989, Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston, Lampeter, 2000.

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144 | Part Three unexpectedly at the Weils’ house. ‘For Simone it was a great delight, a feast of friendship. Holding hands, the little girl and her big adopted soldier would take walks all through the day. They never saw him again, for soon after his leave he was killed in action.’6 Dorothy McFarland is surely right in saying: ‘It would seem that the war affected her very deeply; it was probably the primary external cause of her obsession with suffering and affliction.’7 Simone Weil herself was to date her conversion to antinationalism from the way in which World War I was ended: I was ten years old at the time of Versailles, and up to then I had been patriotically thrilled as children are in war-time. But the will to humiliate the defeated enemy which revealed itself so loathsomely everywhere at that time (and in following years) was enough to cure me once and for all of that naive sort of patriotism.8

Simone Weil was psychologically well prepared, therefore, to be intensely sympathetic to the teaching of the pacifist moral philosopher Alain, whom she first encountered when she was sixteen and a half in October 1925. Simone Weil’s innate anti-authoritarianism and her passionate fellowship with the victims of society greeted the selfsame attitudes in Alain as she whole-heartedly endorsed her professor’s implacable opposition to war: The First World War had made him an ardent and convinced pacifist, for him the chief goal of political action was the preservation of peace . . . he thought that war makes us into greater slaves than capitalism ever could . . . What is the slavery of a worker when set alongside that of a soldier? His disciples were therefore resolved to be pacifists before all else and to spread the spirit of resistance to war as much as possible.9

Simone Weil was taught by Alain for four years and he became a significant, lifelong influence upon her. Between the ages of 16 and 20 Simone Weil was a typical ardent young peace activist: she addressed envelopes and mailed the monthly newspaper of her pacifist organization, The Will to Peace; she leafleted neighbourhoods and put up fly-posters; after the Kellogg Peace Pact ‘outlawing war’ in August 1928, she circulated a manifesto calling for immediate, total disarmament; in February 1929, her branch of the civil liberties organization, the League for the Rights of Man, voted in favour of urging the French government to accept ‘universal and obligatory arbitration’, and in international conflicts to initiate genuine disarmament; it also called upon French people to substitute a policy of Franco-German union for their previous policy of intransigent revenge. During this same period Simone Weil collected signatures protesting against the new policy of the pre-emptive arrest of demonstrators by the police; and in May of 1930

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Simone Weil (1909–1943) | 145 she took part in a pacifists’ march demonstrating support for Briand. The marchers were charged and truncheoned by the Paris police – Simone Weil herself was knocked down but got up again and carried on marching. In all these activities Simone Weil was a typical radical, anti-militarist student; what was less typical was that her youth marked not the climacteric of her pacifist radicalism, but merely its beginning. The following years, 1932–9, were to see her continuously pondering the problem of war as the ultimate form of social violence and connecting it with other forms of social oppression, including the inhumanly efficient technology of industrial mass production and the impersonal, bureaucratic mode of centralized twentieth-century administration. The freshness and independent-mindedness of Simone Weil’s thought on the prevention of war was first seen in an article published on 20 February 1932 in L’Effort – the paper of militant unionists in the building trade in Lyons. Perhaps surprisingly, Simone Weil here decisively opposed both collective security through the League of Nations and proposals for civil defence. At the abortive League of Nations’ Conference on Disarmament at Geneva, in 1932, France had submitted a memorandum proposing the creation of an international force at the service of the League of Nations. Simone Weil opposed this proposition on the grounds that it was not really serious because everyone knew that there was no chance of its being adopted. Whether she would also have opposed such a proposal, had it been serious, is not clear. Simone Weil also opposed a French proposal that international rules should be established for the protection of the civilian population in case of war. With all-too prophetic insight, Simone Weil argued that civil defence ‘only helped to increase the probability of war by guaranteeing the safety of governments and general staffs. She felt that everyone should be in danger if any one person was; the equality of danger was to some extent an assurance against war.’10 Although she was now a respectable young probationary teacher of philosophy at a girls’ lycée, and expected to behave as such, Simone Weil still took part in street protests that the bourgeois considered to be in deplorable taste. In October 1933, for example, she was hoisted on to a window-sill by her syndicalist/pacifist friends in order to address a demonstration against Lebrun, the French president, who had come to unveil a local war memorial. She took advantage of the occasion to attack the life-and-death powers of the head of state, a man who in this case was also suspected of being in the pocket of the French armaments manufacturers. It was not for him to make elegiac speeches at war memorials. Simone Weil followed this up with an anarchist/pacifist article, ‘Reflections on War’ published in November 1933 in La Critique Sociale, the magazine founded by her dissident communist friend Boris Souvarine. Every war, she said, should be evaluated in terms of the means it employs, rather than in terms of the aims it pursues. She took issue with those on the left who were flirting with the idea of a just, revolutionary anti-fascist

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146 | Part Three ‘people’s war’, pointing out that all modern wars subordinate the combatants to the instruments of combat. In effect then, war is . . . the war of the State apparatus against its own army. In war, as in fascism, the essential ‘point’ is the obliteration of the individual by a state bureaucracy serving a rabid fanaticism.11 War always strengthens the hand of the state over the people – no matter what ideology that state purports to serve: The great error of almost every study on war . . . is to consider war as an episode in foreign policy, when above all it constitutes a fact of domestic policy, and the most atrocious one of all . . . [For] massacre is the most radical form of oppression, and soldiers do not expose themselves to death, they are sent to the slaughter . . . Revolutionary war is the tomb of the revolution . . . Whether the [enemy] is labelled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains The Apparatus – the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers’ enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves.12

Extraordinarily resonant words which anticipated Brecht’s poem: ‘Wenn Es Zum Marschieren Kommt’: When it comes to marching There’s plenty who don’t know That their enemy is marching at their head. The voice that’s giving the orders Is their enemy’s voice. For he who talks of enemies Is himself the enemy.13

Simone Weil’s conclusion in 1933 was the absolute pacifist one that ‘in no matter what circumstances, the worst betrayal is to consent to subordinate oneself to this apparatus and, in its service, to destroy in oneself and in others, all true human values.’14 Equally prophetic was Simone Weil’s ‘Sketch of Contemporary Life in her Oppression and Liberty, written at the end of 1933 and early 1934, and influenced, in its pessimism, both by Hitler’s defeat of the German working-class movement and by Stalin’s defeat of the Russians. She was appalled by the lack of human scale already visible in every aspect of industrialized society: We are living in a world in which nothing is made to man’s measure. [Certain] units of measurement are given and have hitherto remained invariable, such as the human body, human life, the year, the day, the

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Simone Weil (1909–1943) | 147 average quickness of human thought, [but] present-day life is not organised on the scale of all these things . . . Quantity is changed into quality, as Hegel said, and in particular a mere difference in quantity is sufficient to change what is human into what is unhuman.15

The supreme example of inhumanity is war, which is a competition in inhumanity; and in the twentieth century both the scale of warfare and of war preparations and the centralization of bureaucratic administration mean that the ‘power and concentration of armaments place all human lives at the mercy of the central authority.’16 Since the state machine is becoming ever more powerful and since national economies are becoming increasingly subordinate to military interests, the ‘pivot around which social life revolves . . . is none other than preparation for war.’17 The economic struggle for power between states can all too easily result in war, whilst the constant preparation for such war only strengthens the centralizing power within each state. Future wars will mean ‘a crazy destruction of wealth of all kinds that previous generations have bequeathed us and finally our civilisation will perish.’18 It is a remarkable warning from a writer of the pre-nuclear age. Over 80 years ago Simone Weil could already see that ‘our present situation . . . resembles that of a party of absolutely ignorant travellers who find themselves in a motor-car launched at full speed and driverless across broken ground.’19 Early in 1936, after her year of factory work, 1934–5, Simone Weil was still an absolute pacifist on moral grounds.20 It was at this same period, April 1936, that she wrote her ‘resumé’ of Antigone for the factory workers at Rosières, and it is significant that it should have been Antigone that she chose as essential to popularize then, rather than any other text of world literature. Clearly, she wanted her worker-readers to share her own affirmation of this courageous, proud being’s lonely stand against righteous war-hatred in the name of the State. She translated Antigone’s defiant credo addressed to Creon: ‘Your orders, I believe, have less authority than the unwritten and unrepealable laws of God . . . I was born not to mete out hatred, but love.’ Pity for helplessness must take precedence over patriotic moral condemnation. Only five months later, however, Simone Weil herself was issued with a rifle to fight in a righteous war for which she had volunteered. How could such a volte-face from her absolute pacifism have been possible? Between April and July 1936 it seemed to Simone Weil – as it did to many other youthful radicals the world over – that the Spanish anarchosyndicalist working class were defending themselves against Franco’s fascist invasion in order to create a real ‘people’s revolution of selfcontained and self-governing communes.’21 She believed that just for once a war was being fought that was not subordinated to the state-machine. Sitting in Paris, reading the news from Spain (as Simone Weil later

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148 | Part Three confessed in a letter to Georges Bernanos), she ‘could not prevent [herself] from participating morally in that war – in other words, from hoping all day and every day for the victory of one side and the defeat of the other.’ So she left for Spain. Ironically, the commander she enlisted under, the anarchist Durruti, was not only one of the most dedicated, but also one of the most violent of all the war-leaders. Simone Weil comforted herself that she was too short-sighted ever to hit anybody or anything at which she aimed; nevertheless she did point her rifle at Nationalist bombing aeroplanes that were out of range and she did recognize that if she were captured she would deserve to be shot – ‘Our troops have spilled a lot of blood. I am morally an accomplice.’22 Just how much blood, she learned only a few weeks later, after she herself had been invalided out by severe burns. What Simone Weil then had to face was that the genuinely idealistic struggle of the Spanish anarchists had rapidly been betrayed by the ferocity of the means they used to wage it. Pitiless killing had become an acceptable way of life and the ‘very purpose of the whole struggle is soon lost in an atmosphere of this sort. For the purpose can only be defined in terms of the public good, of the welfare of men – and men have become valueless.’23 She had hoped and believed that the Spanish Civil War would be less oppressively ‘totalitarian’ (that is, involving conscription, the execution of deserters and a pyramidal military command-structure amounting to dictatorship) than were the wars between sovereign states, but instead she had discovered that in anarchist Spain, just as in Bolshevik Russia and revolutionary France, the waging of war dictated totalitarianism even when its original impetus was libertarian. Moreover, in the agony of a civil war, one of the first casualties is law – as opposed, that is, to lynching – as Simone Weil herself was forced to report in her unfinished article, ‘Reflections, that No One is Going to Like’ (October 1936). Simone Weil’s own brief participation in the Spanish Civil War, from July to September 1936, therefore, actually strengthened rather than weakened her anti-militarism during the subsequent three years. She had experienced, she felt, the self-contradicting, total impossibility of fighting a good, just ‘People’s War’, upon her own pulse. On her return to France she wrote an uncompromisingly pacifist article entitled ‘Do We Have to Grease our Combat Boots?’ which asked rhetorically: ‘Can any war bring to the world more justice, more liberty, more well being?’24 She was convinced that a general war between nations was the greatest of all evils since it must result in the maximum number of human deaths, and in March 1937 she wrote her great analytical anti-militarist essay ‘Ne Recommençons pas la Guerre de Troie’ – translated as ‘The Power of Words’. This essay is the product of an Olympian mind; Simone Weil’s frame of reference ranges easily and authoritatively from Homer’s Iliad to the contemporary iron industry in Lorraine, from the Moroccan colonial crisis of 1911 to the street-fighting in Berlin in 1932, and from the plebeians in Ancient Rome to Poincaré in 1917. Her impulse to write the

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Simone Weil (1909–1943) | 149 essay came from her premonition that the un-reined propaganda-war between Hitler and Stalin would very soon escalate into a Second World War. In her insistence that such a war must not be accepted as inevitable, Simone Weil cast doubts on the reality of the alleged ideological gulf between Hitlerism and Stalinism and even on the justifiability of a war between ‘democracy’ and ‘dictatorship’. Furthermore, she tried to demonstrate the irrationality of all national wars as she posed the fundamental questions: Why do nation states prepare for war and wage war upon each other, century after century? Why is it so essential to be able to make war?25 Simone Weil’s starting-point is that the Trojan War, fought as it was over the phantom of Helen, is a timeless, symbolic expression of the unreality of all warfare. Wars are fought not for a limited, definable object26 but for ideas in the heads of the combatants. And these ideas are delusions, unreal abstractions. For our contemporaries the role of Helen is played by words with capital letters. If we grasp one of these words, all swollen with blood and tears, and squeeze it, we find it is empty. Words with content and meaning are not murderous . . . but when empty words are given capital letters, then, on the slightest pretext, men will begin shedding blood for them . . . In these conditions the only definition of success is to crush a rival group of men who have a hostile word on their banners; for it is a characteristic of these words that each of them has its complementary antagonist.27

Thus ‘our political universe is peopled exclusively by myths and monsters’ – such absolute and abstract entities as ‘Nation’, ‘Security’, ‘Capitalism’, ‘Communism’, ‘Fascism’, ‘Democracy’ and so forth. The tragedy is that ‘Corresponding to each empty abstraction there is an actual human group28 and when that group happens to be a nation state, then there is a permanent danger of war: In the end, a study of modern history leads to the conclusion that the national interest of every State consists in its capacity to make war . . . What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war; petrol is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict. Thus when war is waged it is for the purpose of safeguarding or increasing one’s capacity to make war.29

But, Simone Weil goes on to ask, Is it not natural that every State should define the national interest as the capacity to make war, when it is surrounded by States capable of subduing it by arms if it is weak? . . . And, further, a State cannot appear

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150 | Part Three weak in its external relations without the risk of weakening its authority with its own subjects.30

Thus every state, or bloc, makes an enemy of its opposite number by threatening to exterminate it; yet it has to make such a convincing threat, partly because each state feels threatened by some other state and partly in order to keep control and maintain its own prestige at home. ‘Nothing but complete and universal disarmament could resolve this dilemma, and that is hardly conceivable.’31 In uttering those terrible truths Simone Weil was agreeing with von Treitschke’s view that the nation state exists for the pursuance of war – the vital difference between them being that she abhorred what he had enthusiastically affirmed. To illustrate the irrationality of current ideological conflicts, and hoping that clearer thinking might yet save human lives, Simone Weil pointed out certain vital similarities between Hitlerism and Stalinism: In each of them the State seizes control of almost every department of individual and social life; in each there is the same frenzied militarisation, and the same artificial unanimity, obtained by coercion, in favour of a single party which identifies itself with the State . . . and finally there is the same serfdom imposed upon the working masses in place of the ordinary wage system.32

In our day . . . what is called national prestige consists in behaving always in such a way as to demoralise other nations by giving them the impression that, if it comes to war, one would certainly defeat them; what is called national security is an imaginary state of affairs in which one would retain the capacity to make war while depriving all other countries of it.33

It is still ‘nearly always believed, with or without reason, by all parties, that the only defence is attack’, and ‘the swarm of hate-filled abstractions’ cause us in our turn to ‘forget the value of life.’34 Throughout 1938 Simone Weil could not bear to believe in the inevitability of another world war, largely because of her own recent immersion in the reality of war in Spain. She herself had, however briefly, participated in the brutalizing business and she could not allow herself to forget it: ‘I was very nearly present at the execution of a priest. In the minutes of suspense I was asking myself whether I should simply look on or whether I should try to intervene and get myself shot as well. I still don’t know which I should have done if a lucky chance had not prevented the execution.’35 Simone Weil had also had first-hand experience in the field of the

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Simone Weil (1909–1943) | 151 corrupting effects of the ideology of ‘masculinism’, the identification of virility with ruthlessness. Her male comrades had boasted convivially to her about ‘how many priests they had murdered, or how many fascists, the latter being a very elastic term.’ She had been forced to come to the grim conclusion that, as she wrote to Bernanos: ‘As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage the killers with approving smiles. If anyone happens to feel a slight distaste to begin with, he keeps quiet and he soon begins to suppress it for fear of seeming unmanly.’36 Given that harsh education in the swift degeneration of even the most idealistic war, it is not surprising that Simone Weil kept up a fierce inner resistance to the realization that yet another, total war would soon have to be fought. On 25 March 1938, Simone Weil signed a pacifist declaration by French anti-fascists stating that it was essential, in the interests of world peace, to negotiate with Germany. Negotiation and an end to the deadly armaments race are ‘something on which perhaps the entire future of humanity depends.’37 On 25 April 1938 she was billed, together with Maria Montessori, as a leading pacifist figure to speak on foreign affairs during the following August. Clearly Simone Weil was still closely identified with pacifism in France. She was, however, already turning over in her own mind the possibility of armed resistance to a Nazi invasion, a form of resistance that would be at once less ‘totalitarian’ and more effective than that waged by a ‘conventional’ national army. Anticipating both the guerrilla tactics of many later anti-colonialist struggles and recent proposals of the ‘Alternative Defence Commission’ and Ecoropa,38 Simone Weil defined the problem as ‘how to render a possible invasion so difficult that the idea of such an invasion does not constitute a temptation in the neighbouring states.’39 In an article written early in April 1938 she faced the problem of how to organize a successful revolt in the event of invasion. Her answer was: by decentralizing economic, political and social life, and by decentralizing armed resistance –‘Do not form fronts, do not lay siege to cities; harass the enemy, break up his communications, attack him always where he least expects it, demoralise him, and stimulate the resistance by a series of small but victorious actions.’40 Clearly, therefore, Simone Weil was no longer in her own mind a pacifist. But she was still not reconciled to the inevitability of a second world war. She even preferred the thought of a fascist takeover under Daladier in France, although she well knew that that would imperil all her dearest friends on the Left, not to mention all French Jews including her own parents and brother. (She recognized that there were already signs of widespread, near-violent, anti-Semitism in France.) How could Simone Weil bear to envisage a fascist France? Her answer was that if that were the only price that could buy peace between France and Germany then ‘it would be less murderous of French youth as a whole.’41 The ‘less murderous’ path was now the only one left to opt for, but it

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152 | Part Three was still bitter to have to opt for it – sacrificing the anti-fascist Sudeten Germans, endangering all the other Czechs and humiliating the liberal democracies. After Munich, in September 1938, she wrote: ‘We have been humiliated . . . every one of us has been subjected in the very centre of our beings to . . . the abasement of thought before the power of factual reality.’42 Simone Weil recognized that the Munich Agreement had not averted war, merely postponed it. The rise of fascism and the concomitant near-certainty of war had by now destroyed her humanist faith in progress, as is clear in the fragment ‘The Distress of our Time’: ‘The great expectations inherited from the three preceding centuries and above all from the last century, the hope of a progressive spread of knowledge, the hope of general well-being, the hope of democracy, the hope of peace, are all in the process of disintegrating.’43 The final stage of the transition in Simone Weil’s thinking between her realization that a general war against Hitler would be fought and her recognition that it would have to be fought – that it was not merely a political inevitability but also a moral necessity – is found in her first reflections on the brutal duplicity of Republican Rome, published by Richard Rees as ‘Three Letters on History’ in his edition of her Selected Essays. The analogy she drew between Ancient Rome’s attempt at world domination and that of Hitler was developed in her ‘Réflexions en vue d’un Bilan’, translated as ‘Cold War Policy in 1939’ and written in April 1939 after Britain’s introduction of conscription. In this article Simone Weil still clung to one last hope, that the surrounding democracies might yet hold Hitler off from waging unlimited war by means of a combination of tactical concessions and diplomatic resistance, thus buying time in which his regime might grow ever weaker from within. Nevertheless she was beginning to admit to herself that Hitler, like Rome, was not prepared to give his adversaries this option of buying time. To find another period when men of every kind, in countries extending over a vast area, were equally disturbed by a political danger one would have to go back to the period when Rome annihilated Carthage and crushed Greece . . . [And] since I believe the Roman conquests, with their atrocious material or spiritual annihilation of entire peoples, to have been history’s great disaster, I have no difficulty in accepting the general view that universal domination by Germany would be a catastrophe . . . It is to be feared . . . that the danger is not an illusion . . . [Hitler] governs a country which is strained to full pitch; his will is fiery, unflagging, pitiless, and closed to considerations of humanity; his imagination plays with grandiose historical visions of the future, in a Wagnerian style; and he is a natural gambler.44

Once Hitler demonstrated that he was not, in fact, to be restrained, Simone Weil was reluctantly converted to the moral necessity for fighting

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Simone Weil (1909–1943) | 153 World War II. She even wished she had come round to that conviction earlier: Ever since the day I decided, after a very painful inner struggle, that in spite of my pacifist inclinations it had become an overriding obligation in my eyes to work for Hitler’s destruction, with or without any chance of success, ever since that day my resolve has not altered; and that day was the one on which Hitler entered Prague – in May 1939, if I remember right. My decision was tardy, perhaps; I left it too late, perhaps, before adopting that position. Indeed, I think so and I bitterly reproach myself for it.45

But, Simone Weil insisted, Hitler must be destroyed not by outdoing him in brutality, violence and inhumanity, and not even by being just a little less brutal, violent and inhumane than he: ‘Whoever is only incapable of being as brutal, violent and inhumane as the adversary, yet without exercising the opposite virtues, is inferior to this adversary in both inner strength and prestige; and he will not hold his own against him.’46 In order to be genuinely, incontrovertibly anti-fascist, argued Simone Weil, the democracies must first practise the reverse of Hitler’s domination and racism themselves. Therefore they must, early on in the hostilities, announce their commitment to renounce their own colonial imperialism in Africa and Asia. Addressing herself in particular to the situation of France, Simone Weil insistently criticized French colonial policy in Algeria and Indo-China (for example in her 1943 essay ‘East and West’, now translated in her Selected Essays). Nearer home, on the actual war-fronts, Simone Weil argued that the Allies must show themselves to be just as capable of suicidal heroism as the Nazi storm-troopers, only with the motive of saving human life rather than destroying it. Above all, Simone Weil tirelessly reiterated that the one thing that anti-Nazis must not do, whether during the war or after its victorious conclusion, was to imitate Hitler. If France, for example, were to take a leaf out of Hitler’s book and herself impose a peace of extermination upon the Germans: ‘Hitler’s system would not disappear; it would simply migrate, with all its characteristic aims and methods, to France . . . for the future of humanity, for civilisation, for freedom, a victory like this would not be much better than defeat.’47 To clarify this point in her political writing from 1939 to 1943 Simone Weil concentrated on defining what she believed to be the essential evil of Hitler and Hitlerism, seeking out its root in West European history and warning her own people, the Free French, against succumbing in their turn to the temptations of nationalist idolatry, leader-worship and ‘false greatness’. ‘Analogies,’ wrote Simone Weil, ‘are deceptive; they must be used with caution, but they are our only guide.’48 The analogy that she continued to find most fruitful for an understanding of the essence of Nazism was the

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154 | Part Three history of Rome. Immediately after the outbreak of World War II Simone Weil wrote her ‘Reflections on the Origins of Hitlerism’, including one section on ‘Hitler and Roman Foreign Policy’ and another – rejected by the censor in Vichy France – on Hitler and Roman Internal Policy. Simone Weil insisted that the pernicious legacy of Roman values and praxis had not been confined to Nazi Germany (although it was currently seen at its most brutal wherever the Nazis had power): Every people which turns itself into a nation by submitting to a centralised, bureaucratic, military State becomes and long remains a scourge to its neighbours and the world. This phenomenon is not connected with Germanic blood . . . The majority of people in Europe obey nothing else than the authority of the State.49

And outside itself the authority of the State nowadays encounters no limitation or judge: Even the treaties it signs only commit it to its own interpretation of them and no other interpretation can be legitimately imposed on it from outside. Its power is, in fact, limited solely by the power of other sovereign nations, that is to say, by war, or the explicit or implicit threat of war.50

It is remarkable that no sooner had World War II begun than Simone Weil was not only seeking out its tap-root two thousand years earlier, but she was also suggesting how the world should reorganize international relations when once the war against Hitler had been won. The League of Nations had been doomed to fail, she wrote, because it had tried to establish a supranational international order while leaving the dogma of national sovereignty still intact.51 (Clearly she would have made a similar diagnosis of the failure up till now of the United Nations.) The alternative that she proposed was a federalist world order made up of nations – or rather of ex-nations – that had themselves evolved a great measure of internal decentralization. For the sake of world peace Germany must be dismembered – but so must Germany’s conquerors. The victors must: . . . accept for themselves the same transformation that they impose upon the vanquished. The victory of those who are armed to defend a just cause is not necessarily a just victory; it is not the cause for which men took up arms that makes a victory more just or less, it is the order that is established when arms have been laid down.52

The alternative to such a just, magnanimous peace after World War II, she warned, would be the continued organization of mutual massacres, culminating at last in ‘the mutual destruction of all the states’.

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Simone Weil (1909–1943) | 155 Increasingly, Simone Weil had come to see that the fate of the whole world would depend on whether humanity could or could not evolve an alternative value-system to that which upheld the power (and the right) of the stronger to dominate the weaker, whether by military or by economic force. The Gospel of Force – Realpolitik – did not begin with Bismarck; Simone Weil points out that it was familiar to every tyrant – and to his victims – in the Ancient World, and that it first came to full fruition with the almost-global tyranny of Ancient Rome. One of her most profound meditations on the Gospel of Force – and on the alternative to it – is found in her essay on Homer’s Iliad, written immediately after the French defeat by the Nazi invasion of 1940. On one level her essay is a coded message inspiring the French to recognize the transitoriness of the Nazi conquest, by analogy with the short-lived triumph of Homer’s Greeks. On another level it is a meditation on the perennial threat presented by human awe before the power of the strong. Force, says Simone Weil, ‘is that which turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.’53 The victims of force are not only those who are defeated in war, but also all those who are defeated socially and economically, powerless slaves the world over, prey to hunger and the will of the powerful. But force, the power to dominate, is itself an illusion – in fact no one really possesses it forever. Rather, the true reality is our universal vulnerability to forces both outside and within us beyond our control. Delusions about total power always bring down nemesis – as the Greek thinkers knew but we have forgotten. ‘To the same degree, though in different fashions, those who use force and those who endure it are turned to stone.’ Power relations are only transcended in: those brief celestial moments in which man possesses his soul . . . The love of the son for the parents, of father for son, of mother for son . . . Conjugal love . . . friendship. These moments of grace are rare in The Iliad, but they are enough to make us feel with sharp regret what it is that violence has killed and will kill again.54

The alternative to the false gospel that force will always triumph is our human sense of justice. And justice is simply our sense of obligation towards others, rooted in our pity for all who suffer: the sense of human misery is a pre-condition of justice and love. He who does not realise to what extent shifting fortune and necessity hold in subjection every human spirit cannot regard as fellow-creatures nor love, as he loves himself, those whom chance separated from him by an abyss.55

Simone Weil’s wonderful essay ends with the heartfelt prayer that the peoples of Europe will yet ‘learn that there is no refuge from fate, learn

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156 | Part Three not to admire force, not to hate the enemy, nor to scorn the unfortunate’. One practical suggestion for how the Allies might live out a humane non-fascist value-system even in wartime was Simone Weil’s ‘Plan for an Organization of Front-Line Nurses’, first thought out by her early in 1940 and further worked on in 1941 and 1942. This project is concerned with the formation of a special body of frontline [women] nurses. It would be a very mobile organisation and should in principle be always at the points of greatest danger, to give ‘first-aid’ during battles . . . According to the American Red Cross, by far the greatest proportion of deaths in battle are the result of ‘shock’, ‘exposure’, and loss of blood which can only be prevented by immediate treatment. The American Red Cross has developed a system of plasma injections which can be operated on the battle field in cases of shock, burns, and haemorrhage [Simone Weil’s emphasis] . . . [These women] would need to offer their lives as a sacrifice . . . and this without being sustained by the offensive spirit but, on the contrary, devoting themselves to the wounded and dying.56

The primary importance of such a body of women in the fighting zone would be the saving of human life and the comforting of the wounded and dying on both sides. But there was a still deeper, ideological inspiration behind Simone Weil’s proposal: Hitler has never lost sight of the essential need to strike everybody’s imagination; his own people’s, his enemies’ and the innumerable spectators . . . For this purpose, one of his most effective instruments has been such special bodies as the SS . . . These men are unmoved by suffering and death, either for themselves or for all the rest of humanity. Their heroism originates from an extreme brutality. We cannot copy these methods of Hitler’s, first, because we fight in a different spirit and with different motives; and also because, when it is a question of striking the imagination, copies never succeed. Only the new is striking . . . We ought to create something new. This gift of creation is in itself a sign of moral vitality which will encourage the hopes of those who count upon us, whilst discouraging the enemy’s hopes . . . An inspiration is only active when it is expressed, and not in words but in deeds . . . There could be no better symbol of our inspiration than the corps of women suggested here. The mere persistence of a few humane services in the very centre of the battle, the climax of inhumanity, would be a signal defiance of the inhumanity which the enemy has chosen for himself and which he compels us also to practise. The challenge would be all the more conspicuous because the services would be performed by women and with maternal solicitude . . . Although composed of unarmed

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Simone Weil (1909–1943) | 157 women, it would certainly impress the enemy soldiers, in the sense that their presence and their behaviour would be a new and unexpected revelation of the depth of the moral resources and resolution on our side . . . The contrast between this force and the SS would make a more telling argument than any propaganda slogan. It would illustrate with supreme clarity the two roads between which humanity today is forced to choose.57

De Gaulle’s response to this proposal was said to have been: ‘Mais elle est folle!’ As Simone Weil noted in her later essay ‘On Human Personality’, ‘In Creon’s eyes there was absolutely nothing that was natural in Antigone’s behaviour. He thought she was mad.’ That Simone Weil, herself a woman, was advocating the founding of a woman’s organization with which to counter the essence of Hitlerism must have contributed to her craziness in de Gaulle’s eyes. Simone Weil’s last testament concerning the spurious ‘grandeur’ and real mass murderousness of the Gospel of Force is contained in her The Need for Roots, written in the last four months of her life. Even though she herself was now a member of the Free French Resistance based in London under de Gaulle, Simone Weil could still perceive all too clearly the danger of idolatry in all nationalism, including French nationalism, and its expression in righteous war: . . . [when] it is a question of history, morals cease to play any part . . . Everything is done to make children feel . . . that things concerning the country, the nation, the nation’s growth have a degree of importance which sets them apart from other things. And it is precisely in regard to [the nation] that justice, consideration for others, strict obligations assigning limits to ambitions and appetites – all that moral teaching one is trying to instil into the lives of little boys – never gets mentioned.58

This false assumption of the ‘superior’ moral claims of the nation places the nation above morality, which in practice means that for reasons of state a nation can, whenever it pleases, have recourse to the immorality of war: ‘With morals, properly speaking, thus relegated to a lower plane, no other system is advanced as a substitute, for the superior prestige of the nation is bound up with the exaltation of war.’59 Simone Weil regarded the contradiction between our personal morality and our public immorality as fatal. In personal life it is recognized that: . . . limits must be set to egoism and pride. But when it comes to national egoism, national pride, not only is the field unlimited but the highest possible degree of it seems to be imposed by something closely resembling an obligation. Regard for others, recognition of one’s own faults,

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158 | Part Three modesty, the voluntary limitation of one’s desires – all are now turned into so many crimes, so many sacrileges . . . Our patriotism comes straight from the Romans. The Romans really were an . . . idolatrous people . . . idolatrous with regard to themselves. It is this idolatry of self which they have bequeathed to us in the form of patriotism.60

This absolutist assertion of the validity of national immoralism, which Simone Weil traced back to Rome, she also found in the lifework of the architect of the French state, Cardinal Richelieu, the French equivalent of Prussia’s Bismarck. If one asks the Richelieus and the Bismarcks, ‘Politics for what?’ they answer, ‘For the greater glory of the State.’ But if one presses on with the next question: ‘Why for the greater glory of the State and not for something else?’ they have no answer. That is the question which mustn’t be asked. So-called realist politics [Realpolitik] handed down from Richelieu to Maurras [the contemporary French Ultra-rightist] . . . only makes sense if this question is not put. In fact Richelieu’s political attitude only makes sense for those who, whether individually or collectively, feel either that they are masters of their country or else capable of becoming so.61

In other words, the State is them. For power is never really an end in itself; it is always a means.62 In practice it has all too often been the means to gain still more power for those who already have most; but what power should be is the means to justice rooted in compassion. That is true antifascism – and true patriotism: Compassion for our country is the only sentiment which doesn’t strike a false note at the present time . . . And this same compassion is able, without hindrance, to cross frontiers, extend itself over all countries in misfortune, over all countries without exception; for all peoples are subjected to the wretchedness of our human condition. Whereas pride in national glory is by its nature exclusive, non-transferable, compassion is by its nature universal.63

What hinders us all in creating a civilized world of justice rooted in compassion is ‘our false conception of greatness; the degradation of the sentiment of justice and our idolisation of money.’64 Of these, ‘our conception of greatness is the most serious defect of all, and the one concerning which we are least conscious that it is a defect: at least in ourselves; for in our enemies it shocks us.’65 All our history books foreground the history of conquerors, the champion slayers of humanity, from Alexander to Caesar to Augustus to William the Conqueror to Napoleon – ‘No attention is paid to the defeated . . . The defeated disappear.’66 Official history

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Simone Weil (1909–1943) | 159 takes the murderers at their word. This unconscious consensus about the ‘greatness’ of mass-murdering conquest was, not surprisingly (since it was so general a consensus), also shared by Hitler. The only difference was that he put these criminal values into practice. Hitler, we are told, modelled himself upon Sulla – that was the model of ‘greatness’ which Western European history had transmitted to ‘that wretched, uprooted youth wandering about in the streets of Vienna.’ And it is that same false model of greatness which we must not only refuse to transmit but actually overturn and invert. People talk about punishing Hitler. But he cannot be punished. He desired one thing alone, and he has it: to play a part in History . . . Whatever Hitler is made to suffer, that will not stop him from feeling himself to be a superb figure. Above all it will not stop, in twenty, fifty, a hundred or two hundred years’ time, some solitary little dreamer, whether. German or otherwise, from seeing in Hitler a superb figure with a superb destiny from beginning to end, and desiring with all his soul to have a similar destiny. In which case, woe betide his contemporaries. The only punishment capable of punishing Hitler, and deterring little boys thirsting for greatness in coming centuries from following his example, is such a total transformation of the meaning attached to greatness that he should thereby be excluded from it.67

But this in turn will demand a total reversal of our own national political values – ‘False greatness must first be despised . . . [one must] make a pact with oneself to admire in history only those actions and lives through which shines the spirit of truth, justice and love.’68 But Hitler did not simply believe that he had the spirit of human history on his side; he, like Bismarck, also believed that he was acting out the very same laws that govern all the natural sciences. Simone Weil quotes the passage from Mein Kampf which articulates Hitler’s crude ‘scientific’ belief in the supremacy of force: ‘in a world in which planets and suns follow circular trajectories, moons revolve round planets, and force reigns everywhere and supreme over weakness, which it either compels to serve it docilely or else crushes out of existence, Man cannot be subject to special laws of his own.’69 Simone Weil challenges us with an ultimatum: Either we, like Bismarck and Hitler, agree that force is . . . the unique and sovereign ruler over human relations [or] we must perceive at work in the universe, alongside force, the intuitive sense of obligation to others70 . . . We know justice to be real, experientially, in our own hearts. [And the] structure of the human heart is just as much of a reality as any other in this universe, neither more nor less of a reality than the trajectory of a planet.71

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160 | Part Three We all know, in our hearts, that the highest thing we are capable of is the love of our neighbour, intervening to help anyone who has been reduced to ‘a little piece of flesh, naked, inert, and bleeding beside a ditch’.72 What part, if any, did the division between the sexes play in Simone Weil’s analysis of the phenomenon of war? She pitied men for being victims of the deforming ideology of masculinism; she recognized that ever since they had been small boys they had been brought up to believe that it is heroic to conquer, manly to kill. Her own cherished project for a unit of front-line nurses was explicitly female and maternal, and her heroines from literature and history included Antigone, Electra, Joan of Arc, Teresa of Avila and Rosa Luxemburg. Nevertheless Simone Weil was never a feminist in the (false) sense of claiming that women are morally superior to men. On the contrary, she venerated the creative, humane men throughout Western history also – Homer, Sophocles, Socrates, Plato, Jesus, Marcus Aurelius, Shakespeare, Racine, Rembrandt and Bach, among others. And, since she held that the only test for virtue is the way that we exercise power, she would have considered the case for women’s superior virtue in the political world unproven and improbable. There is no reason to believe that any of Simone Weil’s generalizations about ‘our’ false awe before triumphant brute force, ‘our’ pernicious dual inheritance from the Judaeo-Christian church and Ancient Rome, and ‘our’ constant temptation to dominate those weaker than ourselves were addressed exclusively to men. She wrote simply as a human being speaking to other human beings. It is one of the ironies of twentieth-century history that this most audacious of political thinkers, who outlined a radically ‘alternative’ mode of political praxis and who consistently dared to attack all centralized, militarized sovereign nation states, did not herself (because she was a woman, or more particularly, a French woman) ever have a political vote. But far from allowing that specific injustice to distract her, Simone Weil treated it with oblivion and concentrated all the energy of her short life on trying to save the whole world.73 Given that Simone Weil was driven by Hitler to renounce her absolute anti-militarist stand, how can we be sure that she would not, today, accept, however reluctantly, the stance of ‘nuclear deterrence’? Simone Weil did not wish to see totalitarianism of any kind take over the world; nor, incidentally, did she wish to see ‘the Americanisation of the whole world.’74 ‘One does not liberate the world by conquering it, on the contrary.’75 Nevertheless there is clear evidence in her last writings, in my view, that given today’s choice between risking possible world domination, even enslavement, and risking possible world extinction, Simone Weil would tell us that it was our moral duty to choose the risk of becoming enslaved. For what Simone Weil termed ‘atrocious’, ‘appalling’ in any age, past, present or to come, was mass-murdering cruelty. The massacre of non-

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Simone Weil (1909–1943) | 161 combatants, or of slaves, or of prisoners, or of women and children in the course of some ‘unlimited’ righteous war, was an abomination to her whether that war were waged against the Philistines or against Troy or against Carthage or against heretics or on the Western Front 1914–18.76 ‘The greatest calamity the human race can experience,’ she wrote in her essay on The Iliad, is ‘the destruction of a city.’ And Maurice Schumann recalled how, in her last conversation with him, Simone Weil employed, with ‘a marvellous and atrocious premonition, [the word] “holocaust”. She was troubled by several sections of the Old Testament . . . which seemed to justify genocide. “How can we condemn a holocaust today,” she wondered, “if we have not condemned all past holocausts?”’77 By the same logic she would have condemned all holocausts to come. Simone Weil’s positive values are equally relevant to the choice now before us. Whenever she had to weigh the lesser of two current evils in the terrible years 1936–9, she always tried to identify the less murderous one as being the more positive. In her project for front-line nurses she affirmed the supreme value of saving human life, even in the midst of war. And as for non-human life, she loved the precarious, touching beauty of the natural world, seeing in it Christ’s smile. Preparing for nuclear extinction would have seemed to her humanity’s final blasphemy, its total irreverence towards all Creation and towards all that humans have it in themselves to create. The first part of her last testament, The Need for Roots, called ‘The Needs of the Soul’, spells out a moral alphabet for our time, formulating precisely why we must not even contemplate, let alone risk, the destruction of our world, no matter for what blood-filled word-with-acapital-letter. [We] owe our respect to a collectivity: First because it is food for a certain number of human souls – each of which is unique and if destroyed cannot be replaced. Secondly, because of its continuity, each collectivity is already moving forward into the future. It contains food, not only for the souls of the living, but also for the souls of beings yet unborn which are to come into the world during the immediately succeeding centuries. Lastly, due to this same continuity, a collectivity has its roots in the past. It constitutes the sole agency for preserving the spiritual treasures accumulated by the dead. by means of which the dead can speak to the living.78

The ‘collectivity’ to which we in the nuclear age have the most profound obligation is our whole world. Simone Weil’s positives were ‘the future of humanity, civilization, freedom’ – in that order. But Simone Weil also knew that she was another Cassandra, condemned in her own time to be an impotent prophet, a truth-speaking ‘fool’ – like Parsifal der reine Thor durch Mitleid wissend – Parsifal, the

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162 | Part Three pure-souled fool wise in pity. Finally, haunted by the hunger of those fallen into Nazi hands, Simone Weil either could not, or would not, eat. ‘The suffering all over the world obsesses and overwhelms me to the point of annihilating my faculties,’ she wrote to Maurice Schumann at the end of July 1942. On 24 August 1943, aged thirty-four, she died. Alain could not believe it. ‘When she went into politics I expected much. Much? I expected, quite simply, the answer.’

Notes 1 Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life. Mowbrays, Oxford, 1976, ch. 7, p. 176. 2 T. S. Eliot, Preface to Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, Routledge, 1952. 3 Quoted by John Hellman, in Simone Weil: An Introduction to Her Thought, Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1982, Introduction, p. 1. 4 See Simone Weil’s letter to Joe Bousquet, 12 May 1942, in Richard Rees (ed.), Simone Weil: Seventy Letters, OUP, 1965, p. 137. 5 Pétrement, A Life, Ch. 1, pp. 11–12. 6 Ibid., pp. 15–16. 7 Dorothy McFarland, Simone Weil, Frederick Ungar, New York, ch. 1, p. 13. 8 Letter to Bernanos, in Rees (ed.), Letters, p. 109. 9 Pétrement, A. Life, ch. 3, pp. 48–9. 10 Ibid., ch. 5, p. 123. 11 Jacques Cabaud, Simone Weil: A Fellowship in Love, Harvill Press, 1964, ch. 3, p. 99. 12 ‘Reflections on war’, La Critique Sociale, November 1933, quoted by Cabaud, Fellowship, p. 100 (and recently translated in full in McFarland and Van Ness, Formative Writings 1929–1941: Simone Weil, Routledge, 1987, pp. 237–48). 13 ‘Deutsche Kriegsfibel 1938’, in Bertolt Brecht, Hundert Gedichte, 1918– 1950, Aufbau Verlag, Berlin, 1959. 14 Cabaud, Fellowship, p. 100. 15 Simone Weil, ‘Sketch of contemporary life’, in Oppression and Liberty, Routledge, 1958, p. 108. (Simone Weil’s own title for this book was Réflexions sur les causes de la liberté et de l’oppression sociale.) 16 Ibid., p. 112. 17 Ibid., pp. 115–16. 18 Ibid., p. 116. 19 Ibid., p. 121. 20 See Pétrement, A Life, Ch. 9, p. 262, ‘An answer to a question by Alain’ (translated and given in full in McFarland and Van Ness, Formative Writings). 21 James Joll, The Anarchists, Methuen, 1979, p. 208, quoted in McFarland, Simone Weil, Ch. 4, p. 77. 22 McFarland, Simone Weil, Ch. 4, p. 81. 23 Letter to Bernanos, in Rees, Letters, p. 108, and see Pétrement’s comment, A Life, Ch. 10, p. 282. 24 Quoted in Pétrement, A Life, p. 281. 25 In Richard Rees (ed.), Simone Weil: Selected Essays 1934–43, p. 159.

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Simone Weil (1909–1943) | 163 26 See Anne Wiltsher, Most Dangerous Women, Pandora Press, 1986. 27 ‘The Power of Words’, in Rees (ed.), Simone Weil: Selected Essays 1934–43, OUP, 1962. 28 Ibid., p. 168. 29 Ibid., p. 158. 30 Ibid., p. 168. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., p. 159. 33 Ibid., pp. 158–9. 34 Ibid., pp. 169–70. 35 Letter to Bernanos, in Rees (ed.), Letters. 36 Ibid. 37 Quoted in Pétrement, A Life, ch. 11, p. 326. 38 Cf. Ecoropa Information Sheet 8 – Defending Britain Without the Bomb, September 1982, and The Alternative Defence Commission, Without the Bomb, Paladin, 1985, ch. 5, ‘National defence, British military options’, and ch. 6, ‘Strategies against occupation’. 39 Quoted in Pétrement, A Life, ch. 11, p. 328. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., p. 326. 42 Ibid., ch. 12, p. 339. 43 Ibid., p. 337. The whole text, ‘The distress of our time’, is now published in McFarland and Van Ness, Formative Writings, pp. 272–3. 44 Rees (ed.), Essays, pp. 177, 179. 45 Letter to Jean Wahl, 1942, in Rees (ed.), Letters, p. 158. 46 Quoted in Pétrement, A Life, ch. 13, p. 353. The whole fragment is published in McFarland and Van Ness, Formative Writings, pp. 277–8 and ends: ‘it is not enough to defend an absence of tyranny. We must be rooted in armistice in which every activity is really oriented in the opposite direction from tyranny.’ 47 Simone Weil, ‘The Great Beast’ (1939–40), in Rees (ed.), Essays; cf. George Sand’s prophetic letter to Flaubert, Sept. 1871 after the Franco-Prussian war: The German triumph is for Germany the first act of her moral dissolution. The tragedy of her fall has begun, and as she works at it with her own hands it will proceed apace. All these great material organisations of humanity are so many idols of clay; it is our duty and our interest to realise it . . . But the moral downfall of Germany is not the future salvation of France, and if we are fated to do to her as she has done to us, her ruin will not restore us to our life. It is not in blood that races can renew their youth. Streams of life may yet come from the corpses of France; the corpse of Germany will be a plague centre for all Europe. There is no resurrection for a nation which has lost sight of the human ideal [my emphasis]’. (George Sand– Gustav Flaubert Letters, Duckworth, 1922) 48 Simone Weil, ‘Cold War policy in 1939’, in Rees (ed.), Essays, p. 186. 49 ‘Europe’s colonialism in Africa and Asia’; in Rees (ed.), Essays. Simone Weil also made a comparison to Roman Imperialism: ‘It would certainly be difficult to deny that we have made and are still making use of methods similar to Rome’s in conquering and ruling our colonial empire.’ cf. ‘God knows that in Africa and Asia there is no shortage of peoples for France to emancipate’

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164 | Part Three

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68

69 70 70 71

72

73 74 75 76 77

in ‘A European war over Czechoslovakia’ (May 1938), in McFarland and Van Ness, Formative Writings, p. 265. Rees (ed.), Essays, pp. 136–7. Cf. the ideas of Leopold Kohr – The Over-developed Nations: The Diseconomies of Scale, C. Davis, 1977. Rees (ed.), Essays, pp. 139–40. ‘The Iliad, the poem of force’, reprinted in Siân Miles, Simone Weil: An Anthology, Virago, 1986, p. 183. Ibid., pp. 206–8. Ibid., p. 212. Letter to Maurice Schumann, in Rees (ed.), Letters, pp. 144–53. Ibid., and see Hellman, Introduction, p. 82, for Simone Weil’s antiNietzschean values here. Simone Weil, ‘Uprootedness and nationhood’, in The Need for Roots, pp. 131–2. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 133–4. Ibid., p. 143, and see her ‘Three letters on history’, in Rees (ed.), Essays; ‘[Richelieu] deliberately and pitilessly fostered the wars in Europe’ (p. 85) and ‘in my eyes there is grandeur only in gentleness’ (p. 79). See the chapter in The Need for Roots entitled ‘The growing of roots’, p. 209. The Need for Roots, pp. 165–6. Weil, ‘The growing of roots’, in The Need for Roots, p. 209. Ibid., pp. 209–10. Ibid., p. 212. Ibid., pp. 216–17. Ibid., pp. 224 and 218. cf. ‘In order to love France, we must feel that she has a past; but we must not love the historical wrapper of that past. We must love the part which is inarticulate, anonymous, which has vanished’ (p. 222). Hitler quoted in Weil, The Need for Roots, p. 229. Ibid., p. 230. Ibid., p. 232. ‘Implicit love’, in Waiting on God, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951. As John Hellman pointed out in Introduction, Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan is ‘the ultimate antithesis to fascism’. Weil, ‘Cold War policy in 1939’, in Rees (ed.), Essays, p. 192: ‘Some of us have thought a great deal about the principles of international policy, in the attempt to find them elsewhere than in violence, hypocrisy, and doubledealing.’ Simone Weil, ‘East and West’ (1943), in Rees (ed.), Essays, pp. 206–7. Simone Weil, ‘Uprootedness and nationhood’, in The Need for Roots, p. 108. See for example ‘The great beast’ and especially ‘Reflections on barbarism’ (fragments), in Rees (ed.), Essays, pp. 142–3. Quoted by Hellman, Introduction, p. 73. Simone Weil, ‘The needs of the soul’, in The Need for Roots, pp. 7–8.

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CHAPTER

15 Virginia Woolf and Antigone Thinking against the current It is early morning. Two young sisters are arguing. Antigone has just burst in out of breath to tell her sister, Ismene, that the body of their brother Polyneices, who had died fighting against their city, must be left to lie naked and unburied, and that anyone found disobeying the King’s new order will be stoned to death. Ismene, in shock, takes King Creon’s order as final. But Antigone, we realize, has already decided to disobey and has only come now to Ismene to ask her to help lift their brother’s corpse. Ismene cannot believe what she is hearing: You cannot mean . . . to bury him? Against the order? . . . How could you dare, when Creon has expressly forbidden it? . . . O think, Antigone; we are women; it is not for us To fight against men; our rulers are stronger than we, And we must obey in this, or in worse than this. . . . I can do no other But as I am commanded; to do more is madness.1

Antigone, now knowing that she is totally on her own, says: . . . I will bury my brother: And if I die for it, what happiness! Convicted of reverence – I shall be content To lie beside a brother whom I love. We have only a little time to please the living, But all eternity to love the dead. . . . Live, if you will; Live; and defy the holiest laws of heaven.

First published in South Carolina Review, Virginia Woolf International Issue, Vol. 29, No. 1, Fall, 1996.

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166 | Part Three Ismene does not dispute that the King’s edict is against the law of heaven but simply confesses: “I cannot act /Against the State. I am not strong enough/ . . . [You’re] bound to fail.” “When I have tried and failed, I shall have failed,” retorts Antigone. And the two sisters leave, significantly, by different exits. Whose side is the audience on? We all, I think, ‘see feelingly’ that, however doomed Antigone’s resistance to the inhuman decree against her dead brother may be, she is more right to attempt resistance than is Ismene in choosing self-preservation. But if we are honest we also recognize our own everyday selves in Ismene. She expresses what we probably in fact would feel and do – or not do. Antigone expresses what we know ought to be our reaction to an abominable command, obeying her own inner light of heroic, loving fidelity, even unto death. And Sophocles affirms the girl who dares to break the mould of unquestioning gender subordination.2 The play goes on. Creon puts his political case as follows: . . . damned is he who puts a friend Above his country . . . Our country is our life . . .

And the Chorus of Elders nods. But Sophocles immediately undercuts Creon’s credibility, first when Creon forbids anyone even to mourn Polyneices, thus attempting to dictate what can never be dictated – other people’s feelings – and secondly when Creon reacts to the reported attempted burial of Polyneices, not as an act against the public good, but simply as rebellion against himself – “against my word and law”. Creon’s scene with the terrified Sentry ends by threatening to inflict torture. And when the Sentry then re-appears with Antigone seized by armed guards, the drama reaches its first climax in the confrontation of the unarmed, shackled young girl facing all the might of the State. Creon thunders: “Did you know the order? . . . ” And Antigone answers with the one word, “Yes.” She then immediately begins her counter-accusation of him. He is not her judge, she is his, as she dares to tell him that his order did not come from God. In other words, he is not God; he is less than God. And she for her part will never unquestioningly obey a merely human order if it violates her own conscience – I did not think your edicts strong enough To overrule the unwritten unalterable laws Of God and Heaven, you being only a man.

What is truly unbearable is not her death, which she knows will come sooner or later, but the consciousness that she had bartered her own life

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Virgina Woolf and Antigone | 167 for the betrayal of conscience and love. – “Only if I had let my mother’s son/Lie there unburied, then I could not have borne it.” The tenderness of that speech Sophocles contrasts with the next utterance by Creon as he promises death to Antigone, his own sister’s daughter, adding he would have even his nearest and dearest executed if disobedient. The play’s second climax comes as Creon tries to make Antigone confess that she had, on reflection, been wrong to side with her traitor brother rather than align herself with her country – “An enemy can’t be a friend, even when dead,” is Creon’s dogma – only to be rebutted by Antigone’s great words: “My way is to share my love, not share my hate.” To which Creon jeers, “Go then, and share your love among the dead. / We’ll have no woman’s law here, while I live.” When the Chorus reminds him that Antigone is the beloved affianced wife of his youngest son, Haemon, Creon still finds no difficulty in disposing of her with his crudely reductive “Oh, there are other fields for him to plough.” And when he suspects that Haemon may actually defend Antigone, Creon says he hates him too – so the audience can see what sharing/living in hate entails. The third climax comes in the confrontation between Haemon and Creon. For Creon the State is always a State at war – whether in fact or not – in order to justify his own absolute command, whether right or wrong. When the boy tries to make his father see that he is not the responsible governor of the city but rather a one-man despot, Creon understands so little of the true end of political power that he asks, surprised, “Why, does not every state belong to its ruler?” Only to be checkmated by Haemon’s “You’d be an excellent king – on a desert island.” All Creon can resort to is the verbal castration of Haemon – “Despicable coward! No more will than a woman!” and the expression of his own sadism – both to Antigone and towards his son: “Bring out that she-devil, and let her die/ Now, with her bridegroom by to see it done.” Antigone goes to her death of entombment totally alone – “What God can save me now?” Her only comfort is her thought of the welcome from her dead parents and her dead brother in the underworld. She knows she is dying for God’s law but without God’s help. Then, just in case the audience might still be wavering as to how to judge Antigone’s audacity pitted against the authority of the King, the seer, blind Teresias, enters to spell out to Creon the double nemesis he has incurred – first by burying the living alive and second by leaving the dead to rot unburied. Too late, Creon learns he must pay with the double death of his own wife and last remaining son. For Antigone, characteristically, has not waited in feminine passivity to endure a slow inch-by inch death of suffocation and starvation in her living tomb but has willed her own immediate death by hanging herself, and Haemon has chosen to die with her, life being valueless without the irreplaceable beloved. Finally Creon’s wife, Haemon’s mother, dies cursing Creon with the terrible word “child-slayer.”3 And the tragedy ends

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168 | Part Three with Creon desolate, a living corpse – “I am nothing. I have no life./ Lead me away.” What possible alternative reading of this play could there be to that which condemns Creon for his destructive, unfeeling self-idolatry, his deification of his own will-to-power, camouflaged of course by all the usual rationalizations of the country’s need for a strong ruler, women’s need for male domination, the son’s duty to obey his father at all times, and so forth? Sophocles leaves Creon at the end not only accursed as the killer of those incomparably better than himself, but also self-accursed.4 However Sophocles was not allowing for the stubbornness of masculinist resistance to his text. Time and again in the 19th and 20th centuries, male writers have attempted a radical revisionist interpretation (or rather a re-writing) of Antigone more in accordance with their own world-view. First of course came Hegel, whose political theory excluded ‘women from social life [outside the family], politics, history and freedom.’5 Hegel saw undifferentiated womankind as the enemy within the Universal principle of community, because we women, with our narrow family piety, are incapable of the ideal, either of mind, or of action.6 At first, in his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel saw both Antigone and Creon as wrong. But then – ‘[the] canonic text comes in Part Two (11.3.a.) of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion,’ writes George Steiner in Antigones, and he proceeds to quote Hegel: Creon is not a tyrant, but actually an ethical power (eine sittliche Macht). Creon is not in the wrong. He maintains that the law of the state, the authority of government, must be held in respect, and that infraction of the law must be followed by punishment . . . .

It is from this passage, Steiner points out, ‘that . . . the notion of tragedy as a conflict between two equal ‘rights’ and the belief that Sophocles’ Antigone illustrates in some obvious way, the dynamics of collision and ‘synthetic resolution’ in the Hegelian dialectic [derives].’7 I find it less repugnant that Hegel should have had to superimpose his own idealist/Statist political grid on Sophocles than that the liberal Steiner can still salaam to Hegel’s (self-contradictory) utterings on Antigone as constituting, ‘one of the high moments in the history of reading.’8 Whatever it was, it was not reading. Steiner also bows before Hölderlin’s view that Antigone was necessarily punished for defying the Gods by impetuously taking their actions into her own hands; he bows before Kierkegaard’s reading that Antigone, the doomed daughter of Oedipus’s incest, was merely a suicidal bride of death, who deliberately used her dead brother Polyneices in order to provoke Creon’s death sentence. Steiner then defends Anouilh’s version of 1943 that made Antigone’s motive just absurdist wish-fulfilment and Creon the necessary arm of government; finally Steiner is impressed by

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Virgina Woolf and Antigone | 169 Brecht’s re-writing of Antigone’s role in 1948 as being a political failure because of her ideologically incorrect anarchistic individualism. She should have roused all Thebes against the tyrant, instead of acting alone. What all these ‘readings’, or rather re-writings, of Antigone have in common is that they all come from men and none of them can accept that Sophocles’s Antigone was, quite simply, right. Steiner himself is so impressed by the unfathomable problematics set up by all these different readings that he ends his Jackson Knight Memorial lecture, ‘Antigones’ by listing what he sees as Sophocles’s unanswered, unanswerable questions – namely: 1) ‘Can there be private conscience outside the state?’ (Sophocles would have answered, I think, that he had tried to convince Hegel, Steiner and the rest of us that the State loses all moral validity once it violates private conscience. As Schiller wrote: ‘The State is never an end in itself; it is important only as a condition under which the purpose of humanity can be attained.’9) 2) Steiner sees Sophocles asking: ‘What are the rights of the old because they are old?’ (But Sophocles found this an interesting question in his much later Oedipus at Colonus; it is only a pseudo-question as raised by the child-slayer Creon in Antigone.) 3) Steiner thinks Sophocles is raising the imponderable question: ‘What are the hierarchies of love?’ (But to my mind Sophocles was anxious to have us meditate instead on the hierarchy of all love over any hate. Steiner shakes his head in bafflement: ‘There are questions that madden . . . We leave the play desperately off-balance.’10) In contrast, Virginia Stephen and her later self, Virginia Woolf, did not, I would maintain, finish their readings of Antigone feeling ‘desperately off-balance’ at all. Quite the contrary. Virginia Stephen’s first reference to Sophocles and to reading Greek comes in a letter written when she was an exuberant 18-year-old in June 1900, detailing, among other things, her first ball, and adding: ‘As for Greek it is my daily bread, and a keen delight to me.’11 A year later she is writing to Thoby at Cambridge to ask which Sophocles she should now concentrate on studying in the original – ‘I have read the Antigone, Oedipus Coloneus and I am in the middle of the Trachiniae. I should rather like to read the Antigone again. . . . I really enjoy not only admire Sophocles.’12 Six months later Virginia Stephen found herself having to begin her study of Greek grammar all over again with a new strict teacher, who could, however, be skilfully diverted from grammar into long ardent discussions on Greek ethics, philosophy and political thought. That teacher was Janet Case – ‘a rare teacher and a remarkable woman’ as Virginia Woolf herself was to write in the Times obituary for her thirty-five years later. Much earlier, in 1903, Virginia Stephen had written of Janet Case:

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170 | Part Three She was always expounding [the Greeks’] ‘teaching’ and their views upon life . . . as they can be interpreted by an intelligent reader. I had never attempted anything of this kind before, & though I protested that Miss Case carried it too far, yet I was forced to think more than I had done hitherto. . . . It was upon these subjects that she became really eloquent. ... I feel besides, that she is a really valiant strong minded woman, in a private capacity. . . . She talked on many subjects; & on all she showed herself possessed of clear strong views, . . . she had too, I think, a fine human sympathy.13

‘How I loved her, at Hyde Park Gate, and how I went hot and cold going to Windmill Hill; and how great a visionary part she played in my life, till the visionary became part of the fiction, not of the real life,’ Virginia Woolf wrote in her Diary after Janet Case’s death.14 That love and support were mutual; Janet Case gave Virginia guaranteed refuge during and after her protracted breakdown from 1913 to 1915. A typical Leonard Woolf Diary entry at that time would go: ‘To Hampstead. Saw Marg. [i.e. Margaret Llewelyn Davies.] V[irginia] went Janet.’15 And in Janet’s last illness Virginia went out of her way to visit her and to write to her. ‘How Janet loved her,’ wrote Janet’s sister to Leonard after Virginia’s death. As well as earning her living by being ‘one of the women who teach women,’ Janet Case was a radical political activist. A socialist, pacifist feminist, she was, I think, something of a revelation to Virginia Woolf, in that, highly cultured and sensitive though her Greek tutor was, she did not hesitate to campaign for deeply unpopular political causes, from Home Rule for Ireland in the 1890s to the Peace Pledge Union in the 1930s. Between 1910 and 1913, together with her lifelong friend Margaret Llewelyn Davies, Janet Case prepared the Women’s Cooperative Guild submissions to the Liberal Government on both Divorce Law Reform and State Maternity provision. It was Janet Case who convinced Virginia Stephen of the justice of working for the Adult Suffragist cause – i.e. for the vote for all men and women in Britain – in 1910, and once World War One broke out Janet Case was active on committees to help refugees. ‘Her Greek was connected with the politics of her day.’16 Janet Case put her intellect to the service of the un-enfranchised and the unjustly treated; thus she was an exemplar for Virginia Woolf of the Outsider, the woman who works disinterestedly to make society more just and more humane. ‘In her way she was a pioneer; but her way was one that kept her in the background.’17 Not the worst teacher with whom to discuss Antigone’s refusal to obey an inhuman State decree. And no wonder that Virginia Woolf, after going to tea with Margaret Llewelyn Davies and Janet Case, on 3 May 1918, should have recorded in her Diary: ‘I felt this to be the heart of the woman’s repub-

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Virgina Woolf and Antigone | 171 lic’ – in other words an alternative site of ‘woman’s law’ to the law of the Creons. Six months later, in January 1919, Virginia Woolf was again reading the Antigone. Her explicit references to Antigone are to be found in both her unpublished and her published writing. Is there any unpublished writing left? Yes, the Reading Notebooks – whose contents have been most helpfully listed by Brenda Silver, and which are held, some in the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection and some in the Woolf Archive at the Library of the University of Sussex, UK. It is fascinating and curiously intimate to scrutinize exactly how Virginia Woolf reread and annotated Antigone over a period of nearly twenty years. The text she worked with was the prose translation by R. C. Jebb (first published 1888), which has the original Greek in numbered lines of poetry on the left facing page. It is clear from her Reading Notebooks that Virginia Woolf worked very closely over the best English rendering of crucial passages. Sometimes she writes down the original Greek and then Jebb’s version which she at times criticizes for lack of force. Sometimes she quotes the Jebb without comment simply to stress what are the central moments of the play for her. Sometimes she substitutes her version for a phrase of Jebb’s and sometimes she gives her own direct commentary on the Sophocles. In Reading Notebook XLVII, for example, probably written November 1923, it is refreshing after Hegel and Steiner to come upon Virginia Woolf’s mss. comment ‘Creon is always a repulsive character.’18 And following her own translation of Antigone’s defiant “I avow it” is her comment: – ‘[Antigone is] absolutely determined from the first . . . Her speeches are all in the same tone of tense, uncomplaining ruthlessness . . . Creon is an old hypocrite.’19 Then, in 1924, Virginia Woolf comments on a French translation: ‘Antigone is the perfect type of heroic woman; unflinching and uncompromising.’20 So there. That reading was part of Virginia Woolf’s preparation for her Common Reader essay ‘On Not Knowing Greek’ (1925) – where she compared Sophocles with Proust’s ‘more complicated and varied emotions’. She goes on: ‘But in the Electra or in the Antigone we are impressed by something different, by something perhaps more impressive – by heroism itself, by fidelity itself.’ It was probably in 1932 that Virginia Woolf’s next Reading Notebook entries on the tragedy were written. This time she pulled out all the instances of the attempted male supremacist dictatorship by Creon – his “[No] woman shall rule me . . . . Henceforth they must be women, and not range at large . . . we must in no wise suffer a woman to worst us. . . . Better to fall by a man’s hand than be called weaker than a woman.”21 It is also here that Virginia Woolf writes down Jebb’s translation of Antigone’s great line no. 523: “’Tis not my nature to join in hating, but in loving,” which Virginia Woolf was to use, untranslated, as a kind of coded reference in ‘The Present Day’ section of her novel The Years, written January 1931 through December 1935 but published only in

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172 | Part Three 1937.22 The other principal reference to Antigone in The Years had occurred much earlier in its 1907 section when Sara, reading rapidly, imagines the action offstage, only reported, but always behind the text: The unburied body of the murdered man lay on the sand. . . . Antigone . . . came whirling out of the dust-cloud . . . and flung white sand over the blackened foot. . . . Then behold! there were more clouds; dark clouds; the horsemen leapt down; she was seized; her wrists were bound with withies; and they bore her, thus bound . . . “To the estimable court of the respected ruler” . . . The man’s name was Creon. He buried her. . . . The man in the loincloth gave three sharp taps with his mallet on the brick. She was buried alive. The tomb was a brick mound. There was just room for her to lie straight out. Straight out in a brick tomb.

The horror of the man burying the girl alive is quite hideously vivid. On 29 October 1934, Virginia Woolf’s Diary again records: ‘Reading Antigone. How powerful that spell is still – Greek. Thank heaven I learnt it young – an emotion different from any other.’23 Her Reading Notebook entry, also dated October 1934, copies out just one central passage from Jebb’s translation, Antigone’s speech of spiritual defiance to Creon that he, a mortal, “Could overrule the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven.”24 The last Reading Notebook entry on Antigone is dateable midlate 1937 – while Virginia Woolf was completing Three Guineas – and just after she had written her final tribute to her Greek tutor, Janet Case. Here again Virginia Woolf transcribes line after line of Jebb’s prose translation, occasionally modernizing his archaisms. She singles out Ismene’s refusal to strive against men and Antigone’s rebuttal in the name of the higher law of heaven; she writes down Antigone’s credo ‘[It] is not my nature to join in hating but in loving’; she quotes Antigone’s last lonely cry “Why should I look to the gods any more when by piety I have earned the name of impious?” and finally Teresias’s indictment of “Creon who thrust the children of sunlight to the shades.”25 In no single published work of Virginia Woolf is the Antigone a more important foundation for her thought than in Three Guineas (1938). Far from feeling “desperately off-balance” from reading this tragedy, it was this particular text that gave Virginia Woolf ‘Stand’ – a firm ethical footing from which to confront and resist the encroaching triumph of antihumanist, militaristic, misogynistic Fascism at the end of the 1930s. A lifelong atheist, Virginia Woolf found nothing less, I would maintain, than an alternative Scripture in this Sophoclean text. ‘You want to know which are the unreal loyalties which we must despise, which are the real loyalties which we must honour?’ she asks in Three Guineas. ‘Consider Antigone’s distinction between the laws and the Law.’26 In her important

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Virgina Woolf and Antigone | 173 thirty-ninth footnote to Part Two of Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf cites a contemporary German woman, Frau Pommer of Essen, who had recently been arrested by the Nazi authorities for refusing to hate Jews on command, and she salutes Frau Pommer as a latter-day Antigone.27 Virginia Woolf hears the voice of the eternal Fascist in Creon’s demand that he be obeyed unquestioningly whether right or wrong on pain of a torturing death. (Though she also notes that Sophocles ends by making even Creon pitiable.) In the last, third, section of Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf also compares the young women of the past hundred years in Britain to Antigone figures, especially those in the 19th century, who had longed to study or explore or paint or compose music but who had been forbidden by the law of the fathers; those girls too had wanted ‘not to break the laws, but to find the law.’ Finally, in her peroration to Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf fuses her feminism, her pacifism and her antiFascism as she again reminds her readers of all the familiar noises made by the Creons, then and now. She quotes Creon (“We must support the cause of order, and in no wise suffer a woman to worst us. . . . They must be women, and not range at large. Servants take them within. . . . ”) and observes: ‘And he shut[Antigone] not in Holloway or in a concentration camp, but in a tomb. And Creon we read brought ruin on his house, and scattered the land with the bodies of the dead.’ George Steiner, in his 316-page book on Antigones in world literature, allows Virginia Woolf’s long engagement with the tragedy just a single footnote, in which he reproves her for giving the work ‘a feminist-political twist in Three Guineas’.28 Finally, I must mention some of those places where I sense Antigone’s not explicit but implicit, silent presence in Virginia Woolf’s writing, inspiring her never to cease her mental fight against certain intolerable attitudes of mind still dominant in her society – and even within her own circle. For example, I would cite Virginia Woolf’s two brave letters to the New Statesman on ‘The Intellectual Status of Women’ written in October 1920 and published as Appendix III to Vol. 2 of her Diary. There Virginia Woolf had to take on her peers, her fellow writers, including her friend Desmond MacCarthy, as she dared to protest against the whole female sex being buried alive under the phrase ‘inferior to men in intellectual power’, essentially and eternally inferior irrespective of women’s future access to education or freedom. Virginia Woolf knew that she had now put her innermost self on the line in public; every word she wrote would be judged henceforth as a challenge to male intellectual supremacy, and there would be more than a few men eager to deride her. Secondly, I sense Antigone’s implicit presence in Virginia Woolf’s defiant pacifism – her refusal to regard the recent Great War as great at all, ‘that little shindy of schoolboys with gunpowder?’29 ‘I would say [it] was a stupid and violent and hateful and idiotic and trifling and ignoble and mean display.’30 Culminating of course in the declaration in Three

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174 | Part Three Guineas that can still affront and shock: ‘As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world’ – in contrast to Creon’s “Our country is our life.” ‘[We] can fight with the mind,’ wrote Virginia Woolf in one of the very last essays published in her lifetime, ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air-raid’ (written August 1940, published in America).31 Despite the fact that in war-time Britain women had once again been excluded from the counsels of men in power – ‘There is no woman in the Cabinet; nor in any responsible post. All the idea makers who are in a position to make ideas effective are men’ – Virginia Woolf refused to stop her private thinking and public writing. She refused to take the Ismene path of refuge in weaker sex-hood. For would she not then be ‘stressing our disability because our ability exposes us perhaps to abuse, perhaps to contempt? ‘I will not cease from mental fight,’ Blake wrote. Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it.’ And her subsequent thoughts in that short essay were indeed profoundly heretical. Her own countrymen fighting against Hitler were not, as they claimed, free, because fighting itself is incompatible with freedom, and no more than anyone else were they – or we – immune from the drive to aggress, the need to dominate and enslave that is the essence of fascism – ‘Hitlers are bred by slaves,’32 Creons by the womanly, nonresisting Ismenes. And she also longed for men to free themselves from their confusion of virility with domination and warriordom. ‘Mustn’t our next task be the emancipation of man?’33 ‘We must compensate the man for the loss of his gun.’34 But she despaired of ever being heeded in time. ‘No, I don’t see what’s to be done about war. Its manliness; and manliness breeds womanliness – both so hateful.’35 And she, like Antigone, went into the dark. Notes 1 Sophocles, Antigone, translation by E.F. Watling (London: Penguin, 1947). 2 Cf. Sophocles’ repeated confrontation of heroic resistance versus cowed timeserving as exemplified by the two sisters in his Electra. 3 I am grateful for George Steiner’s stress on the significance of the mother’s allusion to Creon’s other son, Megareus, whom Creon had willingly seen sacrificed for the polis. ‘It is in the nature of the man Creon, in the nature of the power-relations and values which he proclaims and embodies, to bring on the violent deaths of his sons.’ George Steiner, Antigones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 245–6. 4 My unapologetically straightforward reading of Antigone is shared by many critics, among them R. C. Jebb, Sophocles, the Plays and Fragments, Part III: The Antigone (Cambridge, 1888); C.M. Bowra, Sophoclean Tragedy (Oxford, 1944); Cedric Whitman, Sophocles, A Study of Heroic Humanism (Harvard University Press, 1951); A.J.A. Waldock, Sophocles the Dramatist (Cambridge University Press, 1951); H. Lloyd-Jones, The Justice of Zeus (Univ. of California Press, 1971); and Brian Vickers, Towards Greek Tragedy (London: Longman, 1973).

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Virgina Woolf and Antigone | 175 5 Johanna Hodge, ‘Women and the Hegelian State’ in Ellen Kennedy and Susan Mendus, eds., Women in Western Political Philosophy, Kant to Nietzsche (Brighton, UK: Wheatsheaf, 1987), p. 150. 6 Cf. Heinrich von Treitschke: ‘[The] normal woman obtains an insight into justice and government through men’s eyes,’ Politics, Bk. I (Leipzig, 1899– 1900). And cf. Freud on women’s non possession of a sense of justice in his lecture ‘Femininity’ (1933), in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Complete Works of Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 22: p. 134. 7 George Steiner, Antigones (1984), p. 37. 8 Steiner, p. 42. 9 Friedrich Schiller, Collected Works, Vol. XIII: The Historical Writings, ‘The Lawgiving of Lycurgus and Solon.’ 10 George Steiner, ‘Antigones,’ Jackson Knight Memorial Lecture (University of Exeter, 1979), pp. 15–16. 11 Virginia Woolf, The Flight of the Mind, Letters, 1888–1912, ed. Nigel Nicholson (London: Hogarth Press, 1975), p. 35. 12 Woolf, The Flight of the Mind, p. 42. 13 Virginia Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice, the early journals, 1879–1909, ed. Mitchell Leaska (London: Hogarth Press, 1990), pp. 182–4. 14 Virginia Woolf, Diary, Vol. V, 19 July 1937, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1982). 15 Leonard Woolf Papers, University of Sussex Library. 16 Virginia Woolf, obituary on Janet Case, The Times, London, 22 July 1937. 17 Ibid. It is significant that Janet Case should have also been an inspiring teacher for Louise Matthaei, classicist, internationalist and co-founder of the ecology movement. See Virginia Woolf’s letter to Janet Case, 4 November 1920, Woolf, Virginia, Letters, 2: 446, and Dictionary of National Biography entry on Louise Matthaei (later Lady Howard), in Missing Persons (Oxford University Press, 1993), ‘Howard’. 18 Monks House Papers, University of Sussex Library, XLVII/B2 (o), item 36. 19 Ibid. 20 Reading Notebooks, Vol. XIX, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. 21 Reading Notebooks, Vol. X, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. 22 Gerard Joseph has written well on this passage in ‘The Antigone as Cultural Touchstone: Matthew Arnold, Hegel, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Margaret Drabble,’ PMLA, xvi, I (1981): Woolf portrays the gradual decay of a house into a tomb – . . . it is the Pargiter women who. . . . are the vessels of the intense passion associated with the line from the Antigone, while the men sink into the power structures they dominate – the university, the law, the military and congeal into the fearful attitudes with which they bury alive both themselves and a patriarchal society’s women. 23 Virginia Woolf, Diary, Vol. IV: 1931–5, p. 257. Virginia Woolf was still reeling from an attack on her by the reactionary (and misogynistic) Wyndham Lewis – see 14 October 1934: ‘If there is truth in W.L. well, face it. . . . But for God’s sake don’t try to bend my writing one way or the other. Not that one can.’ 24 Monks House Papers, University of Sussex Library, XLV, B2(m). 25 Monks House Papers, University of Sussex Library, LX, B16 f. vol. 3. 26 Three Guineas, Part Two (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 94.

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176 | Part Three 27 Three Guineas, p. 189. For more on Virginia Woolf and Frau Pommer – and the evolution of Woolf’s pacifism – see my essay, ‘The Elegiac Artist, Virginia Woolf 1882–1941’) in Women Against the Iron Fist: Alternatives to Militarism 1900–1989 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); revised edition, Alternatives to Militarism, 1900–1989, Edwin Mellen Press (Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter, 2000). 28 George Steiner, Antigones (1984), p. 141. It is significant that the women in the anti-Nazi Resistance group, the White Rose, Hamburg, should also have given Sophocles’ tragedy ‘a political twist’ – see ‘Germany’s Antigone, Sophie Scholl’, below. 29 Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, 1925; rev. ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 106. 30 Virginia Woolf, Appendix [ms. notes] for Speech ‘Professions for Women’, 21 January 1931, published in The Pargiters, ed. Mitchell Leaska (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), p. 164. 31 First published in Britain posthumously in Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth (London: Hogarth Press, 1942), p. 155. 32 Ibid. 33 Letter to Shena, Lady Simon, Jan. 22, 1940, in Leave the Letters Till We’re Dead: Letters, Vol. VI, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (London: Hogarth Press, 1980), p. 379. 34 ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air-raid’, The Death of the Moth, p. 156 . 35 The last letter to Shena, Lady Simon, 25 January 1941, Letters, Vol. VI, 464.

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CHAPTER

16 German Women in the Resistance to Hitler ‘German women inaugurated the march of women up the Calvary of resistance against Nazism.’ (Vera Laska, 1983)

The extent of German resistance to Nazism and the suffering it endured are still not general public knowledge – not even in Germany, let alone abroad. And even less is known of the resistance put up by German women. The very fact that there have been two Germanies after 1945 means that there has been a division in the writing of German history: in East Germany the history of the German Resistance was almost exclusively that of the Communist German Resistance, whereas until very recently West German historians fore-grounded that of the non-communists. In any event most German historians have focused on resistance by institution or organisation – the churches, the trades unions, the banned political parties – the leadership of all of which was exclusively male. And most English historians of the German Resistance have concentrated on the 20 July 1944 ‘Generals’ Plot’, an attempted Putsch from above, in which again, very few women could be directly involved. For all these reasons the women in the rank and file of the German Resistance have remained largely nameless and invisible1 – invisible that is to us, but not to the Nazis who hunted them down. The very recent German history of resistance by women that has emerged is largely a combination of prison statistics and personal anecdote.2 A systematic coverage of women’s resistance in Germany still has to wait until all the local studies, some of which are already under way, are completed. This essay, therefore, can only be an interim report, the first to my knowledge in English, and will cover the period from 1928 until 1945.

First published in Siân Reynolds, ed. Women, State and Revolution, Wheatsheaf Books, Harvester Press, Brighton, 1986.

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178 | Part Three

The Position of German Women Before the Rise of Nazism Prussia, like the rest of the world, had long cherished the belief that politics – matters of State – are essentially the business of men. The influential Heinrich von Treitschke, Professor of History at the University of Berlin, had thundered every year between 1874 and 1895 that: The features of history are virile, unsuited to sentimental or feminine natures . . . It may be said roughly that the normal woman obtains an insight into justice and government through men’s eyes, just as the normal man has no natural aptitude for petty questions of household management. (Politics, 1916, Book I, The Idea of the State)

Against Treitschke’s view of the State as being essentially the nationin-arms and therefore excluding women, the German women’s suffrage movement had had a hard struggle. Nevertheless there had been an organised women’s movement in Germany at least since 1894,3 and during the First World War German women had been enrolled as essential contributors both to the national war effort and to the administration of the State, just like their counterparts in Britain. In 1919, during Germany’s abortive revolution in the wake of her defeat, all German women over 21 were granted the vote. The ensuing decade, however, was a roller-coaster ride into chaos, although some aspects of the Weimar period were actually liberalising and liberating for women. By 1931, for instance, there were 19,000 women students at German universities and women comprised one-third of all teachers. The number of women doctors had multiplied thirteen-fold since the war, and women made up most of the nursing and social work professions. There were also women film stars, actresses, dancers and even 60 women politicians, all of whom were much in the public eye.4 But also under Weimar there was recurrent near-starvation, total economic insecurity and mass unemployment, none of which was liberating either for German women or for German men. One ominous sign of the times was the ‘revolutionary’ National Socialist Party which had as its programme not only the exclusion of Jews from German national life, but also the exclusion of German women from any positions of economic or political power. Already in 1921 the Nazi Party conference had unanimously declared that ‘a woman could not be accepted for a leadership position in the Party.’ And the party’s ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, declared that the first task of the next Nazi generation of women would be to ‘clear up the mess and emancipate women from women’s emancipation . . . One thing must be made clear: Man must be and must remain Judge, Soldier and Statesman.’5 Thus those German women who could see beyond the struggle for basic survival during the 1920s were already alerted to the threat presented by militaristic, antifeminist Nazism to all those women who wanted not only Kinder, Küche

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German Women in the Resistance to Hitler | 179 und Kirche, but education, work, a place in the polis and peace in the world as well.

The First Phase of Anti-Nazi Resistance by German Women 1928–1933 German resistance to Hitler began several years before economic catastrophe and political chaos finally enabled the Nazis to seize power. This resistance, however, was fatally weakened by the official (Stalinist), Communist Party policy of identifying the Social Democrats rather than the Nazis as their chief political enemy – a hostility that was duly returned. The German Left would only learn to make common cause in the struggle against the Nazis once it was too late. It was principally, therefore, leftwing, pacifist (but not Communist Party) women and men who took the Nazi threat seriously as early as 1928 and who worked to rally a political alternative that would not alienate a German electorate already battered by defeat, attempted revolution, foreign occupation and grotesque currency inflation: By 1928 four large federations of women’s organizations had coalesced, joining millions of women to form Germany’s largest, most powerful bloc of voters . . . In the 1928 elections, this coalition helped to rally twenty-nine million voters to the Social Democratic Party, to the numerous middle-class parties, and to the Catholic Centre Party. As a result the Nazi Party, with less than a million votes, was soundly defeated.6

But the October 1929 Wall Street crash changed all that. Unexampled mass unemployment in Germany (over 6 million unemployed out of a labour force of 20 million) and a halving of the standard of living in real terms over the next three years caused an all too understandable polarisation in politics. The Brown Shirts profited most from the ensuing violence on the streets and left-wing pacifist women now found themselves waging a more and more despairing struggle against not a tide but an avalanche. In October 1930, Käthe Kollwitz produced her drawing, Demonstration, as her protest against the brutal suppression by the Nazis of a workers’ rally. In January 1931, the pacifist, Constanze Hallgarten, founded the German League of Mothers as a counterpart to the French Ligue Internationale des Mères et des Educatrices pour la Paix. Within 18 months it had over 10,000 members all over Germany, mostly educated, middle-class women in the large towns and cities. In 1932, 1500 women attended an overflow women’s peace conference in Munich, including Catholic, Social Democrat and radical pacifist women, chaired by Erika Mann. The Nazis tried to break up the con-

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180 | Part Three ference without success and their newspaper reported it nationally with the scare headlines: ‘Pacifist Scandal in Munich. Women Traitors!’7 On 13 June 1932 Emmy Ender, addressing the Bund Deutscher Frauen, won majority backing for her declaration: ‘National Socialism has grown big in its fight against Jews and women. It will not give up this fight. Today I am for struggle.’8 But ‘today’ was too late. In December 1932 and January 1933 the last meetings of the German branches of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (again with a largely middle-class, educated, left-wing membership, and labelled ‘Jewish/Marxist’ by the Nazis) took place in Stuttgart, Hamburg and Frankfurt. At their Munich meeting in January 1933, the veteran German feminist and pacifist, Lida Gustava Heymann, aged 65, had to stand guard at the door of the hall: So imposing was her carriage and expression that several of the Brown Shirts shrank back. Her last appeal to the blind German people rushing towards their fate went: ‘Hitler means war. Protect your children, don’t let yourselves be fooled by words, – behind these words hide the most brutal, strong-arm tactics which you yourselves will be made to feel on your own flesh!’9

The Impact on German Women of the Nazis’ Accession to Power When Hitler seized power in February 1933, he could exploit a specifically German (or rather Prussian) tradition that women qua women were unfit to take part in matters of State, but he could also rely on a gut assumption that always resurfaces in times of economic depression, and which is far from peculiar to Germany, that a woman’s rightful place is in the home. But Hitler also knew from the outset that he would be confronted by opposition from certain sections of German women within the professional middle class and/or on the Left, who would have to be driven out or eliminated. Therefore he used every means available, ranging from changes in the law and State propaganda to arbitrary mass arrests, imprisonment without trial and even murder, in order to neutralise all opposition including that of women. It is generally assumed that revolutions occur in opposition to the State power and that, at least in their early days, they will have a left-wing, democratic, egalitarian and humanely reforming political orientation. But in Hitler’s Germany an extreme right-wing revolution was swiftly put through by the State machine itself, manipulating enthusiastic popular support for Hitler and the Nazi Party. In addition to the now Nazi-dominated armed police and secret police, backed by a network of informers in every city street, the law itself was swiftly changed, converting all political opponents into

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German Women in the Resistance to Hitler | 181 ‘Illegalen’. Agents-provocateurs and spies were now recruited, or blackmailed into betraying their former comrades. Before any politically-aware German men or women could begin to resist, therefore, the Nazis got in first. Even as the Reichstag was, unbeknownst to her, still burning, the communist Lina Haag was arrested in Stuttgart – she being just one among hundreds of left-wing German women immediately picked up for ‘questioning’ and taken into ‘protective custody.’ Women were included in political persecution from the first day. Already in March 1933, the Social Democrat MP Minna Cammens ‘disappeared’ and her ashes were sent to her husband in a cigar box a few days later with orders to keep quiet about her death. The Jewish Social Democrat MP Toni Sender, was warned only just in time of the Nazis’ plans to murder her and she escaped to America. Women writers who refused to write what one of them called Blut-und-Boden-Quatsch, were placed under Schreibverbot and denied access to publication. Veteran German feminists, including Helene Stöcker,10 Lida Gustava Heymann and Anita Augspurg11 were placed on the first Nazi proscription lists and fled into exile where they died. The pacifists Constanze Hallgarten and Professor Dr Anna Siemsen also went into exile in 1933 but survived. The communist writer Anna Seghers was arrested but escaped with her children to France and then to Mexico. The actresses Erika Mann, Therese Giese and Helene Weigel all had to become political exiles. Other women, like the Social Democrat MP and leading German feminist, Toni Pfülpf, so despaired over what was happening in Germany, that they killed themselves. Many of the new Nazi laws specifically targeted women in Hitler’s attempt to create a new Germany. Women were dismissed from factories, offices and administrative posts under the campaign against ‘doubleearners.’ Women were paid to marry and leave the workforce in order to bear children for Germany. ‘For the woman’s world is her husband, her family, her children and her home,’ as Hitler said at the Nuremberg Party Rally in September 1934. Girls were not allowed to take up more than ten per cent of the places in higher education and pressure was placed on women to resign from the professions of law and medicine.12 But the women who braced themselves to resist Hitler as the 1930s ‘progressed,’ did not do so out of outraged feminism. Nazi anti-feminism was subsumed in Nazi anti-humanism, including its militarism and racism, and it was on humanist grounds that the women who resisted Hitler defied him. They scorned his pseudo-scientific classification of the species into a hierarchy of Aryan, Slav, Negro and Jew, and they rejected his reduction of men to mere fighting animals as passionately as they rejected his reduction of women to mere breeding animals. Many of the women who resisted Hitler were to be accused of being ‘enemies of the State.’13 They defied this new totalitarian, militarist Germany, because they were convinced that its vaunted ‘National

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182 | Part Three Socialist Revolution’ violated every humane moral law. The fact that psychopaths were now in power did not make them sane and just. On the contrary. Lina Haag spoke for all the German women who were to resist Hitler on the grounds of humanism when she asked defiantly: What is the authority of the State, the power of this State? Terror. The storm-trooper and the policeman who may beat you and arrest you. The SS man and Gestapo official and the concentration camp . . . [The] horror and fear of that State are its power and authority. It is true that I stood out against that power and authority.14

Or, as Joanna Jacob put it: ‘Every woman (in prison) came from a different group or party, but we all wanted the same thing, to prevent another war and to fight injustice.’15

The Second Phase of Anti-Nazi Resistance by German Women, 1933–39 As we have seen, many of Germany’s most eminent women intellectuals and leading feminists were immediately driven into exile early in 1933; those few who remained in Germany were left with scarcely any way of expressing their anti-Nazism. For example, Germany’s greatest woman writer, Ricarda Huch, publicly resigned from the Prussian Academy of Arts in order to register her angry protest against the expulsion of the brothers Mann, Döblin, Wasserman and Werfel; and Goebbels publicly retaliated by insulting her on the occasion of her seventieth birthday. Sometimes, however, women managed to write in code as when Gertrud von le Fort published her essay, Die ewige Frau in 1934 on the necessity for women to act as the humane conscience of society in order to counteract the brutality of male power-politics.16 In 1935 the artist and sculptor Käthe Kollwitz, (who had already been expelled from the Prussian Academy of Arts in March 1933), defiantly attended the funeral of the Jewish painter Max Liebermann. In July 1936 the Gestapo came for her, then aged sixty-eight, interrogated her and threatened her with concentration camp. Thereafter she and her husband always carried poison on them lest the Gestapo came to take them away. In 1937, an outstanding woman resister among the intellectuals, the Catholic university lecturer, Dr Margarethe Adam, was arrested for high treason. She had written to army officers (i.e. seven years before the overdue 20 July 1944 Officers’ Plot) urging them to overthrow Hitler before he ruined Germany. She was sentenced to nine years’ penal servitude, the effects of which killed her.17 The German woman resisters found themselves at this time in a situation of ever-increasing isolation as they watched their Satan being hailed as the Messiah. That Hitler was Germany’s saviour was now being taught

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German Women in the Resistance to Hitler | 183 in schools, on newsreels, over the radio, and in the pulpit. Christa Wolf has reconstructed the feelings of her own five-year-old, Nazi self in 1934: The Führer was a sweet pressure in the stomach area and a sweet lump in the throat, which she had to clear to call out for him, the Führer, in a loud voice, in unison with all the others, according to the urgings of a patrolling sound truck . . . Although it frightened her a little, she was at the same time longing to hear the roar, to be a part of it.18

Nevertheless, Hitler still found it necessary to set up more and more prisons, including concentration camps, designed specifically for women before September 1939, in order to punish all those German women who would not shout ‘Heil!’ Already in 1933 Gotteszell in BadenWürttemberg, Stadelheim in Bavaria, Barnimstrasse in Berlin and Moringen in Lower Saxony were designated as new women’s prisons. Moringen became the first women’s concentration camp, then Lichtenburg and, in spring 1939, Ravensbrück. Günther Weisenborn,19 using German prison statistics, estimates that c. 225,000 German men and women had passed through the courts on political charges by September 1939. A surviving Gestapo report for 10 April 1939, states that on that date alone there were 27,369 prisoners in custody awaiting sentence for political offences and 112,432 convicted political prisoners actually serving sentences. Henri Bernard, Brussels,20 estimates that ‘without counting Jews, 302,000 Germans were imprisoned . . . for political reasons before the war.’ We cannot as yet be certain what percentage of these prisoners were women. Hanna Elling’s estimate of 20 per cent is possibly too high. But even 10 per cent would mean over 30,000 German women imprisoned, and just 5 per cent would mean 15,000. What is certain therefore is that there were many thousands of German women who resisted Nazism in one way or another before 1939 and whose struggle is still far too little known. Who were these women? The women who suffered even worse than did the intellectuals from the Nazis’ accession to power were, indubitably, the active socialists and communists. Among the hundreds, if not thousands, of women arrested in Berlin, Hamburg, Leipzig, Bremen, Hanover, Wupperthal, Essen, Frankfurt, Munich, Mannheim, Dortmund and Stuttgart during the first years of Nazi power were the socialists Herta Brünen-Niederhellmann and Anna Stiegler and the communists Maria Zeh, Trude Gessmann, Hanna Melzer, Erika Buchmann, Lina Haag, Gertrud Meyer, Lina Knappe, Gertrud Schlotterbeck, Maria Deeg, Katherina Jacob, Berta Karg, Charlotte Gross, Dr Doris Maase, Anne Bohne-Lucko, Käthe Popall and Centa Herker-Beimler.21 The charges against them included typing, duplicating and distributing illegal leaflets (which often pathetically and unrealistically called for a ‘mass uprising against the Fascist warmongers!’); trying to form a now illegal trade union; giving aid to the

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184 | Part Three families of political prisoners (‘Rote Hilfe’); spreading ‘atrocity stories’ about the Nazis abroad (‘Greuel im Ausland’); attempting to help reorganise the banned Social Democrat or Communist Parties; harbouring wanted left-wingers in their own homes; and even just putting flowers on Rosa Luxemburg’s grave. It is clear from many of these charges that most of the women played a characteristically subordinate and supportive role in the political resistance but it was none the less a role that was both essential and dangerous. As one woman resister pointed out: How could the active men and women comrades who had been outlawed do their work at all without the many women who afforded them secret refuge? . . . These women had to know the precise details of their neighbours’ habits – when they departed for and returned from work, when the housewives swept the apartment-block stairs, when they went shopping and so on, in order that the hidden resistance-worker could leave the house and return without being seen. Above all the Quartiermütter had to know the political attitude of every one of their fellow-tenants. Every day there would be some cause for panic and all too often things would go terribly wrong.22

Once arrested, women might be held for months and even years without trial and subjected to repeated brutal interrogation. Indeed the real motive for their arrest would often seem to have been the Gestapo’s assumption that they would break under continuous cross-examination and betray the names and whereabouts of a whole network of ‘wanted’, much more important, left-wing men – their fathers, brothers, husbands, lovers or sons. Thus the women’s resistance had to continue within prison as they refused to name other people, no matter what was done to them. As a punishment for their non-cooperation they were sentenced to quite disproportionately long terms of penal servitude or solitary confinement, and even after their sentences had been served they were still not released. Instead, these women ‘politicals’ were moved to concentration camps, and so became some of the first to endure Nazi torture, the grey-cloaked women guards with their dogs and whips, and the punishment cells underground where women were beaten to death. As Lina Haag wrote: I always thought that after my two years of solitary confinement there was nothing left in this world that could frighten me, but I was mistaken. I had a terrible fear of the whippings, of the dark cells in which women died so quickly, of the dreaded rooms in which the prisoners were interrogated by the Gestapo . . . The fear alone was martyrdom enough, martyrdom enough the certainty that these things would happen to us.

On Easter Sunday 1938, at Lichtenburg, she had to watch the communist Steffi Kunke of Vienna, who had been arrested for helping her Jewish

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German Women in the Resistance to Hitler | 185 communist lover escape across the frontier, be stripped naked, tied to a post and whipped to death. The Nazis’ sadism, towards both men and women, could now flourish at will in the new, isolated camps, with their specially recruited staff. And on 23 June 1938, the first German woman was legally executed in Berlin because of her political resistance to Hitler. She was 27-year-old Liselotte Herrmann, a former student of chemistry and biology, who had been expelled from University in 1933 for signing a students’ anti-war petition. She had made contact with the banned Communist Party in Stuttgart, and, on discovering during her work in a South German aircraft factory in 1935 that Hitler was definitely rearming for war, she had got word out to friends in Switzerland to rouse public opinion abroad using her technical and industrial evidence. In December 1935 she was arrested for treason; in 1937 she was sentenced to death and in June 1938 she was beheaded. Several prominent Englishwomen, including Lady Violet Bonham-Carter, Eleanor Rathbone MP, Sybil Thorndike, Viscountess Rhondda and Ellen Wilkinson MP, cabled Hitler petitioning for a reprieve, in vain. One large group of women resisters whom the left-wing ‘politicals’ had never expected to find as fellow sufferers in the concentration camps were the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They constituted the first, and for a long time the only, religious group openly to defy Hitler, as Lina Haag testified: They were among the few people in Germany who said what they thought to the all-powerful party and Gestapo demi-gods. They said that they were against war, and that the quasi-divinity which Hitler assumed was blasphemous and criminal . . . They held fast to their faith, and endured imprisonment and death for it. They refused . . . any work that served armaments; . . . They accepted all maltreatment and every insult without complaint, as a trial imposed by Jehovah; or they replied calmly and soberly with prophecies of woe. Their attitude was more than admirable, it was most moving, but it was ‘not of this world’ . . . it belonged to Old Testament times.

Meanwhile, in the rest of Germany, away from the hideous prisons and camps, the persecution of German Jews was on the increase and reached its pre-war climax on Kristallnacht, 9 November 1938. Hundreds of synagogues and shops were set on fire, at least a thousand Jews were arrested and about a hundred killed. H.D. Leuner cites many instances of individual Germans, most often women (and including servants, nursemaids, governesses, and the Gentile wives of Jews) who stood by the stigmatised German Jews before 1939. Even though they did not, as yet, risk imprisonment or death for their loyalty they did risk being pilloried in the Nazi press as ‘Judenfreunde’ and even dismissal from their work, quite sufficient sanctions to make many women hesitate before going out of their way on behalf of the Jews.23

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186 | Part Three All in all, the political resistance of German women between 1933 and 1939 was essentially a resistance grounded in moral revulsion at the Nazis’ brutality, their militarism and racism, and it was often reinforced by the women’s loyalty towards their men who were already political prisoners or in hiding. The women would often practise hidden resistance as they refused to work in the armaments industries or secretly committed themselves to sustaining the families of the racially persecuted or the politically outlawed. As yet it was only if they could be convicted of complicity in some overtly political activity that they would be savagely punished. Mere human fellowship or the expression of anti-Nazi views were not yet crimes. But that would change.

The Impact of War on German Women Resisters Once Hitler initiated the Second World War, the situation of anti-Nazi women in Germany became infinitely more difficult. Whatever slight foreign support they had hitherto received was now cut off. Any aid they now gave to Jews gradually became criminally punishable. Brutal new measures were now swiftly brought in for the elimination of ‘useless eaters’ including schizophrenics, epileptics, the senile, the paralysed, the mentally handicapped, the long-stay mentally ill and those suffering from Huntingdon’s or other neurological diseases (and, in addition all patients of mixed Jewish, negro or gipsy blood also had to be reported for extermination). It was generally women, most often nuns, who were committed to caring for these afflicted people and who were soon faced with a horrific choice. In addition, new categories of untouchable people were being herded into Germany – foreign prisoners of war and slave-workers: Poles, Frenchmen and Russians, and with them came new crimes and new penalties, many of which targeted characteristically ‘womanly’ acts of fellowship and affection. Any girl or woman discovered to be having a love affair with a slave-worker or prisoner of war could now be sent to a concentration camp for ‘Rassenschande.’ It was now an offence to bake a cake for a foreigner, or to speak in French to a French prisoner, or to invite a Pole to a birthday party, or even to mend a prisoner’s socks.24 Any help such as food or ration coupons seen to be given to a foreign slave was made a criminal offence. Whereas under Weimar only three offences carried the death penalty, under Nazi law, forty-six different ‘crimes’ were punishable with death.25 For example to hide a Jew or to help a Jew escape was now made a capital offence. Listening to a foreign radio station was made a capital offence. Uttering anti-Nazi, or anti-war ‘defeatist’ remarks was a capital offence. And informers were everywhere. Clearly it is far more difficult for a woman to resist her own government and country in war-time than it is to do so in peacetime or than it is

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German Women in the Resistance to Hitler | 187 to resist a foreign occupation force. What had been dissidence now seems to be treason, not merely to those in power but also to all one’s neighbours, and even perhaps to oneself. How can you try to sabotage a war-effort in which your own and your friends’ menfolk are being killed? ‘Even to appear to differ from those she loves in the hour of their affliction has ever been the supreme test of a woman’s conscience’, as Jane Addams wrote of those women who had publicly opposed the Great War of 1914–18. Moreover, German women were not only tempted to try to alleviate the suffering of their men, and to ensure their victory, by supplying them with every sort of material and psychological support; they were also being asked to welcome the pain of being bombed and of ever-increasing hardship all for the sake of the Fatherland. Goebbels evolved a Nazi version of the theology of suffering especially addressed to German girls and women. As Christa Wolf bitterly remembers in her Model Childhood, all the idealism and self-immolation of her adolescence were harnessed to the Nazis’ war-effort between the ages of twelve and sixteen; she was desperate to be thought worthy to become a leader of Hitler’s Jungmädel, she worshipped the dedication to duty of her beloved Nazi history mistress, eager to emulate her in all the women’s tasks of warservice – potato-harvesting, fire-watching, billeting and tending the wounded and evacuees, seduced by her own very innocence into believing that evil was good, convinced that her Führer really meant what he said about collective self-sacrifice for the good of the suffering Heimat. The worse things became for herself and for Germany, the more loyal she would be until at sixteen she was grieving bitterly for her worst enemy – the dead Hitler.26 But German women had still more internal barriers to overcome, besides terror for themselves or a misplaced idealistic masochism, before they could resist Hitler and Hitler’s war. Women have a special area of vulnerability because of the existence of those totally dependent upon them. It is not unnatural that women should feel that their first duty must be to those who would be helpless without them – their babies and small children, their sick and their elderly. Bacon remarked that he who has wife and children has hostages to fortune; from 1939 to 1945 she who had helpless dependants had hostages to Hitler. If a woman were caught, her relatives would be arrested also under ‘Sippenhaft’ and her children could be taken away from her altogether to be brought up as good Nazis. It is not surprising that of the 280 women listed by Hanna Elling as executed for political reasons the majority were single women. A few were pregnant with their first child when arrested; they gave birth in prison, were allowed to breastfeed for a few weeks and were then beheaded. Nevertheless, despite all these horrors, there still were thousands of German women, even including some married women with children, who risked resisting both the Nazis and their war. This resistance took one of two contrasting forms. Either it would be

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188 | Part Three waged in maximum isolation and with complete secrecy in order to be effective, or it would attempt to gain maximum exposure, reaching as many key people as possible. An example of the first, ‘secret’ resistance, was the hiding of fugitive Jews or of handicapped young people on the death-lists; an example of the second was the leafleting of university lecture theatres, factories, army barracks or railway stations, giving the truth about the war news. Secret resistance was not directly political in that it did not work to overthrow Nazi power; nevertheless it was still resistance, since it aimed at frustrating and undermining Nazi policies. Erna Lugebiel, who was sent to Ravensbrück for helping to hide Jews, said she did not regard what she did as resistance; it was just a matter of acting according to one’s human feelings.27 But she was wrong. To act like a feeling human being in a society which forbids humanity is to wage resistance against that society, and to do so when the penalty for discovery is torture or death is to be a heroine.

The Third Phase of Anti-Nazi Resistance by German Women, September 1939–May 1945 Among the Germans who risked their lives for Jews before 1945, says H.D. Leuner, women considerably outnumbered men. He cites Frau Angermeier, the caretaker of the Jewish cemetery in Munich, Countess Bullestrem-Solf and her daughter who forged visas, hid Jews and led them secretly across the frontier, and the concert singer Lydia Borelli who said later: ‘I was ashamed to be a German; to keep my self-respect I had to share the fate of the persecuted Jews. I had to make it my own.’ So she sheltered two Jewish women for the duration. The ‘Onkel Emil’ group in Berlin consisting of about twenty-four professional people including the actresses Karin Friedrich and Ruth Andreas, forged identity papers for refugees. They also tore down Nazi propaganda slogans, spread foreign news, looked after the families of political prisoners and secretly fed foreign slave-workers. Martha Beicht took her first two Jews into her flat when she was only eighteen; twenty-three Germans, most of them women, were needed to save just one Jewish couple and their little girl by taking it in turn to hide them. The retired teacher, Elisabeth Abegg, used her home constantly as a hiding-place. And for every helper and fugitive alike every waking minute had to be lived in fear. (Elisabeth Langgässer has written the best imaginative account of what it meant for women to hide and to be hidden in her story In Hiding.) In Königsberg, five German village women – Frau Klieger, Frau Schmiedel, Frau Metzger, Frau Krantz and Frau Seifert – were sentenced to six years’ penal servitude for having taken in eight children of deported Jews and for having brought them up as their own. In Berlin, two women teachers of an illegal school for Jewish children were killed by the Gestapo. Two Protestant women who then

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German Women in the Resistance to Hitler | 189 continued to run the school were arrested and sent to Ravensbrück, as was the Catholic Gertrud Lucker who had tried to help Jews through Caritas. The young nurse, Gertrud Seele, was executed in Plötzensee for helping Jews. Perhaps the most eminent of all German women who suffered for this kind of resistance to the Nazis’ race mania was the Protestant educationist and former headmistress of an outstanding girls’ school, Elisabeth von Thadden. With her hands manacled behind her back she dictated her last words in the death cell to the prison chaplain: ‘We wanted to be good Samaritans.’ Simultaneously, those German nuns who cared for the sick, the handicapped and the incurable were having to risk concentration camp or even death as they tried to save at least some of their charges. They falsified the official returns about the inmates of their hospices, they sent patients away without authority back to the greater safety of their families, they warned these families of the imminent danger that the afflicted ones were in, they did not surrender the patients demanded of them, they tried to obstruct the death-transports, and in each case they were risking a charge of sabotage or anti-state activity. One Franciscan nun, Sister Oswenda, managed to get a spastic boy adopted just in time; another, Sister Gislaria, hid a boy with a skin disease who was on the death-list in her bread kitchen during a search; a third, Sister Paulilla, took twenty mentally handicapped boys out into the fields with her every day where they weeded and picked stones and so were saved from the fatal ‘useless eater’ label. All in all the nuns saved nearly 1500 of the sick and handicapped from being killed like defective cattle. Those they could not save were a lifelong torment to remember.28 Never before have so many of the kindest people, the least selfish, the most capable of pity and generosity and moral courage, had to risk a hideous death because they were decent human beings. There was the communist, Lore Diener, for instance, who was punished by the SS with death in Auschwitz merely for having allowed the Polish women prisoners in her block in Ravensbrück to pray aloud together and sing their folksongs.29 There was the Catholic, Marie Terwiel, executed for distributing Bishop von Galen’s sermons and for forging passports for Jews.30 There were the Jehovah’s Witnesses Margaret Baalhorn, Helene Gotthold and Mathilde Hengeveld, executed for giving shelter to young men who would not kill for Hitler.31 And there was the irrepressible Countess Erika von Brockdorff, convicted of having a radio set in her flat which was used for making contact with the Russians. Her Nazi judge threatened that she would soon stop laughing. ‘Not while I can still see you,’ she retorted; and Hitler personally insisted on the death sentence for her.32 More than three hundred women’s names have so far been found on the Gestapo execution records, and the list is still not complete. By far the largest group of detected anti-Nazi resisters were communists. That they were detected was directly related to the openness of their

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190 | Part Three mode of resistance – leafleting, fly-posting, sabotage, contacting prisoners of war, radioing military intelligence to Russia, and urging German soldiers to desert. Some of these women, like 75-year-old Ottilie Pfühl, had been active communists long before Hitler’s time. Others, like the graphic artist Elisabeth Schumacher, the film researcher Libertas SchulzeBoysen, the secretary Hilde Coppi, the tailoress Lisbeth Rose and the housewife Anneliese Hoevel had worked with their communist husbands in illegal political activity after 1933 and were all executed with them in the early 1940s.33 The Nazis liked to label all their opponents ‘Bolsheviks’ and to assert that such people were simply traitors to Germany, in the pay of the Kremlin. And to some extent this ‘Red’ reputation has stuck in the West – some post-war western commentators seeming to feel that the Nazis did have a point in executing people who listened in to Russian news bulletins and radioed military information back (though how the Nazis could have been defeated as swiftly as possible without Russian knowledge of Hitler’s war strategy they do not say).34 It is not possible to interrogate the dead about their degree of ideological independence, but the last letters written by communist women resisters before their execution certainly do not sound like messages from people inspired just by narrow political sectarianism. The resistance courier, and kindergarten teacher, Rose Schlösinger, for instance wrote to her small daughter: My dear little big Marianne, . . . [Think] of our evenings of discussion in bed, about all the important things of life – I trying to answer your questions. And think of our beautiful three weeks at the seashore – of the sunrise and when we walked barefoot along the beach from Bansin to Urkeritz, and when I pushed you before me on the rubber float, and when we read books together . . . 35

One other group of women resisters who should not be forgotten consisted of girls who had received all their education under the Nazis but who nevertheless risked their lives to testify that Nazism was evil. Twentyyear-old Liane Berkowitz and Cato Bonties van Beek, for instance, who typed and duplicated resistance materials for the Schulze-Boysen Harnack organisation in Berlin; Eva Buch who translated their illegal leaflet ‘Inner Front’ into French to circulate among French prisoners of war; Margarethe Rothe of the Hamburg ‘White Rose’ group which published the illegal radio wavelength of the Deutsche Freiheitssender calling for the overthrow of the Nazis;36 and 21-year-old Sophie Scholl in Munich. Sophie Scholl has, up till now, been the best known, if not indeed the only known, example of political resistance by a German girl.37 Her independent mind and passionate conscience ring out in the leaflets that she helped her brother and his friends to write, duplicate and distribute in

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German Women in the Resistance to Hitler | 191 cities all over southern Germany as well as in Hamburg, Vienna and Berlin. Their first leaflet quoted Schiller to support their stand against the totalitarian Nazi state: Anything may be sacrificed to the good of the State except that end for which the State serves as a means. The State is never an end in itself; it is important only as a condition under which the purpose of humanity can be attained . . . In Sparta a political system was set up at the price of all moral feeling . . .

Their second pamphlet spelt out the slaughter of the Jews in Poland: ‘Here we see the most frightful crime against human dignity, a crime unparalleled in the whole of history. For Jews, too, are human beings.’ Their third leaflet declared: ‘our present “state” is the dictatorship of evil.’ Their fourth: Every word that comes from Hitler’s mouth is a lie. When he says peace he means war, and when he blasphemously uses the name of the Almighty, he means . . . Satan . . . We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!

Their last leaflets, January/February 1943, called on the Germans to commit sabotage and to dissociate themselves from the Nazi gangsters before it was too late: Are we to be forever the nation which is hated and rejected by all mankind? . . . Do not believe that National Socialist propaganda which has driven the fear of Bolshevism into your bones . . . The name of Germany is dishonoured for all time if German youth does not finally rise, take revenge, and atone, smash its tormentors, and set up a new Europe of the spirit .

Sophie Scholl was always quite clear how her open resistance must end. Two days before her arrest she had said to a friend: ‘So many people have died for this regime, it is time that someone dies for being against it.’ In their defence during interrogation the brother and sister simply said that they had wanted to save hundreds of thousands of lives by building up opposition to the continued waging of the war and that they believed that the sacrifice of their own lives for that cause was not in vain. At 5.00 pm on 22 February 1943, Sophie Scholl was manacled to two assistant executioners and beheaded. The announcement of the execution of the Scholls at Munich University was greeted with roars of approval. Finally, there were all those individual German women who belonged to no resistance group at all but who had to express their abhorrence of

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192 | Part Three the Nazi barbarism even if it were only by ‘talking out of turn.’ Elfriede Scholz, for example, the sister of Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front, was denounced by one of her dressmaking customers for saying: Will this idiot let every one of our towns be smashed flat before he agrees to make peace? All the men marched off to the front are nothing but cattle going to the slaughter. If Germans are hated all over the world, then that is their own fault – foreigners are much better people than we are always being told.38

She was convicted of ‘defeatism and shameless betrayal of her own German blood’ and executed. Another such stubborn individual was the distinguished Munich actress, Hanne Mertens, once famous for her Electra and her Hedda Gabler. She too spoke out against the war-mania and dared to mock Goebbels himself. Arrested and held for months without trial in a Hamburg concentration camp, even starvation in the freezing punishment cell could not silence her – she still could be heard singing or reciting Goethe, Heine, Theodor Storm or the Shakespeare sonnet ‘Full many a glorious morning have I seen/Flatter the mountaintops with sovereign eye.’ The letters NN, Nacht und Nebel, had been put against her name, signifying that she was to be got rid of without anyone ever knowing what happened to her. What did happen was that ten days before the end of the war the SS came for her and for twelve other women prisoners (and fifty-eight men) all of whom thought they were about to be released; they were stripped naked instead, and hanged.39 It was not granted to them to save Germany; only to die for her; luck was not with them but with Hitler. Nevertheless, they did not die in vain. Just as we need air in order to breathe, light in order to see, so also do we need noble human beings in order to live. They are the element in which the spirit grows and the heart can become pure. They tear us out of the morass of the mundane; they fire us to struggle against evil; they nourish our faith in the divine in humans . . . Meine Helden, Geliebte . . . 40

Why have we remained so long in ignorance of the resistance by German women? The Nazis themselves of course destroyed a lot of the evidence and the Allies at first wanted to suppress the facts about any German resistance since they needed the collective guilt of all Germans to justify their call for unconditional surrender. (And not even during the Nuremberg trials were any surviving German resisters called to testify, although they were a living proof that it had been possible not to obey orders.) Then the swift resumption of the Cold War between the erstwhile Allies caused communist historians only to acknowledge the authenticity

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German Women in the Resistance to Hitler | 193 of the communist resistance and western historians only that of the noncommunists. And the thousands of women typists, couriers, ‘Quartiermütter’ and rescuers of the persecuted within the German resistance remained largely invisible on both sides of the political divide because they were never the leaders of their groups, only the enablers. For that reason alone it is worth recording that there were women in the German resistance who pitted themselves against a totalitarian state fused with a populist revolution, and who overcame all the barriers specific to the female condition (physical, social and psychological) in order to do life-sustaining work, in spite of its being forbidden, and because it was forbidden. The women resisters did not overthrow Hitler but they did save thousands of his victims, for the personal has never been more political than it was in Germany then. Whether communist or non-communist, hundreds of these women ended up side by side, manacled, naked, hanging from the same gallows or beheaded by the same guillotine, united in their humanist resistance to the Nazi policies of ‘the elimination of the non-human’ and ‘total war.’ Liselotte Herrmann, Lina Haag, Rose Schlösinger, Erika von Brockdorff, Elisabeth von Thadden, Hanne Mertens, Margarethe Rothe, Sophie Scholl and all the many even less known others were Cordelias who ‘with best meaning . . . incurr’d the worst.’ No statues have been raised to them and very few German streets or schools have been named after them. Outside Germany they have remained almost completely unknown. Yet we Europeans, need, I believe, to resurrect these particular dead German women almost above all others. We need them to quicken in us something of their pity for all who are vulnerable, their fellowship with those labelled ‘alien’ and their refusal to do evil in the name of a specious good. Notes All translations from the German are by the author. l E.g. Grant, Mommsen, Reichardt and Wolf, 1966, and Klessmann and Pingel, 1980, mention not a single woman; A. J. Dulles, 1947, and Peter Hoffmann, 1977, mention only one woman in passing, and Löwenthal and von zur Muhlen, 1982, mention just three women. The general study edited by R. Bridenthal et al., When Biology became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany did not become available in time to be consulted when this essay was being written, but is clearly relevant. 2 E.g. Gerda Zorn and Gertrud Meyer, Frauen gegen Hitler, 1974, Hanna Elling, Frauen im deutschen Widerstand in 1981 and Vera Laska, ed. Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust, 1983. 3 See Daniela Weiland, Geschichte der Frauenemanzipation in Deutschland, 1983, pp. 306–10. 4 See Bridenthal, 1973 and Tim Mason, ‘Women in Germany, 1925–1940’, History Workshop Journal, Issues 1 and 2, 1976. 5 Hanna Elling, op. cit., Roderberg, Frankfurt, 1981, p. 11.

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194 | Part Three 6 Martha Kearns, Käthe Kollwitz, Feminist Press, CUNY, 1976, p. 196. 7 Elisabeth Brändle-Zeile, Frauen für den Frieden, Stuttgart, DFG-VK, 1983, pp. 45–50. 8 Richard Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany 1894–1933, London, Sage, 1976, p. 255. 9 For the feminist, pacifist life-work of Lida Gustava Heymann, see her memoirs, Erlebtes-Erschautes, 1977. 10 Helene Stöcker was a radical feminist, champion of the unmarried mother and her child, and a leading figure in War Resisters International. 11 Dr Anita Augspurg was Germany’s first woman lawyer. 12 Tim Mason, 1976: ‘In respect of its attitudes and policies towards women, National Socialism was the most repressive and reactionary of all modern political movements.’ 13 E.g., Lina Haag, Luise Rinser and Sophie Scholl. 14 Lina Haag, How Long the Night, London, Gollancz, 1948, pp. 101–2. 15 Quoted in Gerda Szepansky, Frauen leisten Widerstand 1933–45, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt, 1983, p. 215. 16 Gertrud von le Fort also wrote a very fine short story, The Wife of Pilate, first published in 1955, and translated in Herrmann and Spitz, 1978, which can be read as a parable on the intercessor role of martyred women resisters in Nazi Germany. 17 U. Hochmuth and G. Meyer, Streiflichter aus dem Hamburger Widerstand, 1933–45, Roederberg, Frankfurt, 1969, pp. 271–3. 18 Christa Wolf, A Model Childhood, Farrar, Straus and Co. New York, 1980, p. 45; orig. publ. as Kindheitsmuster, Berlin,1976. 19 Günther Weisenborn, Der lautlose Aufstand, Roderberg, Frankfurt, 1974, p. 43. Weisenborn, who himself had been a resister, is one of the very few male historians who fully acknowledges the part played in the German Resistance by women. 20 L’autre Allemagne: la résistance allemande à Hitler, 1933–1945. Brussels, 1976. 21 See Elling, Zorn and Meyer, Haag, and Szepansky for the survivors’ testimony. 22 Käthe Popall, interviewed in Elling, 1981, p. 151 23 H.D. Leuner, When Compassion was a Crime, Wolff, London, 1978, and see Die Zeit, 27 December 1985, for numerous letters from German Jewish survivors testifying to the loyalty of their German Gentile women servants before 1939. 24 See Heinrich Fraenkel’s chapter ‘Kindness to Prisoners’, in The Other Germany, 1943, which quotes Nazi newspaper reports on the many German women given terms of imprisonment for the smallest acts of humanity; see also Anna Haag, Zu meiner Zeit, Stuttgart, 1978, pp. 161–73. 25 Gertrud Meyer, Nacht Uber Hamburg, Roderberg, Frankfurt, 1971, p. 227. 26 Wolf, op. cit., 1980, chs. 8, 10 and 15. 27 Szepansky, op. cit., 1983, p. 155. 28 Benedikta Maria Kempner, Nonnen unter dem Hakenkreuz, Neumann, Wurzburg, 1979. 29 Szepansky, op. cit., p. 179. 30 Annedore Leber, Conscience in Revolt, Sixty-four Stories of Resistance in Germany 1933–45, Vallentine Mitchell, London, 1957, pp. 123–6.

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German Women in the Resistance to Hitler | 195 31 Elling, op. cit., 1981, p. 182. 32 Weisenborn, op. cit., 1974, p. 257. 33 All these women were connected to the Schulze-Boysen/Harnack group which did vital work warning the Soviet Union of Hitler’s planned invasion of southern Russia. 34 The clearest account of German communist resistance and its independence from Moscow is by Hermann Weber, in Löwenthal and von der Mühlen, 1982. 35 Gollwitzer, Kuhn and Schneider, Dying We Live: The final messages and records of some Germans who defied Hitler, ed. Gollwitzer, Kuhn and Schneider, Collins, Fontana, 1956, pp. 190–1. 36 The most detailed study of the Hamburg White Rose group of students is in U. Hochmuch and G. Meyer, op. cit., 1969. 37 See Inge Scholl, Students Against Tyranny, [includes reprints in English of all the Scholls’ Resistance leaflets], Wesleyan University Press, Connecticut, 1970, and Hermann Vinke, Das kurze Leben der Sophie Scholl – mit einem Interview mit Ilse Aichinger, Otto Maier Verlag, Ravensburg, 1980, 1984. A German feature-film has recently been made of Sophie Scholl’s life and trial, and the University Square in Munich is named after her and her brother. 38 Weisenborn, op. cit., 1974, pp. 315–16. 39 Zorn and Meyer, op. cit, 1974, pp. 74–90. 40 Ricarda Huch aged 82, in 1946, appealing to Germany to remember all those Germans who had been killed for their anti-Nazi resistance, quoted in Weisenborn, op. cit., 1974, pp. 11, 401.

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CHAPTER

17 Germany’s Antigone Sophie Scholl (1921–1943)

‘It seems ridiculous for a girl to care seriously about politics.’ (Sophie Scholl, 28 June 1940)

Whereas Simone Weil and Virginia Woolf were converted by the fact of Hitler to a reluctant renunciation of their pacifism, Sophie Scholl was converted by Hitler to a total commitment to anti-militarism. The decisive difference in her situation, of course, was that she was a German. Sophie Scholl had to resist what almost everyone outside her immediate family believed to be the vital national good. ‘It is perhaps more difficult to stand up for a worthy cause when . . . one risks one’s life on one’s own and in lonely isolation.’1 When Hitler became Chancellor, in January 1933, Sophie Scholl was eleven and a half years old, the youngest daughter and the fourth of Robert and Magdalena Scholl’s five children. Her father had been one of the few Germans who had refused to fight in World War I and he had met his wife, a Protestant deaconess/nurse, while they were both caring for wounded soldiers in a military hospital. Sophie was a reflective, introverted child, expressing herself most often in her drawing and solitary play in the woods and streams, but occasionally she would burst out into a spontaneous protest at some injustice. At first, like her elder brother and sisters, Sophie took all Hitler’s idealistic promises at face value: We heard much oratory about the Fatherland, comradeship, unity of the Volk, and love of our land . . . And Hitler – so we heard on all sides – Hitler would help our Fatherland achieve greatness, fortune and prosperity. He would see to it that everyone had work and bread. He would not rest until every German was independent, free and happy . . . There was something else that drew us with mysterious power and swept us along: the closed ranks of marching youth with banners waving, eyes fixed straight ahead, keeping time to drum-beat and song . . . All of us,

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Germany’s Antigone | 197 Hans and Sophie and the others, joined the Hitler youth. We entered into it with body and soul.2

Only their father dissented. He tried to warn his children that Hitler’s ‘economic miracle’ was achieved by preparing for another war and that Hitler was another Pied Piper, leading the children to destruction. But at first they had no ears to hear. Sophie wholeheartedly enjoyed the hiking and camping, the singing by the torch-lit fires with the Jungmädel, among whom she soon became a leader. Right from the first, however, she could not accept the anti-Jewish paranoia. It made absolutely no sense to her and she insisted on keeping up her friendship with one of the few Jewish girls in her class, Anneliese Wallersteiner. It was only after the Nuremberg rally of 1936, when Sophie was 15, that she began to share her elder brother Hans’s first misgivings about other aspects of Nazi Party ideology and praxis – above all its relentless emphasis on militarism, its authoritarianism and promotion of ‘Deutschland über Alles’. Now that they too had begun to question aspects of Nazism, the Scholl children could draw close to their father again. They asked him what a ‘concentration camp’ was and he told them what he knew and what he suspected, adding: ‘That is war. War in the midst of peace, within our own people. War against the defenceless individual . . . It is a frightful crime.’3 He urged his children to try to remain ‘upright and free’ no matter what. As well as belonging to the Hitlerjugend, Hans belonged to an alternative, secret, boys’ group, ‘Deutsche Jungenschaft vom 1 November’, which read banned poetry, swapped postcards by proscribed artists and sang Russian, Scandinavian and Gipsy songs that were all taboo; and Sophie, although only on the fringe, as a non-boy, had also quietly absorbed much of this alternative, forbidden culture. Early one November morning in 1937 the Gestapo arrived to arrest Inge (18), Sophie (16) and Werner (15) as part of a national crackdown on such subversive pastimes. Hans (19) was arrested in his barracks. Sophie had been arrested by mistake; they had thought her trousers and short-cropped hair meant that she was a boy; clearly no young girl could have had anything to do with forbidden ‘Resistance’ activities. Sophie regarded this first attack upon her family by the Secret State Police as a mark of distinction, refusing to apologize for it in any way. And she incurred further odium within the Bund Deutscher Mädel by naively recommending Heine as a poet for special study. Everyone was aghast, while Sophie muttered: ‘If you don’t know Heine you don’t know German literature.’ Between the ages of 16 and 18 Sophie was kept to the normal academic grind of the German Gymnasium as she prepared for her Abitur. But school life was increasingly remote from her real self, which brooded over her private reading, or escaped into her usual refuge of nature and art. All the family took it for granted that Sophie would be an artist when she grew up, and the quality of her surviving drawings and sketches gives real

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198 | Part Three substance to that assumption. The pictures taken of her at this time by her younger brother show a finely modelled, sensitive face sometimes quietly thoughtful, sometimes frowning over a book or else laughing with the sheer joy of being alive in sea and sun. Paula Modersohn-Becker was her heroine then – the independent-eyed woman artist, conforming to no one else’s vision. Her reading included Shaw (most probably Saint Joan), Maritain’s Anti–moderne, Socrates’ Apology, Claudel and Thomas Mann, as well as introductions to comparative religion, including Buddhism and the Bhagavad Gita. All such foreign and forbidden books were passed from hand to hand within Sophie Scholl’s circle of friends and served to strengthen their inner resistance to the life and thought of Nazi Germany. But Sophie, like her family and friends, knew that merely reading alternative thoughts was not enough; one has also to try to live what one has read. Therefore, when Hitler initiated World War II on 1 September 1939, Sophie, now 18, felt driven to make an impossible demand of all the young men in her immediate circle, including the man for whom she cared most and who loved her, a professional army officer, Fritz Hartnagel. She asked them to promise not to kill. She wrote to Hartnagel on 5 September 1939: ‘Now of course, there’ll be more than enough for you lot to do. I just can’t grasp that people are going to be under constant threat from other people from now on. I’ll never grasp it and I find it quite horrific. Don’t say it’s for the Fatherland.’4 It is clear that already in the early months of World War II Sophie Scholl was stiffening her resolve to resist Hitlerism, though precisely how she was to do so was not yet clear to her. Subconsciously she had already got as far as anticipating imprisonment, ‘I dreamed recently that I was in a prison cell, kept there for the whole duration of the war. I had a thick iron ring around my neck – that was the most unpleasant bit’ (letter to Hartnagel, 6 Oct. 1939). She warned Hartnagel against turning into an arrogant, uncaring army lieutenant: ‘It’s so easy to become callous and indifferent. And I think that would be terrible’ (April 1940). Hartnagel was at that time part of the German operation overrunning the Netherlands and Sophie’s most fervent hope for him was that he would manage to survive the war and ‘these times’ without becoming their creature. ‘We all have inner standards of behaviour within us, only we search them out too rarely. Perhaps because they are the most difficult standards of all to live up to’ (16 May 1940). She was struggling at this time to define the standard according to which she herself must live: Even if I don’t understand much about politics and have no ambition to do so, nevertheless I still have some idea of right and wrong, because that has nothing to do with politics or nationality. And I could weep at how mean and small-minded people are even in the area of high level politics,

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Germany’s Antigone | 199 and how they betray their fellow-creatures just on the off-chance of gaining personal advantage . . . Sometimes I’m tempted to look on humanity as a skin disease on the earth’s surface. But only sometimes, when I’m very tired, and people who are worse than animals loom large in front of me. But basically all that matters is whether or not we can pull through, stand fast against the majority who are only after their own interests and who think any means justified to gain their own ends. This mass-pressure is so overpowering that one must be bad to survive at all. There has probably only ever been one human being who has managed to walk an absolutely straight road to God. But who even looks for it now? . . . At any rate I believe that the individual, whatever befalls, must stay morally awake and especially now when it is hard to do so . . . Precisely here and now fate has offered us a shining opportunity to prove ourselves and perhaps we shouldn’t underrate that. We heard today that France is laying down her arms. It made me shudder unspeakably before writing to you. I too am inclined at times to lay down my arms. But ‘Defying all the powers that be’5 I shall try not to be satisfied just with dreams, with high culture and noble gestures. One cannot allow oneself to be too faint-hearted these days. (Letters to Hartnagel, May–June 1940)

What might have sounded in any other context like a typical 19-yearold’s naïve idealism is here a very untypical 19-year-old’s desperate effort to hold on to a basic humane ethic, while almost all those around her were rationalizing mass murder. It was vital for Sophie Scholl that Fritz Hartnagel, above all people, should become one in spirit with her on this fundamental moral issue of Nazi aggression. Therefore many of her letters to him during 1940 wrestle for his soul: I’m perfectly prepared to believe that you simply argue with me for argument’s sake when we get onto ideological and political subjects. Personally, though, I’ve never argued for argument’s sake, as you may secretly believe . . . I can’t imagine two people living together when they differ on these questions in their views, or at least in their activities. People shouldn’t be ambivalent themselves just because everything else is, yet one constantly meets the view that, because we’ve been born into a world of contradictions, we must defer to it. That doesn’t mean I would range myself on the side of those who are single–hearted in the true sense. Scarcely an hour passes without one of my thoughts flying off at a tangent, and very few of my actions correspond to what I consider right. I’m so often scared of those actions, which loom over me like dark mountains, that all I want to do is cease to exist . . . Don’t think I’m good,

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200 | Part Three that’s all I ask, because I’m bad. Don’t do it for my sake, so I needn’t be always afraid of disillusioning you someday. (Letter to Hartnagel, 22 June 1940)

After the surrender of France to the Nazis in June 1940, Sophie wrote to Hartnagel, who was part of the invading German Army there, aware that her objectivity about politics and her moral seriousness could sound ‘unwomanly’: I’d have been more impressed if the French had defended Paris to the last bullet . . . even if it had been hopeless, as it certainly was, in the immediate situation anyway. But self-interest is all that counts today, there is no meaning anymore. Nor honour. All that matters is just saving one’s own skin . . . If I didn’t know that I’ll probably survive many older people than myself, I could have the horrors sometimes thinking what kind of spirit dictates history today. I’m sure you find it unwomanly, the way I write to you. It seems ridiculous for a girl to care seriously about politics. She’s supposed to let her feminine emotions rule her thoughts, compassion, above all. But I find that thoughts take precedence, and that emotions often lead you astray because you can’t see big things for the little things that may concern you more directly – personally perhaps.

Two months later Sophie answered Hartnagel’s attempt to defend the calling of the professional soldier as he insisted that the decent, self-disciplined soldier could fulfil an honourable role in the scheme of things. Sophie tried to show him that this was cant by concentrating on the heart of the matter – the amorality of the soldier’s ‘obeying orders’, no matter what those orders are. She was, thus, already in 1940, anticipating the moral basis of the 1946 Judgement at Nuremberg: I think you got me wrong about what concerns me in your profession. Or rather I think that the soldier’s calling today is quite other than how you described it. A soldier has an oath to keep; his job is to carry out his government’s orders. Tomorrow he might have to obey precisely the opposite viewpoint from that of yesterday. His calling is to obey. The soldier’s attitude is in fact no ‘profession’ at all . . . How can a soldier have an honest attitude, as you put it, when he’s compelled to lie? Or isn’t it lying when you have to swear one oath to the government one day and another the next? You have to allow for that situation and it’s already arisen before now. You weren’t so very much in favour of a war, to the best of my knowledge, yet you spend all your time training people for it. You surely don’t believe it’s the job of the armed forces to teach people an honest, moderate, sincere attitude. If a soldier’s commandment is to be loyal, sincere, moderate and honest, he certainly can’t obey it, because if he receives an order, he has to carry it out, whether he considers it right

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Germany’s Antigone | 201 or wrong. Otherwise, he gets court-martialled, right? (Letter to Hartnagel, 19 Aug. 1940)

Hartnagel then tried to justify soldiering by reference to the needs of one’s people. Sophie replied: You ask me to tell you how I see the concept of ‘Volk’ . . . I see the position of a soldier in relation to his people as roughly that of a son who swears to stand by his father and his family come what may. If the father wrongs another family and thereby gets into trouble, the son is then supposed to stand by his father no matter what. But such commitment to one’s ‘kith and kin’ is beyond me. I think justice, what is right, must always take precedence over every other, often just sentimental, attachment. And it would surely be better if people engaged in a conflict could take the side they consider right. Similarly I consider it just as wrong when a German or a Frenchman, or whatever, stubbornly defends his own nation just because it is his nation. Feelings often lead one astray. Whenever I see soldiers marching in the street, especially when there’s music playing, then I too am stirred – I even used to have to ward off tears whenever I heard military marches. But those are feelings for sentimental little old ladies. It’d be ridiculous to let oneself be governed by them. (Letter to Hartnagel, 23 Sept. 1940)

Towards the end of 1940 Sophie began to doubt whether she should continue the correspondence with Hartnagel; he still seemed far apart from her in his thinking and she could not yet commit herself to him emotionally as he wished: I’ve already been asking myself whether I ought not to give up hearing from you since it’s for selfish reasons that I keep on writing to you. But I don’t think it is necessary. Perhaps it’s not even right. For in my view (which doesn’t have to coincide with yours), you find yourself in an atmosphere completely at odds with that to which I want to win you over. And at the bottom you’re already half on my side and will never feel wholly comfortable on that other side again. It’s the same struggle that I’m having to wage myself, which you’ve got, not to go under to mere creature comforts and easy Philistinism. Isn’t it a prop and consolation to know that one isn’t all alone? Or rather feel it. But you obviously feel very deserted. Here I can’t help you. I may not help you – even though it hurts me so much. You know that . . . Dear Fritz, don’t think me uncaring. It’s much harder standing firm than turning weak . . . Do you still want to write to me? (10 Nov. 1940)

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202 | Part Three Hartnagel did want to go on writing to her and did in fact come over to her side. Forty years later he testified: As to politics, Sophie was the one that set the trend. We often argued and at first were far from being of one mind on all issues. Only hesitantly and reluctantly did I become ready to follow her way of thinking. It meant a huge leap for me, in the midst of the war, to say: ‘I’m against this war,’ or: ‘Germany must lose this war.’6

Finally, during his service in Russia, in 1941, Hartnagel heard his fellow officers referring to the mass shooting of Jews as though it were the most natural thing to do in the world. At last he could hide from himself no longer the truth of Sophie’s accusation – that he was serving a criminal regime. Even so he could still be shocked by the lengths to which Sophie would go in her absolute opposition to Hitler’s war. In the winter of 1941–2 the German people were called upon to send warm coats, blankets, gloves, socks etc. to the German troops freezing outside Leningrad and Moscow. Sophie refused. She did not deny that it was as bad for a German to freeze to death as for a Russian but she insisted that the one thing that mattered was for Germany to lose the war as quickly as possible – woollen socks for German troops could only prolong it. At last, after fierce arguments with her – in person, not by letter – Hartnagel had to agree that either one was for Hitler or against him and if one were against him the only thing to bring him down and give the Germans back their freedom was military defeat. Sophie had hoped to begin studying for her degree in biology and philosophy at Munich University in May 1940. Instead, she was compelled by the regime to do six months of Reichsarbeitsdienst – national work service. In order to try to avoid that, Sophie had undertaken a year-long training as a kindergarten teacher at the Froebel Institute, a training which was at first accepted as a substitute for work service. No sooner had she qualified as a teacher, however, than the rules were changed and she had to do six months’ national work service none the less, stationed in a barracks and wearing uniform. It was gall to her spirit. ‘[Her] convictions forced her into a state of continuous resistance. Wasn’t it an unforgivable sign of weak character if she gave the least bit of service to a state founded on lies, hatred and bondage?’7 Once those hateful six months were over, the regime imposed yet another six months’ compulsory service on all girl would-be university students. Refusal would have meant instant imprisonment, of course. ‘So I’ve got to spend another half year in the strait jacket,’ Sophie reported furiously to her brother Hans: ‘The time I’ve already spent has quite sufficed to ripen my loathing and contempt for the whole business. But, strangely enough, only now for the first time do I feel that nothing will have power over me. I have a marvellous feeling of inner strength some-

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Germany’s Antigone | 203 times’ (letter to Hans, 7 Sept. 1941). She was now a female ‘compulsorywar-service-auxiliary’ – ‘the name is as ghastly as everything else about it’ (letter to Hans, 20 Nov. 1941). The only things that supported her spirit during this whole period, in addition to the lifeline of letters and books, were music and nature. Sophie Scholl was capable of a quite exceptional intensity of response to the natural world, partly perhaps because she was so gifted artistically, and partly because of her reverence for life. Her letters and diary entries are full of ecstatic, sensitively precise ‘nature notes’: As we lay in the grass, the pale green beech twigs and white cobwebbed sky above us, it was as though war and worry could find no room in such beauty. The meadow by the brook was pink with campion and there were lovely juicy marsh marigolds. (Letter to Hartnagel, 16 May 1940) Best of all I lay on the ground so that I could be near all the little creatures and a part of them all. The ants and beetles looked on me simply as a piece of wood, and I quite liked it when they tickled and crawled right over me. (Letter to Hartnagel, 8 Aug. 1940) We leaned against the wind, hair streaming out like witches, while the leaves kept whirling over us as though scattered down by some strong hand. And the little leaves on the ground tumbled about in droves as though they simply had to keep moving faster and faster. How we laughed. (Letter to Hartnagel, 4 Nov. 1940) I spent half an hour in the park this evening, and just as you were able to pick snowdrops in yours some months back, so I now find innumerable cowslips in mine. And in my park the clumps of trees looked so lovely in the evening light that I walked home backwards so as to prolong the sight of them. Clouds were floating high above like the slender white feathers of some strange bird, and the spring sky and the lower-lying clouds were tinged all over with orange by the setting sun. (20 April 1941)

Finally, in her Diary of 12 December 1941: ‘Only Nature gives me any nourishment now, sky and stars and the quiet earth.’ They were the innocent, beautiful, life–giving reality with which to counter the death’s–head reality of the Nazis’ scorching of the earth. For music, her other life–giver, Sophie had to depend during her national work service period on being allowed to play Handel or Bach on the organ of a nearby village church. In addition there were precious recitals of classical music on the wireless – ‘It is music that can best and most quickly stir my dull heart to tumultuous feeling. And that is so necessary, the precondition for everything else’ (letter to Lisa Remppis, 14 Jan. 1942). Sophie’s private motto at this

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204 | Part Three period was from Maritain: ‘It is necessary to have a tough spirit and a tender heart.’ It is music, she wrote in her Diary, in January 1942, that ‘makes the heart tender: brings order to its wild confusion, loosens its crampedness and prepares the soul for the influence of the spirit that had been knocking at its firmly closed doors in vain. Yes, quite quietly, and without forcing its way, music opens the doors of the soul.’8 In the spring of 1942 the Scholls read some secretly distributed extracts from a recent sermon by the Catholic Bishop of Munster, Count von Galen. Von Galen saw that Hitler was attempting to root out Christianity in Germany and he denounced the latest Nazi policy of ‘mercy-killing’ for the incurable, the handicapped and the insane. Von Galen alleged that ‘the officials follow the precept that it is permissible to destroy life which does not deserve to live.’9 His rousing peroration, which was circulated secretly through-out Germany and cost many distributors their lives, ran: Grow strong. Stand firm. Remain steadfast. Like the anvil under the blows of the hammer. It may be that obedience to God and loyalty to conscience will cost you or me our lives, our freedom or our home. But let us rather die than sin. May the mercy of God without which we can do nothing give us that strength.10

Hans Scholl’s reaction was: ‘At last a man has had the courage to speak. out. We really ought to have a duplicating machine.’11 It is possible that Bishop von Galen’s sermons may have helped Sophie to gain a new respect for organized Christianity – compromised as it had been in Germany ever since 1933 by the deafening silence of both Churches concerning Hitler. Her sister Inge has written that religion, to Sophie, was an intensive search for meaning both in her own life and in history. ‘God’ demanded not only that she be true to her most authentic self – which was also what she meant by freedom – but also that she find some way of acting out such authenticity in the world. ‘But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only’ was a decisive life-motto for her.12 She found it very difficult to gain any sense of a personal God, however, and could only pray to be enabled to pray. Nevertheless, the New Testament constituted an increasingly powerful ‘forbidden book’ under a brutish dictatorship that was trying to instil pitilessness as the national German consciousness: ‘Hate is Our Prayer – and Victory Our Reward . . . We Will March on, though everything Break into Fragments’ was an approved Nazi daily newspaper headline then.13 In reaction against such a Gospel of Hate Sophie found herself becoming more and more of a would-be Christian, which is perhaps the only real kind of Christian. This then was the ardent, serious and very impatient 21-year-old who arrived in Munich in May 1942, complete with home-baked birthday cake and bottle of wine, in order to start out on life as a university student at last. What she possibly did not realize, however, was that Munich was

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Germany’s Antigone | 205 also the secret uncrowned capital of Nazism and Munich University one of the most fanatical in Germany – its very Chancellor being a highranking member of the SS. It is not certain precisely when Sophie joined the activities of Hans’s White Rose Resistance Group. Certainly she was introduced by Hans to his closest friends Probst, Schmorell and Graf the moment she arrived, about 1 May.14 Fritz Hartnagel has testified that as early as May she asked him, without giving a reason, whether he could get her a duplicating machine. And in a letter to her friend Lisa Remppis, dated 30 May 1942, Sophie reports a three-hour nonstop philosophical discussion by her brother and a friend, adding: ‘Actually I feel more of a need to be on my own because I’ve an urge to act on what I’ve hitherto only theoretically recognized as being right.’ Whether Sophie had any part at all in preparing the first Resistance leaflet, which appeared six weeks after her arrival in Munich, or whether, the moment she discovered that leaflet and that Hans had written it, she then immediately insisted on becoming part of the Resistance group, we shall never know. What is certain is that Hans could never have kept his youngest sister safely out of the protest action indefinitely, even had he hoped to do so. Ever since Hitler had begun his attack on Poland, the Netherlands and France, Sophie Scholl had been a secret resister in spirit to this war. She had been yearning for some active way to testify to her opposition to Nazi militarism, and from the moment that she discovered her brother’s involvement, her own independently evolved humane credo, as well as her love for him, impelled her to be one with Hans to the end. Both in putting ‘the Law’ before ‘the laws’ and in choosing to join in loving rather than in hating her outlaw ‘traitor’ brother, Sophie Scholl was Germany’s Antigone. The first three leaflets were written in May, June and July. There is no way of identifying specific contributions by Sophie but there is not a word that she did not endorse and the clear, passionately uncompromising tone of urgent, youthful pleading is one that had already been present in her letters to Hartnagel two years earlier. If everyone waits until the other man makes a start the messengers of avenging Nemesis will come steadily closer; offer passive resistance – resistance – wherever you may be, forestall the spread of this atheistic war machine before it is too late before the last cities, like Cologne, have been reduced to rubble and before the nation’s last young man has given his blood on some battlefield for the hubris of a sub-human.15

That first leaflet ends with a very apt quotation from Schiller’s essay comparing ‘The Lawgiving of Lycurgus and Solon’: Anything may be sacrificed to the good of the state except that end for which the state serves as a means. The state is never an end in itself; it is

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206 | Part Three important only as a condition under which the purpose of humanity can be attained, and this purpose is none other than the development of all of man’s powers his progress and improvement . . . At the price of all moral feeling a political system was set up in Sparta and the resources of the state were mobilised to that end . . . In the Spartan code of law the dangerous principle was promulgated that men are to be looked upon as means and not as ends – and the foundations of natural law and of morality were destroyed by that law.16

For Sophie, as for Antigone, Simone Weil and Virginia Woolf, the State was not the ultimate political authority; every State exists only to serve a humane moral end. The citizen’s conscience regarding his or her fellows must be enabled to grow – rather than be suppressed ‘for the good of the State’ – and the citizen’s conscience, therefore, must be his or her ultimate authority and reality. The second leaflet, which was distributed in June, began as an appeal by intellectuals to other intellectuals in Germany, demoralized and isolated from each other though they were: Now it is our task to find one another again, to spread information from person to person, to keep a steady purpose and to allow ourselves no rest until the last man is persuaded of the urgent need of his struggle against this system. When thus a wave of unrest goes through the land, when ‘it is in the air’, when many join the cause, then in a great final effort this system can be shaken off. After all an end in terror is preferable to terror without end.17

‘An end in terror’ – clearly the Scholls were prepared to go under themselves rather than do nothing while Europe went under. But they overestimated most people’s readiness for martyrdom. The second leaflet goes on to spell out what the group had learned so far about Nazi atrocities both in Poland and towards Jews and the leaflet indicts the Germans for knowing about the barbarities but simply shrugging them off as a fact of life: Since the conquest of Poland three hundred thousand Jews have been murdered in this country in the most bestial way. Here we see the most frightful crime against human dignity a crime that is unparalleled in the whole of history. For Jews, too, are human beings . . . Is it a sign that the Germans are brutalised in their simplest human feelings, that no chord within them cries out at the sight of such deeds, that they have sunk into a fatal consciencelessness from which they will never, never awake?18

Germans must rouse themselves from their stupor and show not only sympathy for these hundreds of thousands of victims but also an aware-

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Germany’s Antigone | 207 ness of their own complicity in the guilt. German apathy is what has allowed the Nazis to act as they do: Each German wants to be exonerated of a guilt of this kind; each one continues on his way with the most placid, the calmest conscience. But he cannot be exonerated; he is guilty, guilty, guilty!19

One could almost swear that it was Sophie’s desperation and moral passion which gave those words their italics and exclamation mark. The leaflet ends with a definition of true patriotism for Germans now: Up until the outbreak of the war the larger part of the German people was blinded; the Nazis did not show themselves in their true aspect. But now, now that we have recognised them for what they are, it must be the sole and first duty, the holiest duty of every German to destroy these beasts.20

The third leaflet reiterates the group’s libertarian and ethical definition of the state and then spells out how Hitler’s tyrannical and criminal system must be resisted and military defeat for the Nazis brought nearer: Every individual human being has a claim to a useful and just state, a state which secures the freedom of the individual as well as the good of the whole . . . But our present ‘state’ is the dictatorship of evil . . . Many, perhaps most, of the readers of these leaflets do not see clearly how they can practise an effective opposition . . . The only means available is passive resistance . . . We must . . . bring this monster of a state to an end. A victory of fascist Germany in this war would have immeasurable, frightful consequences. The military victory over Bolshevism dare not become the primary concern of the Germans. The defeat of the Nazis must unconditionally be the first order of business . . . Sabotage in armament plants and war industries, sabotage at all gatherings, rallies, public ceremonies, and organisations of the National Socialist Party. Obstruction of the smooth functioning of the war machine (a machine for war that goes on solely to shore up and perpetuate the National Socialist Party and its dictatorship). Sabotage in all the areas of science and scholarship which further the continuation of the war whether in universities, technical schools, laboratories, research institutes, or technical bureaus. Sabotage in all cultural institutions which could potentially enhance the ‘prestige’ of the fascists among the people. Sabotage in all branches of the arts which have even the slightest dependence on National Socialism or render it service. Sabotage in all publications, all newspapers, that are in the pay of the ‘government’ and that defend its ideology and aid in disseminating the brown lie. Do not give a penny to public drives (even when they are conducted under the

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208 | Part Three pretence of charity). For this is only a disguise. In reality the proceeds aid neither the Red Cross nor the needy. The government does not need this money; it is not financially interested in these money drives. After all the presses run continuously to manufacture any desired amount of paper currency. But the populace must be kept constantly under tension, the pressure of the bit must not be allowed to slacken! Do not contribute to the collections of metal, textiles, and the like. Try to convince all your acquaintances, including those in the lower social classes, of the senselessness of continuing, of the hopelessness of this war.21

That third leaflet, the last for several months, ends with the warning from Aristotle’s Politics: ‘the tyrant is inclined constantly to foment wars.’ After that quotation came the plea: ‘Please duplicate and distribute.’ Sophie herself did much of the duplicating and distribution. Thousands of copies of the three leaflets had to be printed off secretly at night and then packed in suitcases and rucksacks and taken by train to Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Freiburg, Saarbrücken, Mannheim and Karlsruhe – all the major cities of southern Germany. Once there, the leaflets had to be posted from different boxes, using addresses arbitrarily selected from the local telephone directory; and all this under the continuous minute-by-minute fear of discovery. Only the conviction that what she and the others were trying to communicate to their fellow Germans had to be said could have sustained them. In addition, the White Rose Group, including Sophie, collected dried white bread to send via go-betweens to concentration camp prisoners; they helped support the families of those prisoners; they refused to prolong Hitler’s war by donating to the Nazi ‘Winter Aid’ clothing drive that was to benefit German soldiers in Russia; they showed human understanding for prisoners of war and foreign workers. Examples of small-scale resistance, practical and tangible, and potentially contagious.22

It is very possible that Sophie and Hans were borne up by their new acquaintance with Christian Existentialism mediated to them by their 75year-old mentor in Munich, Carl Muth.23 It was Muth who introduced the Scholls to his friend, the Catholic philosopher Theodore Haecker, the rediscoverer of Kierkegaard, and the Scholls may well have felt inspired by Haecker’s resonant re-statement of Kierkegaard’s insistence that everyone in this world has a mission: God did not create one soul uselessly and without a place in the scheme of salvation . . . it is true whether a man is conscious of his mission or not, whether he fulfils it with all his strength or only half-heartedly or even fights against it; it is true whether he is victorious or succumbs,

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Germany’s Antigone | 209 whether it brings him happiness or misery and persecution; it is true whether great or small, but the more important it is, the more conscious of it will the man be who has to fulfil it.24

There now had to be an interval in the Resistance work in the summer and autumn since Hans and the others were all dispatched to a tour of military duty in the Soviet Union, where they narrowly escaped court martial for opposing Nazi brutalities towards the Russians. Sophie, meanwhile, was conscripted, bitterly against her will, to do several months’ work in an Ulm armaments factory. Nothing could have been more abhorrent. Now she made Simone Weil’s discovery of the intolerable slavery inherent in servicing a machine on a conveyor belt hour after hour, and all in aid of a purpose that was anathema to her. It seems probable that she did not refuse this war-work and incur imprisonment because that would only have meant the end of her active participation in the resistance work of the White Rose. The one positive aspect of her factory experience was that she found herself working beside a Russian slave-worker and so was able to live out her total rejection of ‘the enemy concept’. Working next to me is a Russian girl, a child in her guileless, touching trustfulness – even towards the German foreman whose fist-shaking and brutal shouts she counters with just an uncomprehending, almost merry smile. These people probably strike her as funny and she takes their threats for jokes. I’m glad that she’s working beside me and I do my best to correct her picture of the Germans a little. But many of the other German women workers also make a point of being friendly and helpful, astonished to find human beings even amongst Russians, especially such uneducated ones, and without an ounce of mistrust in their nature. (Letter to Hartnagel, Aug. 1942)

Between July and October 1942 Hans wrote home from Poland and Russia. He had seen with his own eyes the cities ruined by the German attack; the half-starved children whimpering for bread in the streets, the walled-off Warsaw ghetto, the proud, defeated Poles refusing to exchange a word with their conquerors, the man-made gigantic suffering of Russia where, as he wrote, Christ was being crucified a thousand times each hour.25 All this, of course, was passed on immediately to Sophie. Nothing other than renewed total resistance to the Nazi war-lords would be possible for them both from now on, cost what it would. Sophie’s long letter to Hartnagel at this time shows how she was girding up her own spirit for such resistance, as well as standing by him in his attempt to resist the corrupting pressures from his fellow officers in Russia:

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210 | Part Three I wish I could stand by you with all that I know and am, in the arguments which you’re often compelled to have with your brother officers. It strikes me as absolutely terrible and either degenerate or else totally insensitive that their whole inner being does not rise up against this ‘natural law’ of the victory of the strong over the weak. Even a child is filled with horror when forced to witness the defeat and destruction of a weaker animal by a strong one. I was always deeply moved and saddened by that inescapable fact, not only as a child but later on as well, and I racked my brains for some way of remaining aloof from this universal state of affairs. The sight of an innocent little mouse in a trap always brought tears to my eyes, and I can only attribute my regained and continuing happiness to forgetfulness, which is no solution. Nor can there be any solution here on earth. In the Epistle to the Romans it says that the suffering of creation has to wait – to be delivered into the glorious liberty of the children of God. (28 Oct. 1942)

Sophie entreated Hartnagel to read the whole of that chapter, which contains the great words of spiritual inspiration that can withstand death: If God be for us, who can be against us? . . . Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? . . . For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.26

Sophie then returned to Hartnagel’s struggle with his Nazi fellow officers and their arrogant faith in Machtpolitik as constituting ultimate reality: And if they put their faith in the triumph of force believing that might must prevail, ask them whether they think that man is nothing more than an animal or whether he can reach beyond that and partake of the world of the spirit . . . And then ask them whether a physical victory of brute strength is not an insult to the world of the spirit, or whether in that world count from those in this world of the flesh whether perhaps a sick inventor, or, to get away from the dubious realm of technology, a sick poet or philosopher doesn’t have more weight than a stupid athlete, a Hölderlin more than the boxer Schemeling . . . Yes, we too believe in the victory of the stronger, but the stronger in spirit. And that this victory will perhaps have force in another world than our limited one . . . that doesn’t make it any less worth striving after. I shall never ever believe that a human being can consider it good when a weak country, overrun by a mighty army, goes under . . . The triumph of brute strength must

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Germany’s Antigone | 211 always mean the defeat or at least the obscuring into invisibility of the spirit. Is that what they want, those who argue with you? . . . Life can only come out of life, or have they seen a dead mother give birth to a child? Or a stone manage to reproduce itself and increase? They still haven’t pondered the absurdity of the [Nazi] saying: ‘Only out of death comes life.’ (Letter to Hartnagel, 28 Oct. 1942)

Sophie’s appeal to the laws of the spirit that differ vitally from the laws of the powerful in this world echoes Antigone’s appeal to Creon to remember the Law rather than the laws. Once Sophie and Hans returned to Munich in November 1942, ostensibly just to begin the new academic year, they redoubled their efforts at resistance. First Sophie obtained money from Hartnagel ‘for a good cause’ with which to buy a new duplicating machine, typewriters and paper. Next the Resistance group was expanded to include the Philosophy Professor Kurt Huber and others, who in turn made contact with the Italian Resistance, and with student Resistance cells in Hamburg and Freiburg. Hans himself went to a secret meeting with Falk Harnack, the brother of the communist resister Professor Arvid Harnack, then already imprisoned on a charge of treason; and Falk Harnack in turn promised to arrange a meeting in February 1943 between Hans Scholl and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Thus the White Rose Group was rapidly making connections both with intellectuals and with communists and learning of the existence of other dedicated political, religious and even military opponents of Hitler. Sophie worked night after night duplicating the leaflets and then taking them by day to post in Stuttgart, Ulm and Augsburg. ‘Soon the White Rose leaflets appeared in many other German cities: Frankfurt, Berlin, Hamburg, Saarbrücken, even in Salzburg and Vienna. A few copies even reached Norway, England and Sweden. The Munich Gestapo was in a state of extreme alarm.’27

On one of her trips to Stuttgart Sophie said to a woman friend: ‘If Hitler were to come toward me right now and I had a gun I would shoot him. If the men won’t do it, well, then a woman will have to . . . One has to do something – or else be guilty.’28 The fourth leaflet, in December 1942, began by stressing the masskiller role of the apparently successful Hitler: In the past weeks Hitler has chalked up successes in Africa and in Russia . . . This apparent success has been purchased at the most horrible expense of human life . . . Neither Hitler nor Goebbels can have counted the dead. In Russia thousands are lost daily . . . Yet Hitler feeds with lies those people whose

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212 | Part Three most precious belongings he has stolen and whom he has driven to a meaningless death. Every word that comes from Hitler’s mouth is a lie. When he says peace, he means war, and when he blasphemously uses the name of the Almighty, he means the power of evil, the fallen angel, Satan . . . We must attack evil where it is strongest, and it is strongest in the power of Hitler.29

The leaflet concluded by insisting that the White Rose Group was not in the pay of any foreign power but was attempting to achieve a spiritual renewal within Germany: This rebirth must be preceded, however, by the clear recognition of all the guilt with which the German people have burdened themselves, and by an uncompromising battle against Hitler and his all too many minions, party members, Quislings, and the like . . . for Hitler and his followers there is no punishment on this earth commensurate with their crimes. But out of love for coming generations we must make an example after the conclusion of the war, so that no-one will ever again have the slightest urge to try a similar action. And do not forget the petty scoundrels of this regime; note their names, so that none will go free! They should not find it possible, having had their part in these abominable crimes, at the last minute to rally to another flag and then act as if nothing had happened! . . . We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!30

On 3 January 1943, Sophie wrote to Hartnagel, who was still in the midst of the horrors of the Russian campaign: Oh, I can well believe that hardship desensitises, but remember: Un esprit dur, du coeur tendre! I’m often wretched that I cannot be a vehicle for universal suffering, so that I could take away at least a part of my guilt towards those who, undeservedly, have to suffer so much more than I.

Ten days later on 13 January 1943, the city Gauleiter, Giesel, very nearly caused a riot at Munich University by a speech to the students in which he urged the women there to present the Führer with a child instead of completing their education. He could offer a few of the prettier girls the services of one of his own adjutants. Several women students got up and walked out of the hall in protest, only to be instantly arrested, whereupon male students rose in their defence and took a leading Nazi Party official hostage. The authorities appeared to climb down, releasing the women from custody after a few days. The Scholls felt immensely heartened by this evidence that there clearly was some spirit of resistance waiting to be tapped among their Munich contemporaries. The Gestapo,

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Germany’s Antigone | 213 however, secretly intensified their efforts to identify the anti–Nazis responsible for the White Rose leafleting. In mid-January the group issued their fifth leaflet, headed ‘Leaflet of the Resistance – A Call to All Germans’. Two and a half years before World War II ended, the White Rose tried to convince the Germans of their inevitable defeat: The war is approaching its destined end . . . in the East the armies are constantly in retreat and invasion is imminent in the West. Mobilisation in the United States has not yet reached its climax, but already it exceeds anything that the world has ever seen. It has become a mathematical certainty that Hitler is leading the German people into the abyss. Hitler cannot win the war; he can only prolong it . . . Germans! Do you and your children want to suffer the same fate that befell the Jews? Do you want to be judged by the same standards as your traducers? Are we to be forever the nation which is hated and rejected by all mankind? No. Dissociate yourselves from National Socialist gangsterism . . . A war of liberation is about to begin . . . Do not believe the National Socialist propaganda which has driven the fear of Bolshevism into your bones.31

That entreaty not to identify Germany’s survival with an anticommunist ‘crusade’ indicates the new influence upon the group of their recent left-wing Resistance contacts in Germany. This fifth leaflet is much more politically constructive than the earlier, idealist writings. Decentralization, as with Simone Weil, is now seen to be essential to democratic liberty, but economic liberation of the workers and the poor, not only in Germany, is called for as well. Above all, the pernicious legacy of Prussian militarism with its ideology of force would have to be buried and buried for all time, if there were ever to be the co-operative reconstruction of a peaceful, federal Europe. (The existentialist Haecker, in his unpublished war diary from which he read extracts to the Scholls in Munich at this very time, also indicted the heritage of Prussianism for having taken away Germany’s ‘heart of flesh and substituting one made of iron and paper.’)32 Haecker had also written in his diary (13 Sept. 1941) that the Germans had crucified Christ a second time by crucifying the Jewish people and that they would have to wear the badge of anti-Christ for that terrible guilt.33 On the 3 February 1943, the German Army surrendered at Stalingrad. The final White Rose leaflet, drafted by Professor Huber and addressed to ‘Men and Women of the Resistance!’ began: Shaken and broken, our people behold the loss of the men of Stalingrad. Three hundred and thirty thousand German men have been senselessly and irresponsibly driven· to death and destruction by the inspired strategy of our World War I Private First Class. Führer, we thank you! For us there is but one slogan: fight against the party! Get out of the party

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214 | Part Three organisations, which are used to keep our mouths sealed and hold us in political bondage! Get out of the lecture room of the SS corporals and sergeants and the party bootlickers! We want genuine learning and real freedom of opinion. No threat can terrorise us, not even the shutting down of the institutions of higher learning. This is the struggle of each and everyone of us for our future, our freedom, and our honour . . . Freedom and honour! For ten long years Hitler and his coadjutors have manhandled, squeezed, twisted, and debased these two splendid German words to the point of nausea, as only dilettantes can . . . They have sufficiently demonstrated in the ten years of destruction of all material and intellectual freedom, of all moral substance among the German people, what they understood by freedom and honour. The frightful bloodbath has opened the eyes of even the stupidest German it is a slaughter which they arranged in the name of ‘freedom and honour of the German nation’ throughout Europe, and which they daily start anew. The name of Germany is dishonoured for all time if German youth does not finally rise, take revenge and atone, smash its tormentors and set up a new Europe of the spirit. The dead of Stalingrad implore us to take action ‘Up, up, my people, let smoke and flame be our sign!’34

That leaflet was intended by Professor Huber principally for the students of Munich University and Hans and Sophie Scholl volunteered for the dangerous task of its distribution inside the main lecture hall before anyone arrived for classes. They were caught in the act of distribution on the morning of 18 February 1943. During the four subsequent days of their separate interrogations both the Scholls said that their one motive had been their hope that by building up public opinion in Germany against the war they would contribute to shortening it and thus save hundreds of thousands of lives by sacrificing their own. Sophie’s interrogator lectured her on the principles of National Socialism, the importance of the Führer, Germany’s honour and the damage that the Scholls had inflicted on Germany’s fighting morale. It was self-evident to him that his was the only right-thinking, realistic, patriotic stance and he pressed her to acknowledge that if only she had taken all those things into account she would never have allowed herself to be seduced into Resistance activities. Sophie answered: ‘You are deluding yourself, I would do exactly the same all over again; it is you, not I, who hold the wrong world-view.’35 On the third day she was confronted with the official charge of ‘preparation to commit treason’ which carried the mandatory death penalty. For a moment she blanched. That night Sophie dreamed she was carrying a child, dressed in long white robes, to be baptized. The path to the church went up a steep mountainside, but she was holding the child very securely. All of a sudden a

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Germany’s Antigone | 215 crevasse gaped open in front of her and she only just had time to place the child in safety before she herself plunged down into the abyss. Sophie interpreted the dream next day to her cell-mate: “The child in the white robe is our ideal which will triumph despite all obstacles. We were permitted to prepare the way for it, but first we have to die for it.”36 The fourth day after her arrest, 22 February, was the day of her sham trial before Freisler. Her father attempted to intercede for his children but both parents were ordered out of court. The death sentence, for ‘preparing to commit treason and . . . [give] aid to the enemy’ was then read out. The parents saw Hans and Sophie one last time. Sophie had been deeply afraid that her mother would not be able to bear the loss of two of her children at once, but when she saw her mother standing staunchly by her side she felt immeasurably relieved and strengthened – released from guilt and fear. “Gelt, Sophie, Jesus,” said her mother. “Ja, aber du auch,” Sophie replied. Like Hans, Sophie read Psalm 90 aloud with the prison chaplain: Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. Thou turnest man to destruction and sayest: Return ye children of men. For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past and as a watch in the night. Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up. In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth . . . Return, O Lord, how long? and let it repent thee concerning thy servants. O satisfy us early with thy mercy: that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us and the years wherein we have seen evil. Let thy work appear unto thy servants, and thy glory unto their children, and let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us; and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.

Then she was manacled to two warders and taken to the execution hut, where they beheaded her.

Aftermath As for those who want to . . . transpose into pure political action all that inspires their mind and heart – they can only perish murdered, forsaken even by their own people, vilified after their death. (Simone Weil, ‘Obedience and Liberty’ (1937) published in Oppression and Liberty)

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216 | Part Three Sophie had believed that the students would rise up against Hitler after her and Hans’s execution, but in fact that same evening several thousand Munich University students roared out their condemnation of the two Scholls, and no member of faculty or student protested against the summary ‘justice’. The ‘impact of their deaths was undermined by abuse or icy silence.’37 The Münchener Neueste Nachrichten commented: Typical outsiders, the condemned persons shamelessly committed offences against the armed security of the nation and the will to fight of the German Volk by defacing houses with slogans attacking the state and by distributing treasonous leaflets. At this time of heroic struggle on the part of the German people these despicable criminals deserve a speedy and dishonourable death.38

Underground, however, the work of Resistance went on. The news of the Scholls’ death reached the Resistance in Norway, and then neutral Sweden and Switzerland, enabling Thomas Mann to broadcast to the Allies that there was a Germany within Germany other than that of the Nazi State.39 The Soviet Union broadcast news of the heroism of the Scholls back to Germany on their ‘Deutsche Freiheitssender’ wavelength, and news of the Resistance leaflets even got through to the concentration camps, including Auschwitz. The most direct and immediate legacy of the Scholls, however, was to their counterparts, who called themselves ‘Candidates of Humanity’, in Hamburg. The medical students Grethe Rothe, Albert Suhr and Frederick Geussenmaier, the bookshop assistant Hannelore Willbrandt, the chemistry students Hans Leipelt and Marie Luise Jahn, and the philosophy students Heinz Kucharski and Reinhold Meyer banded together with other like-minded people to continue the work of the Scholls. Fired rather than deterred by the execution of Hans and Sophie, they duplicated the Munich students’ leaflets with the epigraph: ‘Their spirit lives on in spite of all’ and circulated the wavelength of the Russian ‘Deutsche Freiheitssender’ with its motto ‘Against Hitler and War’ in countless public places. In making forbidden friendly contact with a Yugoslav slavedoctor, Margarethe Rothe and Hannelore Willbrandt explicitly invoked the great affirmation of Antigone: ‘My way is fellowship in love, not hate.’40 The Hamburg branch of the White Rose was dedicated, like the Scholls, to the recreation of a humanistic Germany and Europe after the war, but, also like the Scholls, they were destroyed by the Nazis before the war was over. Betrayed by agents provocateurs, 30 of the 50 ‘Candidates of Humanity’ in Hamburg were delivered into the hands of the Gestapo between October 1943 and February 1944; they were all imprisoned and interrogated and eight of them met their deaths. ‘Was it’ – in Yeats’s words – ‘needless death after all?’41 Not if one believes in the redemptive power of martyrdom endured for the sake of

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Germany’s Antigone | 217 others – martyrdom for the very principle of humanitas itself. Sophie Scholl, like her brother, their friends and their later counterparts in Hamburg, gave her life to testify to the reality of another, greater power within human beings than the power to hurt and kill. Reality, for her, was the reality of everyday life rather than the infliction of death, and the ultimate, greatest power on earth, for her, was our power to transmit life, both physical and spiritual, to others. Whether drawing or writing or making music or caring for babies and small children or arguing passionately with Hartnagel or laughing for joy in the mountains, life was what Sophie Scholl cherished and what she wanted for others as much as she wanted it for herself. In the event she wanted it so much for others that she gave her own life away in order to resist the Nazi death–bringers. She is, therefore, a lasting challenge to all those politicians and military thinkers, Creons and Bismarcks under whatever system, who have continued ever since the end of World War II to assert that they alone are the realists in their belief that strength has to mean armed strength – Machtpolitik – and that there is no final reality on earth other than destructive force. Preparedness to incinerate other people’s children could never have been Sophie Scholl’s conception of the only way to maintain international peace for the foreseeable future: And if they put their faith in the triumph of force, ask them whether they think that man is exactly like an animal or whether he can reach beyond that and partake of the world of the spirit . . . Life can only come out of life. (Letter to Hartnagel, 28 Oct. 1942) Notes 1 Inge Scholl, Students Against Tyranny: The Resistance of the White Rose, Munich, 1942–43, Wesleyan University Press, 1970, p. 4. 2 Scholl, Students Against Tyranny, p. 6. 3 Ibid., p. 11. 4 Quotations from letters throughout this chapter from Inge Jens (ed.), Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl; Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, Fischer, 1984, translated as At the Heart of the White Rose; Letters and Diaries of Hans and Sophie Scholl, Harper & Row, 1987. I have used this translation, making occasional idiomatic changes. 5 ‘Defying all powers that be, never going under, proving oneself strong in spirit, calls up the power of the Divine’ – favourite lines from Goethe that were a motto for the Scholl family; Hans Scholl inscribed them on his cell wall before standing trial. 6 Hermann Vinke, Das kurze Leben der Sophie Scholl, Otto Maier Verlag, Ravensburg, 1980, p. 71. Translated by Hedwig Pachter as The Short Life of Sophie Scholl, Harper & Row, 1984. 7 Scholl, Students Against Tyranny, p. 23. 8 Cf. Jens, At the Heart of the White Rose, p. 190. Sophie’s last letter was an overflowing of joy at Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet.

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218 | Part Three 9 Quoted in Scholl, Students Against Tyranny, p. 19. 10 Annedore Leber, Conscience in Revolt: 64 Stories of Resistance in Germany, 1933–45, Vallentine Mitchell, London, 1957, p. 188. Marie Terwiel was one of those executed for distributing von Galen’s sermon, see Leber, p. 123. 11 Scholl, Students Against Tyranny, p. 20. 12 The Epistle of James 1: 22. 13 Quoted in Scholl, Students Against Tyranny, p. 45. 14 Probst, Schmorell and Graf were all medical students (like Hans Scholl), committed to anti-Nazism in the name of humanism; they were all executed. 15 The first leaflet, published fully in Scholl, Students Against Tyranny, pp. 73–6. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., pp. 77–80. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., pp. 81–4. 22 Vinke, Short Life, p. 98. 23 Carl Muth (1867–1944), editor of the liberal and progressive Catholic periodical Hochland until 1941, when it was banned by the Nazis. See Jens, At the Heart of the White Rose, pp. 260–2. 24 T. Haecker, Søren Kierkegaard, OUP, 1937, p. 56. 25 See Hans Scholl’s letters to his parents, in Jens, At the Heart of the White Rose, pp. 83–6. 26 Romans 8: 31, 35 and 38–9. 27 Vinke, Short Life, pp. 123–4. 28 Ibid., pp. 122–3. 29 Scholl, Students Against Tyranny, pp. 85–8. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., pp. 89–90. 32 Diary entry, 2 June 1940, quoted in Jens, At the Heart of the White Rose, p. 266. 33 Ibid., p. 263. 34 Scholl, Students Against Tyranny, pp. 91–3. 35 Testimony of Sophie Scholl’s cell-mate, Else Gebel, quoted in Vinke, Short Life, p. 155. 36 Ibid. 37 Eberhard Zeller, The Flame of Freedom: the German Struggle Against Hitler, Woolf, London, 1967, ch. 8, p. 166. 38 Scholl, Students Against Tyranny, p. 148. 39 Ibid., p. 152. See also Hanser, A Noble Treason: The Revolt of the Munich Students against Hitler, Putnam, 1979; William Bayles (ed.), Seven Were Hanged, Gollancz, 1945, which told the story of the Scholls and in which Eleanor Rathbone, MP, put the question to the British public: ‘Ask yourself what you would have done, were you a German’; and Ricarda Huch, ‘Hans and Sophie Scholl’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1951. ‘“These young people did what we should have done and did not dare to do” – was how thousands reacted to the secret news of their resist-

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Germany’s Antigone | 219 ance and execution in Spring 1943,’ wrote 80-year old Ricarda Huch in 1946, shortly before her own death. 40 Ursel Hochmuth and Ilse Jakob, ‘Weisse Rose Hamburg’, in Streiflichter aus dem Hamburger Widerstand 1933–45 (Roderberg, Frankfurt, 1969), pp. 387–421. See p. 393 for the ‘Antigone’ episode; the identical speech of Antigone was quoted both by Simone Weil and by Virginia Woolf. 41 W. B. Yeats, ‘Easter 1916’.

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CHAPTER

18 Compiling the First Dictionary of British Women Humanitarians Why? What? Who? How?

‘Lady Muriel was a classic do-gooding pest.’ Thus David Pryce-Jones in his review of the diaries of Reader Bullard, Inside Stalin’s Russia, in The Times Literary Supplement, Aug. 25, 2000. Over the last twenty years I have researched the humanitarian efforts, not just of Lady Muriel Paget, but of a hundred and fifty other British women ‘do-gooding pests’ as well. Why? I have been increasingly dismayed by the twentieth century’s crisis of faith in humanity – which I consider to be immeasureably more dangerous and disturbing than the nineteenth century’s crisis of faith in God. Not only is the world’s mass-murdering, modern history continually being cited as irrefutable evidence that belief in global progress towards a more humane civilization is a fallacy; history itself has enshrined the mass murderers. As Simone Weil pointed out in her The Need for Roots, Hitler got all that he ever wanted – a place in the history books. Almost all dictionaries of twentieth-century biography give space to King Leopold II, Mussolini, Stalin, Beria, Franco, Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler and Emperor Hirohito – to name but a few. But their opponents who tried to prevent or reduce or palliate their cruelty, – the do-gooding pests – are largely absent from the record. It was, therefore, partly for the sake of sheer historical justice that I have produced a record of counterhistory, chronicling some of the healers of our time. My research was grounded in the twin convictions that the humaneness of our species is real and effective, however frequently it may have seemed defeated, and that in order to be humane, each generation needs the moral energy that can only come from the history of heroic altruism – that is, if we are to First published in Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 24, No. 6, 2001. The women included in Oldfield, Women Humanitarians: A Biographical Dictionary of British Women Active between 1900 and 1950, London and New York: Continuum, 2001, are listed on pages 225–229.

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The Dictionary of British Women Humanitarians | 221 have reason to hope. Collective identity is the product of collective memory. I see my biographical dictionary of British women humanitarians, active 1900–1950, as a volume not only of humanist history but also of women’s history. Women’s history has become a vitalizing, ever-growing field of study for the last quarter of the 20th century. One has only to survey Gayle Fischer’s compilation, The Journal of Women’s History Guide to Periodical Literature (1992) or June Hannam et al.’s British Women’s History: A bibliographical guide (1995), or the Select Bibliography to Sheila Rowbotham’s A Century of Women (1997). My women humanitarians hearken back to the ‘women worthies’ school of 18th, 19th and early 20th century feminist history because there are still so many women worthies to whom justice has not been done; but they also belong to a more recent feminist historical tradition that focuses on women dissidents and radical activists like Patricia Hollis’ Ladies Elect (1987), M.A. Lind’s The Compassionate Memsahibs (1988), Pat Barr’s The Dust in the Balance (1989), Jill Liddington’s The Long Road to Greenham (1989), Johanna Alberti’s Beyond Suffrage: Feminists in War and Peace, 1914–1928 (1989) and Ingram and Patai’s Rediscovring Forgotten Radicals (1993). The first question I am always asked is ‘What do you mean by “humanitarian”?’ I define humanitarians as those who put the needs of desperate strangers, the cry of humanitas itself, above the claims of their own immediate group, – whether that group be their own nation, religion, race, class, tribe or family – and at no matter what personal cost to themselves. Some of the humanitarians in my dictionary were war-resisters when their own country was at war – they took care of the suddenly stranded ‘enemy’ civilians and the ‘enemy’ prisoners of war and they sustained the men of their own country who were arrested for refusing to kill for their country. Others championed the always unpopular refugees seeking asylum. Still others were international rescue workers in foreign famine or disaster areas, often in the aftermath of some appalling war: Someone has to shove the rubble to the roadsides so the carts loaded with corpses can get by. . . . (Wyzs‰ava Szymborska, ‘The End and the Beginning’, 1997)

Still others were medical missionaries, doctors, or nurses, risking their own lives as they fought disease and premature mortality all over the world. Very often they were the ones who alone would reach out to help the ‘untouchable’, whether abroad or at home – the lepers, the prisoners, the homeless, the infectious and incurable. When I am asked why the humanitarians in my biographical dictionary

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222 | Part Three are all British and why they are all women, I have to plead the nature of my ignorance. Having specialized in early twentieth century British women’s history, that was all I was capable of covering, however inadequately. It is for others to do justice to the heroically humane women of other countries and to their male counterparts. And it has been a hugely difficult undertaking to choose which British women to include and which to omit even in a period of history covering a mere fifty years – 1900– 1950. My original starting point was my discovery of the list of 156 names on the British Committee supporting the Women’s International Congress at the Hague, April 1915, whose aims were: a) To demand that International disputes shall in future be settled by some other means than war. b) To claim that women should have a voice in the affairs of the nations. What I discovered, as I gradually identified each of these women, was that their humanitarian intervention both reached back before 1915 and forward for decades afterwards, as they responded to almost every horrific happening in the first half of the twentieth century. The British invention of concentration camps in the Boer War, the enslavement, mutilation and mass killing of Africans in the Belgian Congo, the massacre of the Armenians, the Russian famine, the enforced mass expulsion of Greeks from Turkey, the rise of European fascism, Japan’s invasion of China, the refugee flight from Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, the gulag, the holocaust, the fire-bombing of Germany and the atomic bombing of Japan, the brutal aftermath of World War II for millions of ‘Displaced Persons’, the expulsion of the Palestinians, and the Korean War – to one or other and often several of these horrors ‘my’ humanitarian women responded, doing absolutely everything that was in their power to try to staunch the suffering. ‘Ihr Henker, haltet ein!’ [‘Stop, you torturers, you executioners, stop!’] as Bach’s contralto soloist sings in the St. Matthew Passion. Gradually I realized that I could not restrict myself to that list of Women’s International Congress supporters – but must search still more sources in order to discover exemplary instances of practical, ‘hands-on’, humane intervention. Therefore, in addition to the Quaker obituaries in The Friend, I went to what was then the Fawcett Library, and is now retitled The Woman’s Library, and searched through its amazing collection of biographical cuttings, mostly obituaries, that reach back to the 1920s. I ignored the ballerinas, the jazz singers, the first women stockbrokers or aeronautical engineers and discovered instead a great procession of heroic women humanitarians of whom I had never heard. Following that first clue, I then went on to the British Red Cross Archives, now in London, to the London headquarters of the Save the Children Fund, to Anti-

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The Dictionary of British Women Humanitarians | 223 Slavery International, to the Church Missionary Society Archives, to the Mission of St. John of Jerusalem Archives in Oxford, to the Salvation Army Heritage Centre, to the Quaker library at Woodbrooke, to the Contemporary Medical Archives at the Wellcome Library, and to the School of African and Asian Studies, University of London, always scouring their obituaries – as well as posting requests for nominees for inclusion on the internet. And of course, in the midst of re-living one historical tragedy of our time after another, I also rejoiced to discover in story after story Sorrow that is not sorrow but delight . . . To hear of, for the glory that redounds There from to human kind and what we are. (Wordsworth, Prelude, 1805)

But was it not naïve of me to take these obscure obituary testimonies so on trust? How can we, post Marx, post Freud and post the postmodernists still believe in authentic altruism? I can only say that I have been totally convinced by the genuine humanitarianism of these women. Unlike the rest of us non-activist humanitarians who merely groan over the suffering daily reported from one part of the world or another and who, at most, are moved to write out a cheque, these women felt compelled to spend themselves, often risking their health and even life in the process. It is true that their ‘Britishness’ in the first half of the last century gave them a privileged position that contributed to the effectiveness of their social intervention but it was also their critical alienation from British imperial, racial and class attitudes and praxis that would often trigger their humanitarian activism in the first place. They felt morally implicated in what they considered an immoral project, whether that was conscription in World War I, or British colonial policy in Africa and India, or the Allies’ saturation bombing of German civilian targets in World War II. I shall instance just four exemplary women humanitarians. First the Victorian feminist Alicia Little, née Bewicke (1845–1926), minor novelist and campaigner against the Contagious Diseases Acts who, by the beginning of the twentieth century was living in China and doing more than any other individual to end the foot-binding of Chinese girls. Her Natural Foot Society cannily kept its distance from Christian Missions, since Alicia Little knew that a traditional practice could only be ended at that juncture by traditional Chinese leaders with Confucian authority. When she returned to Britain she left her work behind her being carried on ever more successfully by radical Chinese campaigners, and, far from complacent at what she had struggled to achieve, she felt very remiss towards the end of her life in the 1920s that she had not tackled girl-slavery in China and Hong Kong as well.

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224 | Part Three Then there was the missionary Alice Harris (1870–1970), who, with her husband John Hobbis Harris, was aghast to discover the atrocities being committed wholesale in the Congo’s ‘heart of darkness’ at the beginning of the twentieth century. Instead of Europeans bringing Christian civilization to Central Africa, it was the whites, as the Harrises discovered, who were ordering the crucifying – the flogging, mutilating and killing – of the helpless dependants of the Congolese who could never supply enough baskets of rubber. Alice Harris was one of the first, if not indeed the very first, photographer to use her images as irrefutable evidence of oppression in a global human rights campaign that she and her husband then proceeded to wage for the Congo Reform Movement and the Anti-Slavery Society, 1903–1911. Winifred Coate was another revelation. An English graduate and headmistress of Girls’ High Schools in Cairo and Jerusalem in the 1920’s and 1930’s, she found herself, her staff and her girls, Christian, Muslim and Jewish, at the centre of the bitter Arab–Jewish conflict in Palestine. Eventually, in 1948, she decided to accompany some of the Palestinian refugees into Jordan and served them there for the rest of her life, founding, after her retirement a pioneering, flourishing agricultural commune for landless refugees on land that had been believed to be rock desert. And finally that ‘do-gooding pest’, Lady Muriel Paget herself, who had so exasperated our man in Stalin’s Moscow. What she was doing there was try to rescue stranded destitute and friendless British subjects – elderly governesses, nurses, widows of former employees of British companies and their Russian-speaking children – from being summarily mopped up as ‘Western spies’ in the 1930s and despatched to the gulag . She did rescue them all in the nick of time, having spent the previous twenty years in organizing massive disaster relief saving countless child lives in the Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia and the Baltic after World War One. An effective pest. Other first class ‘pests’ in the Dictionary include Emily Hobhouse, scourge of the Colonial Office, the War Office and the Foreign Office to whom she was ‘That Miss Hobhouse’; Eleanor Rathbone, the truly ‘Independent’ MP, scourge of the Foreign Office and the Home Office in her championing of visas for Jewish refugees; and Sister Dorothy Raphael, battling for basic rights for black South Africans in Sophiatown – before the arrival of Trevor Huddleston. Clearly it has been an invidious task to choose which doctors, nurses, missionaries, aid workers, or political campaigners to include and which to leave out. I am haunted by my omissions, both those of whom I am aware and those of whom I am still ignorant.1 What generalizations do I now feel prepared to make about these women? I think that every one of them was a feminist of the deed in her determination to think, speak and act according to her own light, despite the fact that almost all political and economic power was then in the hands

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The Dictionary of British Women Humanitarians | 225 of ‘superior’ or hostile men. Their considerable intelligence helped these women as, in most cases at least, did their high level of education and their confident class position. Moreover they were all British when there was still a British Empire. And however critical they were of that Empire and however much their consciences impelled them to try to right – or at least to palliate – some of that Empire’s wrongs, nevertheless they did gain standing from their very Britishness. In politics they were for the most part – though not invariably – on the Left/Liberal end of the spectrum. As for their religious convictions, most of them would have said, with Muriel Lester, that they were ‘trying to be Christian’. However, in my view, their humanitarianism was less grounded in religious belief than their religious belief was itself a concomitant of their humane value system. One last significant factor that they almost all had in common was childlessness. It would seem incontrovertible that a colossal, lifelong energy had been freed thereby to concentrate on parenting the world. Dr. Cicely Williams, the first Head of Mother and Child Care for the World Health Organization, used to say that she felt that she had been mother to millions of babies. It is a real question – for both women and men – whether the infinite demands of family life plus professional life today do not render us comparatively ineffective as citizens of the world in our time? As I have collected and collated all these testimonies to the human capacity for enormous and effective kindness, I have been strengthened in my faith that cruelty is not the ultimate truth about us. Of course it is incomparably easier and quicker to destroy than to construct, to kill others rather than to keep them alive – and wanting to stay alive. But for all the sophisticated, fashionable cynicism regarding the impossibility of authentic altruism and for all the deep temptation to despair in our incurably nationalistic as well as nuclear age, I believe that human goodness is not a sham, not banal, and certainly not the exception. But how are we to extend the effort of kindness to more of those left out in the cold? Appendix

The women included in Oldfield, Women Humanitarians: A Biographical Dictionary of British Women Active between 1900 and 1950, London and New York: Continuum, 2001 are: Margaret Corbett Ashby, Internationalist feminist. Margaret Ashton, Socialist pacifist feminist, Manchester City Councillor. Gladys Aylward, child rescuer, China. Hertha Ayrton, scientist, researcher against gas in warfare, Mary Baker Penman, nurse, champion of refugees. Dr Margaret Balfour, CBE, medical service to Indian women and children. Helen Bamber, UNRRA, Belsen, rehabilitation of child concentration camp victims.

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226 | Part Three Evelyn Bark, OBE, British Red Cross and International Red Cross tracing service, Dr Frances Lady Barrett, CH, CBE, MD, MS, pioneer in the social work of medicine. Rosa Barrett, Irish child rescue worker. Florence Barrow, International relief-worker in war and famine. Dr. Julia Bell, researcher into muscular dystrophy and other inherited conditions. Louise Bennett, Irish socialist pacifist feminist, Dr Ethel Bentham, Labour MP, JP, MD. Edith Bigland, Quaker. Lady Violet Bonham Carter liberal campaigner against death penalty. Dr Mary Bisset, MB, CHB, LM, obstetrician and eye surgeon in India. Col. Mary Booth, Salvation Army, CBE, refugee relief worker in Belgium. Lt. Col. Olive Booth, Director, Salvation Army’s Europe Relief team. Bertha Bracey, rescuer of refugees in the 30’s and 40’s. Sybil Brazell, volunteer plague nurse in N. Africa. Vera Brittain, pacifist feminist. Dame Dr. Edith Brown, surgeon, missionary founder of first women’s medical college, India. Dorothy Buxton, Fight the Famine Committee and Save the Children Fund. Geraldine Barrow Cadbury, pioneer Juvenile Penal reformer. Maynard Linden Carter, ARRC, Florence Nightingale medallist nurse, International Red Cross. Hilda Cashmore, educationist, welfare worker in Britain and India, Quaker War. Relief worker. Nurse Edith Cavell – “Patriotism is not enough”. Dr Sylvia Chapman, cofounder of CORSO, worker for UNRRA in Greece. Dr. Hilda Clark, International relief organizer. Winifred Coate, missionary teacher, farmer with Palestinian refugees. Phyllis Cooper, ambulance driver, relief worker, Red Cross rescuer of civilian wounded. Selina Cooper, Socialist, pacifist feminist. Kate, Lady Courtney of Penwith, pacifist champion of ‘enemy’ aliens. Kathleen Courtney, pacifist feminist, League of Nations Union. “Gretta” Cousins, Irish suffragist, teacher, Indian women’s emancipation, imprisoned in India. Dame Rachel Crowdy, League of Nations campaigner against transnational drug and prostitution traffickers. Margaret Llewelyn Davies, Women’s Co-op Guild. Mabel Dearmer, pacifist nurse in Serbia. Charlotte Despard, Women’s Freedom League, pacifist, anti-fascist, Mrs. Doughty-Wylie, medical relief organizer in India, Armenia, Ethiopa, Greece, Romania. Marian Ellis > Lady Parmoor, Quaker, Dorothy England, Quaker, nurse in Save the Children German DP Camps. Dorothy Evans, feminist pacifist. Isabella Ford, Socialist pacifist feminist. Josephine Foss, missionary girls’ teacher in Asia. Hon. Henrietta Franklin, Liberal Jewish internationalist educationist. Mrs. Kathleen Freeman, Save the Children, Refugee Rescuer.

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The Dictionary of British Women Humanitarians | 227 Mary Friedrich, Quaker in Nazi Germany. Joan Fry, Quaker relief organizer, founder of allotments movement. Margery Fry, Penal Reformer. Ruth Fry, Quaker relief organizer in Russia. Katherine St. John Glasier, Socialist feminist pacifist. Nan Green, Basque child refugee rescue after Spanish Civil War; monitor of trials of anti-fascists in Francoist Spain. Dorothy Hardisty, Kindertransport Jewish Child Refugee rescuer, 1940–48. Lady Alice Harris, anti-slavery movement in Africa. Mary Higgs, champion of women tramps. Elaine Hills-Young, MBE, nurse, midwife in Egypt, Sudan, campaigner against clitoridectomy. Emily Hobhouse, publicist of concentration camps in Boer War. Dorothy Hodgkin, researcher into penicillin, vitamin B2 and insulin. Winifred Holtby, internationalist and champion of African liberation. Louise Howard, née Matthaei, ILO, and conservation campaigner. Mary Hughes, champion of the down and out. Doreen Ingrams, activist for welfare of Bedouin women and orphans in the Hadhramaut. Storm Jameson, anti-fascist writer, PEN, refugee rescuer. Eglantyne Jebb, Save the Children Fund founder. Dorothy Jewitt, SRN, Medical missionary in Eastern Nigeria, and leper colony. Sister Priscilla Jorden, International Red Cross relief worker. Lettice Jowitt, Quaker teacher and relief worker. Mother Mary Kevin, CBE, Franciscan Missionary teacher, midwife and carer for lepers. Dr. Isabel Kerr, Medical Missionary serving lepers in India. Dr. Phyllis M.T. Kerridge, Ph.D., M.Sc. MRCP, pioneer physiologist in aids for the deaf. Dr. Elizabeth Knight, human rights of women worldwide. Janet Lacey, YMCA in post-war Germany, Christian Aid. Emmeline Pethick Lawrence, pacifist feminist. Muriel Lester, pioneer of cooperative communities and non-violence, Fellowship of Reconciliation. Alicia Little, founder of movement to end foot-binding in China. Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, FRS, scientific proponent of nuclear disarmament in Cold War. Lesley Maber, rescuer of Jewish children in occupied France. Mary Macarthur, Socialist pacifist feminist. Dr. Joan McMichael-Askins, née Malleson, Medical Aid for Spain, Vietnam. Margaret McNeill, Quaker relief organizer in DP camps in Germany. Dr. Kathleen MacPhail, medical rescue in wartime, and after. Chrystal Macmillan, pacifist feminist. Catherine Marshall, pacifist feminist, Non-Conscription Fellowship. Hannah Mitchell, socialist pacifist feminist. Hon. Lily Montagu, Liberal Jewish feminist pacifist. Professor Edith Morley, refugee rescuer. Florence Newton, champions of Palestinian Arabs. Dame Leila Paget, nurse of ally and enemy in Balkans.

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228 | Part Three Lady Muriel Paget, CBE, relief work in Russia, Baltic and Czechoslovakia. Violet Paget – ‘Vernon Lee’ – anti-militarist writer. Sylvia Pankhurst, socialist feminist pacifist. Joyce Pearce, founder of ‘The Ockenden Venture’ for refugees. Priscilla Hannah Peckover, Quaker. Edith Picton-Turbervill, MP, campaigner against girl slavery in Malaysia, Caroline Playne, anti-militarist cultural historian, social psychologist. Edith Pye, Quaker midwife, International rescue and relief-worker. Diana Pym, philhellene, political campaigner for imprisoned Greek anti-fascists. Marjorie Rackstraw, Quaker relief-worker; housing for the elderly. Sister Raphael (Dorothy Maud) campaigner for black South Africans. Eleanor Rathbone, MP, Family Allowances, women’s emancipation, and refugee rescue. Stella Jane Reekie, Red Cross nurse, founder of Polish school in Belsen, 1945. Juliet Lady Rhys Williams, reduction of maternal and perinatal mortality. Annot Robinson, socialist feminist pacifist. Esther Roper, socialist feminist pacifist. Dr. Alice Roughton, psychiatrist, asylum-giver, nuclear pacifist. Tessa Rowntree, later Cadbury, refugee rescuer after Sudetenland crisis. Maude Royden, Christian feminist pacifist. Dora Russell, Sscialist feminist, birth control campaigner, co-founder CND. Sue Ryder, carer for war and torture victims and concentration camp survivors. Ada Salter, socialist pacifist. Sophy Sanger, co-founder ILO. Evelyn Sharp, anti-militarist relief worker. Mary Sheepshanks, internationalist feminist pacifist, rescuer of Belgian refugees, Ukrainians. Rebecca Sieff, founder of WIZO, welfare of Jewish women and girls in Palestine. Dame Kathleen Simon, anti-Slavery. Esther Simpson, rescuer of refugee scholars. Motee Booth-Tucker Sladen, Col. Salvation Army, refugee rescuer and DP relief, Finland and Western Europe. Ethel Snowden, socialist feminist pacifist. Lilian Starr, later Underhill, missionary nurse, Afghanistan. Elsie Stephenson, Red Cross Nurse in wartime Egypt and post-war Europe; Director of first degree in Nursing Studies. Murray, Katherine Stewart, Duchess of Atholl, champion of refugees from Spain, and anti-appeaser, Marie Stopes, birth-control pioneer and publicist. Eleanor Strugnell, medical missionary, health educator among Chilean Indians. Dr. Mary Sturge, pioneer GP. Sophia Sturge, social reformer in Ireland and anti militarist activist. Helena Swanwick, pacifist feminist. Mavis Tate, MP, JP, refugee rescuer from the Nazis, inspector of post-war Buchenwald. Dr. Claire Thomson, doctor and obstetrician, preventive medicine pioneer in India. Dr. Margaret Thomson, MBE, Malaya Medical Service. Sybil Thorndike, tragic actress, pacifist.

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The Dictionary of British Women Humanitarians | 229 Violet Tillard, international relief organizer, Germany and Russia. Dr. Janet Vaughan, researcher on blood transfusion, nutrition for concentration camps survivors and radiation sickness, Dr. Jane Walker, C.H. pioneer of successful treatment for TB. Dame Barbara Ward, internationalist writer, economic thinker on global justice and ecology. Dr. Marjory Warren, CBE, revolutionary pioneer of geriatric care. Prof. Doreen Warriner, OBE, refugee rescuer, international land reformer. Elizabeth Spence Watson, Quaker. Mrs. Alfred Watt, internationalist founder of Women’s Institutes and Countrywomen Worldwide. Monica Whately, feminist, internationalist, anti-fascist. Dr. Honor Wilkins, missionary doctor in India. Ellen Wilkinson, MP, socialist feminist, anti-fascist. Dr. Cicely Williams – discoverer of kwashiorkor, WHO organizer for mothers and children. Ethel Williams, pioneer paediatrician, pacifist feminist. Francesca Wilson, international relief and rescue worker. Dr. Helena Wright, international birth control campaigner. Virginia Woolf, pacifist feminist, Mary Young, nurse gassed at Ravensbrück for helping prisoners escape. Note 1 See Introduction and note 9, p. xv, to Oldfield, Women Humanitarians, 2001, (since reissued as a paperback, Doers of the Word: British Women Humanitarians 1900–1950, 2006, Oldfield, 4 Houndean Close, Lewes, BN71EZ, UK).

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CHAPTER

19 Vera Brittain (1893–1970) The dogged pacifist

It was her nursing of dying German prisoners as a VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) in November 1917 near Passchendaele that planted the seed of Vera Brittain’s subsequent and absolute pacifism.1 She had already lost her fiancé and two close friends to the war and six months later she was to lose her beloved brother. It was too early to bear the recognition that Europe’s competition in massacring its youth had been futile as well as mad and barbaric but the universality of the suffering and death she witnessed as a nurse did initiate her into a profound internationalism. Ironically and terribly, her Testament of Youth, the most popular anti-war book written by a woman between the wars with its indictment of the betrayal of the idealism of a whole generation sent to die for ‘meretricious gods’2 was published in 1933, when Hitler’s accession to power made the next World War a certainty. Vera Brittain refused to believe either that the next war would come or that it must be fought. However mistaken her view of the possibility of effective non-violent resistance to Nazism may have been, (see her Humiliation with Honour, 1942), she both suffered for her pacifist leadership after war was declared and she did her utmost to try to halt Britain and the Allies from descending to the Nazis’ depth of callous inhumanity. Vera Brittain suffered personally in that, as a leading pacifist, she was not allowed to travel abroad for the duration of the war and was thus cut off from her two children who had been sent to the United States.3 She also suffered so acutely in her conscience that, despite her weakness for approval and praise, she was driven to speak, both in season and out, knowing just how unpopular it would make her. Abominating fascism and in particular the Nazis’ diabolic cruelty towards Jews, Vera Brittain was convinced, like her contemporary Simone Weil4 that the one thing First published in Oldfield, British Women Humanitarians, Continuum, London/New York, 2000; republished in paperback as Doers of the Word, Oldfield, 2006, BN7 1EZ.

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Vera Brittain | 231 needful was that the anti-Fascists should demonstrate their alternative faith by actions grounded in basic humanity. Hence she wrote in January 1943 in support of Victor Gollancz’s pamphlet Let My People Go, urging, in vain, the immigration of threatened Jews into British-mandated Palestine and deploring the British refusal to allow 2,000 French-Jewish children from Vichy France asylum in Britain. They were all deported to their deaths.5 In addition, as Chairman of the Peace Pledge Union’s Food Relief Campaign, Vera Brittain wrote and lectured tirelessly, urging the British Government to relax its economic blockade of occupied Europe sufficiently in order to permit minimal medical and relief supplies to get through. Her pamphlet, One of These Little Ones, February, 1943, which sold thirty thousand copies, declared: ‘Remember that just feeling sorry or shocked will achieve nothing . . . .What is wanted is a change of heart on the part of the Government, so that they will grant the navicerts required before Europe’s starving children can be fed .’6 The children of Belgium, Greece and Holland were particularly at risk from extreme malnutrition and consequent disease. ‘If we say and do nothing, we shall be held as responsible as the Nazis for the sufferings of ‘these little ones.’’7 She pleaded for navicerts for just one ship a month laden with medicine and vitamins and for neutral ships to be allowed to transport food from the United States for International Red Cross distribution in occupied Europe. But her attempt to sway the Ministry of Economic Warfare failed. Vera Brittain’s other campaign during World War Two was to join in the attempt, by Bishop Bell, R. Stokes (the Labour MP for Ipswich) and leading Quakers, to end the indiscriminate saturation bombing of German civilians by the RAF. In 1942 and 1943 hundreds of thousands of Germans, including of course women and children, had already been burnt or buried alive or suffocated in the day and night raids on their cities. In November 1943 Vera Brittain wrote Seed of Chaos. What Mass Bombing Really Means. It was first published as Massacre by Bombing in the United States and aroused immense hostility – as well as some disquiet in the Roosevelt administration. Published in April 1944 in Britain it aroused little interest except a hostile review from George Orwell. Vera Brittain’s attempt to remind Winston Churchill, the rest of the British Government and the military High Command, including ‘Bomber Harris’, of the minimal civilized standards of international law regarding warfare proved as impotent as did the efforts of Bishop Bell and Mr. Stokes.8 Nevertheless it was vital that some few did speak out so that even worse was not perpetrated. (It has recently emerged that in July 1944 Churchill was contemplating drenching German cities with poison gas, only to be told by his Chiefs of Staff that it was not necessary ‘to start chemical and biological warfare in order to shorten the war.’)9 I am not responsible for the cruel deeds done by the Nazis in the name of the Germans, and much as I deplore them I cannot prevent them. But

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232 | Part Three so long as [there is] breath in me I shall protest against abominations done by my government in the name of the British, of whom I am one. The mercilessness of others does not release us from the obligation to control ourselves.10

‘Church leaders and politicians denounced her . . . obscenities and dog faeces were put through her letter box.’11 In her old age Vera Brittain joined the demonstrators marching against British nuclear weapons and against British collusion with the US war in Vietnam. As her biographers have said: ‘[The] moral courage and clearsightedness with which she took her stand is still deserving of recognition and respect.’12 Notes 1 Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge, Vera Brittain: A Life (London: Chatto and Windus, 1995), p. 121. 2 Op. cit., p. 266. 3 Op. cit., pp. 402–3. 4 Sybil Oldfield, Women Against the Iron Fist: Alternatives to Millitarism 1900–1989 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 82–7. 5 Vera Brittain, Letters to Peace Lovers, 28 January, 1943, reprinted in Winifred Eden-Green and Alan Eden-Green, eds., Testament of a Peace Lover (London: Virago, 1988), pp. 138–9. 6 Vera Brittain, One of These Little Ones (Hertfordshire: Andrew Dakers Ltd, 1943), p. 4. 7 Op. cit., p. 10. 8 Cf. David Irving, The Destruction of Dresden (London: William Kimber, 1963). 9 The Guardian, 2 November 1998. 10 Vera Brittain, Letters to Peace-Lovers, 17 June 1943, in Eden-Green, op. cit., p. 154. 11 Shirley Williams (Vera Brittain’s daughter), ‘Testament to the touchstone of my life’, The Independent, 29 December 1993, p. 16. 12 Berry and Bostridge, op. cit., p. 442. See also, Yvonne Bennett, Vera Brittain, Women and Peace (London: The Peace Pledge Union, 1987); Paul Berry and Alan Bishop, Testament of A Generation: The Journalism of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby (London: Virago, 1985); Britta Zangeu, ‘“Above all nations is Humanity” – Vera Brittain’s Painful path to Radical Humanism’, in Women’s History Notebooks, Vol. 6, No. 1, Winter 1999, pp. 10–17. The obituary in The Times, 30 March 1970, made no mention of her stand in Word War II.

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CHAPTER

20 American Visionaries Helen Keller and the poets Muriel Rukeyser, Denise Levertov and Sharon Olds

Wars Unseen Unlike European women, American women anti-militarists this century have never had to operate within an immediate war-zone. They have not been shot at by fighter-planes as was Virginia Woolf, nor bombed like Simone Weil was during the Blitz, let alone beheaded like Sophie Scholl for the public denunciation of her country’s militarism. Nevertheless, American women peace-thinkers have still needed great moral and physical courage in order to withstand political hostility, police intimidation, arrest and imprisonment – and even violence on occasion from American National Guardsmen. But on the whole theirs has been a spiritual struggle to engage with the problem of wars fought always outside America, even when fought by Americans. Images ‘of levelled cites, refugees clogging highways, starvation and disease are snapshot from another place for Americans’.1 where no bombs ever have screamed down smashing the buildings, shredding the people’s bodies, tossing the fields of Kansas or Vermont or Maryland into the air to land wrong way up, a gash of earth-guts . . . (Denise Levertov, ‘Fragrance of Life, Odor of Death’, (The Freeing of the Dust, 1975)

First published in Women Against the Iron Fist: Alternatives to Militarism 1900– 1989, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1989; reprinted by Edwin Mellen Press, Lampeter, 2000.

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234 | Part Three For that very reason the American public can regard war as something distant and unreal, while American anti-militarists have needed correspondingly greater reserves of moral energy and imaginative vision, in order to reach their public.

Helen Keller, 1880–1968 One American woman who did possess such reserves in abundance was Helen Keller. Until Joseph Lash’s monumental biography, Helen and Teacher (1980), the political radicalism and pacifism of Helen Keller had largely been passed over as something of an embarrassment in a great American folk-heroine.2 But in fact her lifelong peace-witness lay at the very heart of Helen Keller’s inner vision. For no one who has ever lived has understood more profoundly than she did that there is an alternative to the iron fist – our own hand of flesh reaching out to answer someone else’s need or trying to express our own. When Helen Keller was 19 months old she was struck down by an acute illness that left her blind, deaf and therefore unable to talk. By the time she was six she had grown, in her own words, ‘into a wild destructive little animal’ who did not know the difference between day and night, who pulled the food off other people’s plates at every meal and who erupted into more and more frequent violent, frenzied rages over her frustrated drive to communicate. Without access to language ‘nothing was part of anything’, as Helen Keller was later to write in her book Teacher. It was only when that same teacher, 21-year-old Annie Sullivan, first finger-spelled W–A–T–E–R over and over again into one of Helen Keller’s hands while holding her other hand under the flow from a pump that the child first grasped that for everything on earth there is a word, a word which she could understand and then communicate back. From that moment she could not rest or let her teacher rest – she had to know, through her hand, the name for everything. Words had given birth to her mind. Although she would still be confined for the next 80 years in her ‘steel cell of total silence and absolute darkness’3 Helen Keller would henceforth possess a means of communication. In later years, using the halting, handicapped speech that she had slowly and painfully forced herself to acquire, Helen Keller would publicly define her own liberation into humanity through the touch of the caring human hand as being symbolic of the way to reciprocal liberation for all human beings: ‘I was dumb; now I speak, I owe this to the hands and hearts of others . . . Don’t you see what it means? We live by each other and for each other. Alone we can do so little.’4 ‘The meaning of the word ‘hand’, she said, filled eight pages of her dictionary.’5 When the anarchist Emma Goldman met Helen Keller during World

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American Visionaries | 235 War I she instantly understood how human spirit could, in spite of every barrier, reach out to human spirit: The marvellous woman, bereft of the most vital human senses, could nevertheless, by her psychic strength, see and hear and articulate. The electric current of her vibrant fingers on my lips and her sensitised hand over mine spoke more than mere tongue. It eliminated physical barriers and held one in the spell of her inner world.6

When her great teacher and friend Anne Sullivan Macy died, after having spent almost every day under the same roof with her for fifty years, Helen Keller mourned: Every hour I long for the thousand bright signals from her vital, beautiful hand. That was life! The hand that with a little word touched the darkness of my mind, and I awoke to happiness and love . . . After fifty years I continue to feel her dear, communicative hand’s warmth and urge in mine . . . Look as I will, it is not there.7

Every morning Helen Keller would ask to have the world’s news spelled out into her fingers. ‘All her life she grieved over the catastrophes that filled the news – dust storms in the Middle West, floods in Mississippi – and she instinctively hated the unjust and the cruel.’8 Hostile American political columnists mocked Helen Keller’s response to world events as invalidated by her disabilities and by her assumed dependence upon the opinions of those few who could spell into her hand. But, as Helen Keller pointed out with some spirit, there are other kinds of blindness and deafness than the physical, the morally imaginative blindness and deafness to the remediable suffering of others. Moreover, she and Teacher did not, in fact, agree on politics for many years. Annie Sullivan was, at first, a convinced pessimistic conservative on all issues – ‘The more we talked, the less we thought alike’ – and yet she was eventually converted to a more radical critique of the world. She was converted in part by Helen herself, rather than the other way around. ‘I can read,’ Helen Keller pointed out; and read she did, in Braille, in many languages expressing many conflicting views. Her ardent, idealistic response to the world thus revealed was her own. The first public expression of Helen Keller’s approach to politics was published when she was 24 and newly graduated from Radcliffe College. In ‘My Future as I See it’ she committed herself to work as a social interventionist, and concluded with the anti-militarist statement: As I reflect on the enormous amount of good work that is left undone I cannot but say a word and look my disapproval when I hear that my country is spending millions upon millions of dollars for war and war

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236 | Part Three engines – more, I have heard, than twice as much as the entire public school system of the United States costs us.9

In 1909 Helen Keller joined the American Socialist Party which its leader, Eugene Debs, hoped would become the internationalist political arm of his international trade union movement – the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). To Eugene Debs, as to Helen Keller, wars between nation states were nothing but ‘Murder in Uniform’ orchestrated by the conflicting, competitive interests of the élites in each country. The abolition of such wars could only come when the working people of the world recognized their supranational common cause and refused to kill one another for the rulers’ sakes. In 1912 Helen Keller became more and more publicly committed to the increasingly militant IWW, sending money to their strike-fund and letters of support to their jailed leaders. But it was not just America’s exploited working class she cared about – ‘all suffering humanity is my affair’, as she wrote to the socialist John Macy in January 1914. And, with the coming of August 1914, that meant all humanity. The world seemed one vast Gethesemane . . . I used to wake suddenly from a frightful dream of sweat and blood and multitudes shot, killed, and crazed, and go to sleep only to dream of it again. I was often asked why I did not write something new. How could I write with the thunder of machine guns and the clamour of hate-filled armies deafening my soul, and the conflagration of cities blinding my thoughts? I was in a state of spiritual destitution . . . It was extremely hard for me to keep my faith as I read how the mass of patriotic hatred swelled with ever wider and more barbaric violence. Explanations without end filled the pages under my scornful fingers, and they all amounted to the same frightful admission – the collapse of civilisation and the betrayal of the most beautiful religion ever preached upon earth.10

On 19 December 1915 – the same year that Eugene Debs declared: ‘I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth; I am a citizen of the world’ – Helen Keller told an anti-war audience of two thousand people in New York: ‘I look upon the whole world as my fatherland and every war has for me the horror of a family feud. I look upon true patriotism as the brotherhood of man and the service of all to all.’11 Putting forward her alternative to military preparedness, she declared that ‘the best preparedness is one that disarms the hostility of other nations and makes friends of them.’12 She then endorsed the IWW’s call for a General Strike that would cross national frontiers in order to bring World War I to an end, in her speech at New York’s Carnegie Hall on 5 January 1916 under the auspices of the Women’s Peace Party and the Labour Forum:

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American Visionaries | 237 You are urged to add to the heavy burdens you already bear the burden of a larger army and to make additional warships. It is in your power to refuse to carry the artillery and the dreadnoughts . . . With the silence and dignity of creators you can end wars and the system of selfishness and exploitation that causes wars. All you need to do to bring about this stupendous revolution is to straighten up and fold your arms . . . Strike against the war, for without you no battles can be fought. Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder. Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human beings. Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction.13

The New York Herald said ‘poor little Helen Keller’, as though she were still a small girl and not a woman of 35; and Life magazine called her ‘a blind leader of the blind’. Undeterred, Helen Keller decided to participate in an ‘Anti-WarPreparedness’ lecture tour of the Mid-West, Nebraska, Kansas and Michigan. Already she had received thousands of letters from Europe asking for help, and now she was urged by American anti-militarists to give a moral lead with ‘a lecture on Preparedness for Peace . . . Jane Addams isn’t well enough to help steady the ship and she and Helen Keller are the only women the country will listen to.’14 In the event, of course, the country did not listen, as Helen Keller herself acknowledged: [The] tour was far from successful . . . The group of which I was a part was doing all it could to keep America out of the war . . . What we desired was fair discussion and open debate. I wanted to have the whole matter put before the people so they could decide whether they wanted to go into the conflict or stay out. As it was, they had no choice in the matter . . . I believe war is the inevitable fruit of our economic system, but even if I am wrong I believe that truth can lose nothing by agitation but may gain all. I tried to make my audiences see what I saw, but the people who crowded the great tents were disappointed or indifferent . . . no words can express the frustration of those days.15

Even after the United States had entered the war, Helen Keller persisted in declaring her own absolute neutrality and her total opposition to this war for ‘a place in the sun’ between competing militarist powers. In September 1917, after her friend Giovannitti and other syndicalist leaders of the IWW were arrested as ‘security risks’, she made a public appeal in New York for a far more committed anti-militarist foreign policy than President Wilson’s had now proved itself to be. She called for ‘a

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238 | Part Three people’s peace – a peace without victory, a peace without conquests or indemnities.’16 In November 1917 Helen Keller shared the hopes of radicals the world over who welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution, not least because of the new Russian leaders’ decision to stop fighting World War I, and she consistently protested against the Allied attempt to overthrow the Bolsheviks. When Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison under the Espionage Act for having denounced US participation in the war in June 1918, Helen Keller publicly championed him: ‘You dear comrade! . . . I write because I want you to know that I should be proud if the Supreme Court convicted me of abhorring war, and doing all in my power to oppose it.’17 There was, of course, almost nothing that was in her power. Nevertheless, throughout the early 1920s, a period of hysterical anticommunist reaction in the United States, Helen Keller never stopped testifying to her unpopular political convictions, including those on peace, war and ‘national security’, although she was dependent on public goodwill for her livelihood: Q: Do you think any government wants peace? Helen Keller: The Policy of governments is to seek peace and pursue war ... Q: Do you think any nation really wants peace? Helen Keller: I think all the other nations would like to see Russia disarm ... Q: What did America gain by the war? Helen Keller: The American Legion and a bunch of other troubles. Q: Who is your favourite hero in real life? Helen Keller: Eugene V. Debs. He dared to do what other men were afraid to do. Q: Who is your favourite heroine in real life? Helen Keller: Kate O’Hara because she was willing to go to jail for her ideal of world peace and brotherhood . . . Q: What do you think of war? Helen Keller: Read John Dos Passos’s The Three Soldiers, and you will know what I think of war, the most atrocious of human follies.18

On 25 July 1925 Helen Keller defined the eradication of disease, poverty and exploitation as the only kind of war she believed in: More and more we should come to understand that we are our brothers’ keepers, and that a state is great in proportion to the opportunities which it affords its citizens to become healthy, useful, happy human beings. A new will has come into the world, not a will to power, but a will to service. Everywhere I feel there is a growing desire to restore, to rehabilitate, to reclaim and promote better living for all men . . . We can, if

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American Visionaries | 239 we are so minded, roll back the clouds of calamity which overshadow the world . . . Friendship and cooperation between nations are the most effective barriers to war . . . An international association for the prevention of disease and the conservation of health would be a long step towards creating the thing we hope for out of the travesty we call civilization.19

In 1932 Helen Keller joined Einstein’s movement of War Resisters International and in 1933 her book Out of the Dark was burned by the Nazis in Berlin because it contained praise of Lenin. In 1936, she refused to have any of her books published in Germany as her protest against Nazism. The Journal that Helen Keller wrote in 1936–7 at the age of 56, as an attempt at self-therapy for her grief over the death of Teacher, constantly moves between her own private misery and her growing horror at public events in the increasingly fascist world outside: November 14 [1936]. Up early so that we could read The Times’ comments on the alarming state of European affairs . . . It is devoutly to be wished that all statesmen should join Mr Baldwin in his warning that the world is moving towards war, but it is no news to me. For eighteen years I have tried to suppress a great fear of another world war and the yet worse misery it may entail . . . I cannot believe that the stronger Britain is in armaments, the greater will be ‘the certainty of peace’. History teaches that fleets and armies are as provocative as weapons openly carried by private citizens, and that the innumerable treaties signed after wars have settled nothing. November 24. Sometimes my heart sinks when I hear that forty million gas-masks are being prepared for Britain alone, and that medical students in the University of Edinburgh are being trained to treat gaspoisoning. The situation looks indeed hopeless when war and its increasingly diabolical means of destruction are expected and prepared for . . . December 31. I have been wrapped in a tempest of grievous thoughts. What had this Old Year brought that was new? To me, only the illness of her for whom I lived, and sorrow old as mortality. To the world, black clouds threatening Europe’s peace hopes, wicked anti-Semitic persecutions, and the sickening barbarities in Madrid. January 16 [1937]. Hitler is Mephistopheles. March 21 1937. Rozika Schwimmer and I spoke of the apparent triumph of militarism everywhere. She said we needed another Thomas Paine with irresistible eloquence to clear the way for a world federation of nations which would render it impossible for any state to call out its fighting forces without the consent of the rest. Alas, when shall we ever have such a desirable council of men?

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240 | Part Three March 27. Easter. How different my last Easter and this one are from all others! Besides its own blessed message for mankind, each Easter used to bring in a new way the thrilling sense of my own resurrection when Teacher awoke me with a word, a touch, from the only death I can imagine – dark silence without language or purpose or faith . . . Now there is no greeting from her on earth. But I do not forget the disheartening retrogression apparent in civilisation everywhere. Times have changed. Tyranny in its worst forms, denying human rights, has enslaved three peoples who are supposed to be progressive, and they are suffering themselves to be led into the accumulation of armaments which threaten mass murder in all lands.20

After Munich, September 1938, Helen Keller advocated and herself participated in an international boycott of goods from Germany, Italy and Japan. Finally, after Hitler had overrun France and the Netherlands, Helen Keller, like Simone Weil and Virginia Woolf shortly before her, renounced her pacifism. She was 60 years old: In the First World War I was a convinced pacifist, and I continued to hold that attitude until some months ago. Then, the atrocious happenings in Europe, the life-and-death quality of Nazi aggression and the uniqueness of this conflict as I saw it – a duel between human ideologies and a brutality deadly with a false philosophy – tore me away, not from my ideal but from the joy of embodying it in the letter.21

Helen Keller’s support for Roosevelt and for the United States’ entry into World War II did not, however, convert her into a politically acceptable US citizen in the eyes of the FBI. They had kept a file on her ever since she had appealed for a lifting of the US arms embargo for Spain and they also noted all her eager expressions of solidarity with the Russian wareffort against Hitler. The Dies House Committee on Un-American Activities cited her eleven times before 1943. It was also in 1943 that Helen Keller began her tours of military and naval hospitals throughout the United States, as an offering of fellowship with the newly blinded and mutilated young casualties of the war. This literally ‘first–hand’ experience of other people’s wounds forced her to experience the world war in her imagination – their burned, twisted hands in hers ‘struck her somehow as trails crossing her palm.’22 She was not totally reconciled to her decision to support the war – ‘I still feel like a deserter, and I know that the conflict began as a rankly imperialistic one, but what could I do when it developed into a people’s war of liberation?’23 Immediately World War II was over, all Helen Keller’s political energy went into advocating a US foreign policy that would not be militaristic or rabidly anti-Russian and anti-Communist. She toured war-devastated Greece, Italy, France and Britain in 1946 on behalf of their blind, including

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American Visionaries | 241 all those combatants and civilians blinded not from birth but by war. And already she had to brood upon the next man-made threat to life on earth: The manufacture of bombs continues, and it dismays me to see how little the people are doing individually to prevent atomic warfare . . . I only hope they may be aroused to a sense of their danger before it is too late to assert their human dignity and put into office men who grasp the supreme issue – ‘One world or none.’24

In 1947 Helen Keller appeared at a rally in support of civilian control of atomic energy and in 1948, at the age of 68, she made a poignant return visit to Japan. There she found herself in the insupportable position of begging the victims of the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for money for the blind – ‘The bitter irony, of it all gripped us overwhelmingly, and it cost me a supreme effort to speak.’ But she did speak and the survivors of the two blasted cities still had the will to give to others. ‘What can I say to such an invincible spirit of generosity?’ She passed her worn fingers over the scarred face of one of the atomic victims and solemnly rededicated herself to the struggle against nuclear warfare and for the constructive uses of atomic energy. Ten years later, a friend reported that, now 78, Helen Keller was still a convinced nuclear pacifist: Peace is very much on Helen’s mind . . . She has spoken of it every time I have seen her during the past couple of years. She feels that she betrayed a sacred thing when she laid aside her pacifism during the last war and is determined not to do it again. She says that Polly [her companion and interpreter after Teacher’s death] will stand by her on this and I tell her that I hope I shall have the strength to do it.25

Helen Keller was thus much more than an unparalleled individual success-story in the history of the disabled and much more than an unequalled publicist for the human rights of the world’s blind. Despite her life-sentence of absolute darkness and silence – or perhaps in some way because of it – her intuitive moral sense penetrated to essentials, to ‘simple truth mis-called simplicity.’ No one could have had better reason to care exclusively about her own desperate predicament, and yet, ‘far from being self-absorbed, [Helen Keller] proved herself capable of an all-embracing love for humanity and[a] profound feeling for its woe and despair’ – as Emma Goldman, among others, testified. ‘We live by each other and for each other.’ ‘I believe that happiness, attained, should be shared.’ ‘One world or none.’ Helen Keller’s halting yet radiant, ‘seeing’ words deserve to penetrate our darkness also.

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242 | Part Three

American Women Poets and War Helen Keller died in 1968 just at the time when the US assault on Vietnam was bringing a new generation of men and women peace-thinkers into existence in the United States. Some of the most eloquent and memorable responses, both to that war and to a future nuclear World War III, have been the words of women poets. In order to grapple morally with that Third War, the war that must never happen, we are dependent not, as we were in recent wars, on the unbearable eye–witness of the documentary photographs by Don Cullin, or Bert Hardy or Werner Bischof or Martha Gellhorn but on the visionary eye–witness of the imaginative artist and poet. For only a ‘seer’ can see – and communicate – what we must never allow to take place. But in attempting to be such ‘seers’, the poets have an almost impossible task; so desensitized have most of us in the developed world become in order to survive our twentieth-century history that it is difficult for anyone to feel very much for or about anyone else – outside, that is, our own immediate circle. As the American poet Denise Levertov has expressed it, the twentieth century’s ‘Life at War’ has dirtied our imagination, blinding us inwardly: We have breathed the grits of it in, all our lives, our lungs are pocked with it, the mucous membrane of our dreams coated with it, the imagination filmed over with the gray filth of it. (‘Life at War’, from The Sorrow Dance, 1967)26

And the result is, as she says, moral and political paralysis: The poisoning called ‘getting used to’ has taken place: we are the deads; . . . Don’t know what to do: Do nothing. (‘Biafra’, from Relearning the Alphabet, 1970)

So many images of unendurable mass suffering have become mere clichés of the cultural consciousness now. The very words ‘holocaust’, ‘death-camp’, ‘genocide’, ‘bomb’ have become dead words; they move us not, for ‘Things thought too long can be no longer thought’, as Yeats wrote as early as 1939 in ‘The Gyres’. And all too often the horrors of our time have been not ‘thought’ but merely exploited with ever-diminishing emotional returns – in films, in fiction, and even, unbelievably, in tourism.27 And shock tactics that try to force us to feel only desensitize us

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American Visionaries | 243 still further. ‘Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock’, as Denise Levertov wrote in The Poet and the World.28 Thus the contemporary poet has to struggle, not, of course for the first time, but perhaps more urgently than ever before, to find unclichéd words that are not dead and thoughts that do not crudely bludgeon reader or hearer into a still worse insensibility. ‘For,’ as Wordsworth wrote, ‘the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants.’ In his or her very effort to find words to express ‘the essential passions of the heart’, the poet is still – in the 1990s as in the 1790s – ‘the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver.’29

Muriel Rukeyser, 1913–1982 One such upholder and preserver was Muriel Rukeyser. ‘Born in 1913 on the eve of World War One, she . . . lived through the Civil War in Spain [which she reported], the Second World War, the Korean War in the 1950s, and the war in Vietnam in the 1960s and against many of these wars Rukeyser . . . protested as citizen and as poet.’30 She also attempted to intervene on behalf of political prisoners in Greece, Chile, South Korea and Spain. Poetry, in Muriel Rukeyser’s view, is an articulation of inner vision that can help the reader or hearer to engage with the world outside and even to change it. But such energizing, inner visioning is not easy nor even always possible. Already in 1944 Muriel Rukeyser had to diagnose her own twentieth-century shock and compassion-fatigue, writing of herself as one Who in one lifetime sees all causes lost, Herself dismayed and helpless, cities down, Love made monotonous fear and the sad-faced Inexorable armies and the falling plane, has sickness, sickness. (‘Who in One Lifetime’, from The Beast in View, 1944)

Nearly 20 years later, however, Muriel Rukeyser sloughed off her despair sufficiently to participate in political protest once more, becoming part of a group: [an] island of people who stayed out in the open in City Hall Park in April of 1961, while the rest of the city [New York] took shelter at the warning sound of the sirens. The protest against this nuclear-war practice drill was, in essence, a protest against war itself and an attempt to ask for some other way to deal with the emotions that make people make war.31

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244 | Part Three ‘An attempt to ask for some other way’ – Muriel Rukeyser could hardly have put the need for an alternative politics more tentatively, and her poem ‘The Long Body’ is correspondingly minimalist in its attempt to touch in, very gently, the simple, quiet insistence on going on living, despite official orders to prepare for death: Whatever can come to a woman can come to me . . . This moment in a city, in its dream of war, We chose to be, Becoming the only ones under the trees when the harsh sound Of the machine sirens spoke. There were these two men, And the bearded one, the boys, the Negro mother feeding Her baby. And threats, the ambulances with open doors. Now silence, Everyone else within the walls. We sang. We are the living island, We the flesh of this island, being lived, Whoever knows us is part of us today. Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me. (From Waterlily Fire, 1963)

In 1968, Muriel Rukeyser wrote of herself in the past tense, as one already dead, destroyed in spirit by the compulsory mass hatreds of our time, living as she did in a phobically anti-communist, militaristic, commercial-enterprise United States: I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane, The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories, The news would pour out of various devices Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.

All that sustained her was the knowledge that she was not alone in her dissidence – other Americans were with her in the construction of an antiwar movement. Thus this same poem continues: I would call my friends on other devices; They would be more or less mad for similar reasons. Slowly I would get pen and paper, Make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day I would be reminded of those men and women Brave, setting up signals across vast distances, Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values. As lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened, We would try to imagine them, try to find each other.

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American Visionaries | 245 To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other, Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves, To let go the means, to wake. I lived in the first century of these wars. (‘Poem’, from The Speed of Darkness, 1968)

Five years later Muriel Rukeyser asked herself and us to identify our own black holes of inner blindness as being at the root of all war-waging. Although we, unlike Helen Keller, are able to see with our physical eyes, we do not seem able to see imaginatively that every human group is made up of feeling fellow humans. It is worth noting in the following poem that both the subject and the object of righteous hatred are always plural – it is in our group relationships and collective psychology that we are at our most pathological; always in need of someone to loathe or fear: When they’re decent about women, they’re frightful about children, When they’re decent about children, they’re rotten about artists, When they’re decent about artists, they’re vicious about whores, What do we see? What do we not see? When they’re kind to whores, they’re death on communists, When they respect communists, they’re foul to bastards, When they’re human to bastards, they mock at hysterectomy – What do we see? What do we not see? When they’re decent about surgery, they bomb the Vietnamese When they’re decent to Vietnamese, they’re frightful to police, When they’re human to police, they rough up lesbians, What do we see? What do we not see? When they’re decent to old women, they kick homosexuals, When they’re good to homosexuals, they can’t stand drug people, When they’re calm about drug people, they hate all Germans, What do we see? What do we not see? Cadenza for the reader When they’re decent to Jews, they dread the blacks, When they know blacks, there’s always something: roaches And the future and children and all potential. Can’t stand themselves Will we never see? Will we ever know? (‘What Do We See?’, from Breaking Open, 1973)

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246 | Part Three The poem ‘St Roach’ – ‘For that I never knew you, I only learned to dread you’ – takes this idea further. The analogy with that urban American bête noire, the cockroach, vividly expresses just how merciless we are to any form of life that we do not want to know, that we need to believe is an alien, undifferentiated enemy: For that I never knew you, I only learned to dread you, for that I never touched you, they told me you are filth, they showed me by every action to despise your kind; for that I saw my people making war on you, I could not tell you apart, one from another, for that in childhood I lived in places clear of you, for that all the people I knew met you by crushing you, stamping you to death, they poured boiling water on you, they flushed you down, for that I could not tell one from another, only that you were dark, fast on your feet, and slender, Not like me. (‘St Roach’, from The Gates, 1976)

Muriel Rukeyser decided to commit Civil Disobedience in protest against the American onslaught on Vietnam; she was arrested, tried, found guilty and imprisoned, staunchly insisting ‘We will help stop this war’ (‘Facing Sentencing’, from Breaking Open, 1973). One of her very last poems, ‘Looking’, begins as a four-line threnody that is at once elegy, protest and prophecy, as she grieves over all the wars that have ever been and over all the wars to come: Battles whose names I do not know Weapons whose wish they dare not teach Wars whose need they will not show Tear us tear us each from each.

Denise Levertov, 1923–1997 Muriel Rukeyser ‘was a cathedral’ to Denise Levertov – her friend and fellow poet – (‘In memory of Muriel Rukeyser’, from Candles in Babylon, 1982). Denise Levertov has been another passionately outspoken protester against the United States’ atrocious war-crimes in Vietnam: Did the people of Vietnam use lanterns of stone? . . . Sir, their light hearts turned to stone. (‘What were they like?’ from The Sorrow Dance, 1963)

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American Visionaries | 247 She is weeping for her lost right arm. She cannot write the alphabet any more on the kindergarten blackboard . . . In the wide skies over the Delta her right hand that is not there writes indelibly, ‘Cruel America, when you mutilate our land and bodies, it is your own soul you destroy, not ours.’ (‘Weeping Woman’, from The Freeing of the Dust, 1972)

In 1967 Denise Levertov pleaded for the withdrawal of all US troops from Vietnam followed by the penitent presentation to the people of Vietnam, by the US, of huge quantities of food and supplies (‘Writers Take Sides on Vietnam’, in The Poet in the World, 1973). Her freedom to express her dissidence was limited however to publication of little-read poetry and prose; Denise Levertov was not allowed to make the following statement on NBC television, although originally asked to speak: We are living at war: the shame and horror of being citizens of the country which, in its ruthless imperialism, is not only ravaging Southeast Asia, but, with its military bases, its Polaris submarines, the machinations of its CIA, and the tentacles of its giant corporations, is everywhere the prime force of anti-life and oppression – this shame and horror cast their shadow over all we say, feel, and do. (‘Statement for a Television Program’, 1972, in The Poet in the World)

Denise Levertov continued to be a front-line political protester, warning Americans against the material and psychological preparations for World War III. Her ‘Speech for an Antidraft Rally, DC, 22 March 1980’, sobbed with the fierceness of her outrage and irony as she insisted on telling her listeners what she knew the majority of Americans simply do not want to see: ‘Bomb Tehran’ – ‘Bomb Moscow’ I heard them say. Ach! They’re the same ones, male and female, who ask, Which came first, Vietnam or Korea? What was My Lai? The same kids who think Ayatollah Khomeini’s a, quote, ‘Commie’. Who think World War Two was fought against, quote, ‘Reds’, namely Hitler and some Japs. No violence they’ve seen on the flickering living-room screen familiar since infancy

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248 | Part Three or the movies of adolescent dates . . . None of that spoon-fed violence prepares them. The disgusting horror of war eludes them. They think they would die for something they call America vague, as true dreams are not; something they call freedom, the Free World . . . Great. They don’t know that’s not enough, they don’t know ass from elbow, blood from ketchup, that knowledge is kept from them, they’ve been taught to assume if there’s a war there’s also a future, they know, not only nothing, in their criminally neglected imaginations, about the way war always meant not only dying but killing not only killing but seeing not only your buddy dying but your buddy in the act of killing, not nice, not only your buddy killing but the dying of those you killed yourself, not always quick, and not always soldiers. Yes, not only do draft-age people mostly not know how that kind of war’s become almost a pastoral compared to new war, the kind in which they may find themselves . . . . . . but also they know nothing at all about radiation nothing at all about lasers nothing at all about the bombs the Pentagon sits on like some grotesque chicken caged in its nest and fed cancerous hormones, exceed and exceed and exceed Hiroshima, over and over and over, in weight in power in horror of genocide. When they say ‘If there’s a war, I’ll go,’ they don’t know they would be going to kill

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American Visionaries | 249 themselves their mamas and papas brothers and sisters lovers. When they say, ‘If there’s a war, I’ll get pregnant,’ they don’t seem to know that war could destroy that baby. When they say, ‘I’d like to fight,’ for quote, ‘freedom’, for quote, the ‘Free World,’ for quote, ‘America’ . . . . . . they don’t know they’d be fighting very briefly, very successfully, quite conclusively, for the destruction of this small lurching planet, this confused lump of rock and soil, ocean and air, on which our songs, cathedrals, gestures of faith and splendour have grown like delicate moss, and now may or may not survive the heavy footsteps of our inexcusable ignorance the chemical sprays of our rapacious idiocy, our minds that are big enough to imagine love, imagine peace, imagine community – but may not be big enough to learn in time how to say no. (From Candles in Babylon, 1982)

What Denise Levertov dreaded was going to happen to our world because of our ‘criminally neglected imaginations’, visually spoonfed since birth on unreal, televisual violence, she expressed, ‘seer-like’ in the form of a prophetic fable: Once a woman went into the woods, The birds were silent. Why? she said. Thunder’s coming. She walked on, and the trees were dark and rustled their leaves. Why? she said. The great storm, they told her, the great storm is coming. She came to the river, it rushed by

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250 | Part Three without reply, she crossed the bridge, she began to climb up to the ridge where grey rocks bleach themselves, waiting for crack of doom, and the hermit had his hut, the wise man who had lived since time began. When she came to the hut there was no one. But she heard his axe. She heard the listening forest. She dared not follow the sound of the axe. Was it the world–tree he was felling? Was this the day? (‘Sound of the Axe’, from Candles in Babylon, 1982)

The ‘wise man’ is, one assumes, an ironic reference to all the all-too clever men now alive who have rationalized mega-death, making it both technically feasible and politically legitimate. Why ‘hermit’? Does the word invoke connotations of ‘hermetically sealed off’ from the ordinary and human? In an earlier poem, Denise Levertov had already expressed her horror at the diabolic misuse of ‘masculine’ intelligence by a few brilliant men: Smart bombs replace dumb bombs . . . the smartest boys, obedient to all the rules, who never aimed any flying objects across the classroom, now are busy with finely calibrated equipment fashioning spit-balls with needles in them, that fly at the speed of light multiplied around corners and into tunnels to arrive directly at the dumb perfection of living targets, icily into warm wholeness to fragment it. (‘May our Right Hands Lose their Cunning’, from The Freeing of the Dust, 1975)

Traditionally in folk-tales the hermit or wise man has gnomic answers to life’s problems and directs the troubled hero or heroine on to the true moral path; but our imaginatively blind smartest boys-turned-hermit will, unless stopped in time, take their axes to our whole world-tree. Denise Levertov does not, it should be stressed, single out men as being the sole source of the world’s war-evil. In her Anti-draft Rally speech, she indicts

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American Visionaries | 251 all those young Americans, whether male or female, who are high on mindless patriotism, and, like Muriel Rukeyser, she reaches out to men as well as to women in the struggle before us.

Sharon Olds 1942– More recently, the poet Sharon Olds has also imagined ‘it’ – only in her case not if it happens but when, in the poem she calls ‘When’: I wonder now only when it will happen, when the young mother will hear the noise like somebody’s pressure cooker down the block, going off. She’ll go out into the yard, and there, above the end of the street, in the air above the line of the trees, she will see it rising, lifting up over our horizon, the upper rim of the gold ball, large as a giant planet, starting to lift up over ours. She will stand there in the yard holding her daughter, looking at it rise and glow and blossom and rise, and the child will open her arms to it, it will look so beautiful.32

Sharon Olds’s collections of poetry (Satan Says, The Dead and the Living, The Gold Cell) have two areas of near-obsession – the war to the death within the family and the wars to the death in the world outside. War between parents, between children, between parents and children – in poem after poem Sharon Olds breaks through the taboo concealing these shameful facts of family life. And gradually the reader makes connections between one kind of war and another. The almost unbearably painful poems in Part I of The Dead and the Living, for example, are divided into two sections ‘Public’ and ‘Private’. The public poems make us see, really see, some loathsome twentieth-century photographs – condemned prisoners in China in 1905, suspended on made-to-measure wooden crosses as they await execution; Russian and Armenian children either dying or just dead of starvation in 1921; political prisoners in the Iran and Chile of the 1980s to whom ‘things that are worse than death’ have just been done; a mother of a (bayoneted) newborn baby in Rhodesia in 1978, the mother’s face: beaten and beaten into the shape of a plant, a cactus with grey spines and broad

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252 | Part Three dark maroon blooms . . . Don’t speak to me about politics, I’ve got eyes, man. (‘The Issues’)33

For those with eyes, ‘politics’ cannot even begin to legitimate atrocity, ever. But you’ve got to have eyes. The private world, however, was no compensatory haven for Sharon Olds. ‘What went on at home/ I couldn’t bear to see’ (‘The Indispensability of Eyes’, from Satan Says). Cruelty had a human face in the form of her sadistic, boozing father and a mother who had to put herself first. She had to do whatever he told her to do to the children; she had to protect herself. (‘The Forms’)34

Sharon Olds was therefore conscripted as a ‘student of war’ when very young. She quickly learned that real dictatorship and real torture can exist inside the home. She learned to hate, and she also learned how cruelty can corrupt people, through fear, in private just as it does in public. Indeed she came to see that this very cruelty in the family is one root cause of the mega-cruelty in the world outside. Family life of one sort or another produces all the damaged people on earth – both those able to inflict the horrors and those who, cowed, acquiesce in that infliction. The unjustly punished son: When he cools off and comes out of that door will not be the same child who ran in and slammed it . . . The long impurification has begun this morning. (‘The Unjustly Punished Child’)35

If the times are right, the brutalized son of a bullying parent may even grow up to be a Camp Guard (‘That Year’, from Satan Says). For ‘the child hit in the face over and over [presages] the end of the world’ (‘Geography’ from The Gold Cell). Sharon Olds agrees with the psychotherapist Alice Miller that ‘the need to commit murder’ – even on a world scale – ‘is the outcome of a tragic childhood . . . every persecutor was once a victim.’36 As for Sharon Olds herself, she confesses painfully:

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American Visionaries | 253 I have never thought I could take it, not even for the children. It is all I have wanted to do, to stand between them and pain. But I come from a long line of women who put themselves first. (‘The Fear of Oneself’)37

Thus this poet is someone for whom the worst will happen – ‘I wonder now only when it will happen’ – because it already has happened, has been done to her over and over again and has infected her in her turn. One reason why Sharon Olds is so certain at times that there is no hope for us is suggested in the poem ‘Rite of Passage’ about her six-year-old son’s birthday party. All the little boys there have already been successfully socialized by family life, television and the school playground into accepting the age-old virility test for males. Readiness to kill is their ‘Rite of Passage’. As the guests arrive at my son’s party they gather in the living room, short men, men in first grade with smooth jaws and chins Hands in pockets, they stand around jostling, jockeying for place, small fights breaking out and calming. One says to another How old are you? Six. I’m seven. So? They eye each other, seeing themselves tiny in the other’s pupils. They clear their throats a lot, a room of small bankers, they fold their arms and frown. I could beat you up, a seven says to a six, the dark cake, round and heavy as a turret, behind them on the table. My son, freckles like specks of nutmeg on his cheeks, chest narrow as the balsa keel of a model boat, long hands cool and thin as the day they guided him out of me, speaks up as a host for the sake of the group. We could easily kill a two-year-old, he says in his clear voice. The other men agree, they clear their throats like Generals, they relax and get down to playing war, celebrating my son’s life.38

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254 | Part Three But Sharon Olds despaired too soon. The distorted masculinity of readiness to kill is not the whole truth about Gabriel Olds. He is also a compassionate would-be life preserver, able to put himself into another’s shoes and feel an urgent wish to feed the hungry other – as his mother herself testifies: Every time we take the bus my son sees the picture of the missing boy. He looks at it like a mirror – the dark blond hair, the pale skin, the blue eyes, the electric-blue sneakers with slashes of jagged gold. But of course that kid is little, only six and a half, an age when things can happen to you, when you’re not really safe, and Gabriel is seven, practically fully grown – why, he would tower over that kid if they could find him and bring him right here on this bus and stand them together. He sways in the silence wishing for that, the tape on the picture gleaming over his head, beginning to melt at the centre and curl at the edges as it ages. At night when I put him to bed my son holds my hand tight and says he’s sure that kid’s all right, nothing to worry about, he just hopes he’s getting the food he likes, not just any old food, but the food he likes most, the food he is used to. (‘The Missing Boy’)39

So recovery is possible – not just survival but resurrection. Hurting and killing do not have to have the last word, there are also love, birth, desire, and the rebirth of the capacity for pity with each new generation. It seems a very long way from the purity of idealistic vision that streamed from blind Helen Keller to the unblinking focus on deliberate torture, so often found in Sharon Olds. Both women abhor cruelty but perhaps there was an unquenchable optimism still possible to someone born in 1880 unattainable to someone born in 1942. Sharon Olds does not finally leave us with no hope at all, however. She, like Muriel Rukeyser and Denise Levertov, feels a Helen Keller-like outrush of pity for all victims and she insists that there are still two paths for us to choose between:

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American Visionaries | 255 All I can do is tell about it, say This is the human, the clippers, the iron – and This is the human, the hand, the milk, all I can do is point out the two paths, we can go down either. (‘The Paths’)40

Notes 1 Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War, Basic Books, 1987, Part II, ch. 5. 2 One other recent writer who has not overlooked Helen Keller’s radical political thought but concentrated on it is Philip S. Foner in his anthology, Helen Keller: Her Socialist Years, International Publishers, 1967. 3 Joseph Lash, Helen and Teacher, Penguin, 1981, ch. 27, quoting Will Cressy. 4 Ibid., ch. 25. 5 Van Wyck Brooks, Helen Keller, Dent, 1956, ch. 4. 6 Emma Goldman, Living My Life, Pluto Press, 1987, vol. 2, ch. 47. 7 Helen Keller, Journal, Michael Joseph, 1938, entry for 21 December 1936. 8 Brooks, Helen Keller, ch. 6. 9 Lash, Helen and Teacher, ch. 16. 10 Helen Keller, Midstream: My Later Life, Hodder & Stoughton, 1929, ch. 11. 11 Quoted in Philip Foner, Helen Keller. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Lash, Helen and Teacher, ch. 23. 15 Keller, Midstream, ch. 11. 16 Lash, Helen and Teacher, ch. 25. 17 Cf. her letter at this time to Emma Goldman, then under sentence of imprisonment for her stand against conscription: ‘Believe me, my very heart-pulse is in the revolution that is to inaugurate a freer, happier society.’ Quoted by Emma Goldman in Living My Life. 18 Lash, Helen and Teacher, ch. 27. 19 Article in the New Leader, in Foner, Helen Keller. 20 Helen Keller, Journal. 21 Letter from Helen Keller, in 1940, quoted by Lash, Helen and Teacher, ch. 37. 22 Brooks, Helen Keller, ch. 11. 23 Lash, Helen and Teacher, ch. 37. 24 Ibid., ch. 38. 25 Ibid., ch. 41, quoting Nella Braddy Henney. 26 All Denise Levertov’s poetry quoted in this chapter is published by New Directions, New York. 27 ‘There are queues now to get into Auschwitz, Dachau, Mauthausen, Buchenwald and the rest and there is great demand for memorabilia and souvenirs of the holocaust’, Michael Simmons, Guardian, 16 July 1988. 28 Denise Levertov, ‘A Testament’, in The Poet and the World, New Directions, 1973, pp. 3–5; ‘By shock I meant the invention of sadistic images (as if competitively!) when life already presented so many real instances of pain and cruelty.’

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256 | Part Three 29 Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802. 30 Elaine Hedges and Ingrid Wendt (eds.), In Her Own Image: Women Working in the Arts, Feminist Press, NY, 1980, Part IV, p. 240. 31 Muriel Rukeyser, note to section 5 of her poem ‘Waterlily Fire’ in the volume of the same name, 1963. All Muriel Rukeyser’s poems can be found in her Collected Poems, McGraw-Hill/Random House, 1982. 32 From Sharon Olds, The Gold Cell, Knopf, 1987. 33 From Sharon Olds, The Dead and the Living, Knopf, 1984. 34 Ibid. 35 From Sharon Olds, Satan Says, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980. 36 Alice Miller, For your Own Good: The Roots of Violence in Childrearing, first published 1980, republished Virago, 1987, pp. 195 and 249. 37 The Dead and the Living. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Published in Jim Schley (ed.), Writing in a Nuclear Age, University Press of New England, 1984.

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CHAPTER

21 Righteous Violence – War in the Family, War in the World Governments declare war; their citizens, bonded in families, always consent to wage and endure them. Why? At first sight the most important connection between the family and war – those two characteristically human institutions – is the instinct to defend hearth and home. One nation’s young parents fight another nation’s young parents to defend their respective young. So is it personal love that lies at the root of impersonal mass-hate? Or could there be something wrong with this love, as William Blake asked over two hundred years ago: Is this thy soft Family Love? / Thy Cruel Patriarchal Pride – Planting thy Family alone, / Destroying all the World beside?1

Some wars clearly do have a quasi-rational, territorial imperative – on both sides – as each group of belligerents wholeheartedly believes it is fighting for Lebensraum for its own children. But there are many other wars, especially, ‘Crusades’, ‘Jihads’, Civil Wars, and, I fear, the next World War – ‘omnicidal’, nuclear, total – which are not so rationally explicable as tribal territorial conflicts over land, water, or oil, for economic survival or else dominance. These other wars, usually the most implacable, gruesomely savage and long drawn-out on record, may have their roots, I have now come to think, in the irrational soil of the human psyche. And our failure to see this leads us to perpetuate fanatical rationalizations which then remain immune to reason. The first half of this essay will try to penetrate this irrational darkness within us, diagnose the sickness whose terrible symptom is the present and future threat to incinerate one another’s children, obliterating almost all life on earth (though not, thanks to the properties of the neutron bomb, Unpublished conference paper for the Triennial Congress of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; drafted April 1980 and updated.

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258 | Part Three all inanimate matter.) The second half of the essay will attempt to find some hope in our common plight.

PART ONE ‘Those I fight I do not hate;/ Those I guard I do not love.’ (W.B. Yeats, ‘An Irish Airman foresees his death’, 1916)

‘But I will punish home . . . Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill,’ (Shakespeare, King Lear)

The most clearly irrational, because so clearly self-contradictory, aspect of war is its righteous cruelty. Evil is now good. Killing suddenly becomes an act of justice, a meritorious duty, and not a crime. Our nuclear missile will be fired by Britannia’s patriotic ‘Trident’. So that’s alright then – murder is not murder if it is just revenge, or protection of one’s nearest and dearest. I remember a scene in Bill Douglas’ painful film My Childhood. It is 1945; a family huddles in a makeshift air-raid shelter, then gathers up shawls and blankets as the All Clear sounds; two little boys return home to find that one boy’s cat has killed the other boy’s canary. The outraged canary-owner, despite his younger brother’s struggles and screams, batters the pet cat to death. Righteous murder in the bombing raid, righteous murder in the home. Beware humans. With what rectitude did President Carter and Mrs. Thatcher once castigate the expansionist thuggery of the Soviet Union and its persecution of its own dissident citizens. And how righteously the Soviet Union answered back: “Chile!”, “Vietnam!” and pointed out the West’s failure to satisfy the human right to work. And how morally superior are Israel and Iran to one another now. The politicians’ moral outrage, whether assumed or genuine, serves to legitimate their more material, power-hungry imperatives, allowing them to arm for and to threaten mass-murder – ‘mass-destruction’- which they all claim to abhor. International politics bears an uncanny resemblance to that most primitive and infantile of playground games – ‘Goodies versus Baddies’. Only in the adult version there is no agreement beforehand as to who is playing which rôle. And because ‘They’ are believed to be capable of every imaginable atrocity, ‘We’ must show ourselves equally prepared. Thus the one-time British Defence Minister, Francis Pym, looked into the feasibility of arming us with chemical weapons, including that efficient human pesticide, nerve gas. Truly ‘our righteousness is as filthy rags’ – as Luther once said. And we ‘little people’ who are not the powerful decision-makers? Immersed in our private worlds of family (and jobs) we would seem to have no relation at all to the ‘big’ world outside with its simplistic aggres-

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Righteous Violence | 259 sion and counter-aggression. But this un-relatedness or ‘alienation’ is only apparent. In fact, of course, we do all live simultaneously both a private life and a public one – we are the citizens of the world in our time – there aren’t any others. Our apparent impotence, I now in my darkest moments believe, is really collusive acquiescence and thus legitimates what is done or threatened to be done in our name by national leaders claiming to champion our ‘vital interests’. For if we had really, whole-heartedly, abominated total war, would we not have insisted, long ago, on seeing all weapons of mass-extermination sent to the bed of the sea? So why do we passively acquiesce? Why, even when we sincerely deplore all militarism, is our peace witness quite so ineffectual? I have come to think that our acquiescence in our leaders’ lunatic ‘preparedness’ and our peace witness fatigue, far from being totally unrelated to our private lives, may in fact actually be caused by our private experience. At first sight there seems to be a total, crazy contradiction between our personal morality and our collective immorality. In every family on earth, parents tell their children “Don’t hurt!” and “You have to share!” Yet every nation feels justified, even compelled, not to share but to compete and hurt, to compete in hurting. And almost every family goes along with that. How strange and inexplicable. – Or is it? For is it not all too often the case that we have, each of us, felt nearmurderous anger at some time – especially towards some in our own families? Who has not known the sickening feeling of righteous – but forbidden – hatred as we sob to ourselves: “A saint would find her unbearable.” Or “He made me so mad I had to lash out at him.” For every actual suicide, domestic murder, divorce or battered child there are countless instances of suicide, murder, divorce or battering committed within our hearts. Adrienne Rich dared to penetrate this in her chapter ‘Violence, the maternal heart of darkness’ in her searing book Of Woman Born . Every family on earth wants to be a ‘happy family’, harmonious, reassuring, kind. But every family fails – a lot of the time. For although love within the family is real, so are the frequent failures to love.1 And, as Virginia Woolf said in Mrs. Dalloway: ‘failure one conceals.’ Therefore each adult, fearing that his or hers is the only failure, goes through the day bearing a burden of guilt. And real guilt is unbearable – it has to be transferred to someone else’s shoulders. How helpful, then, to have a group who deserve to be hated, a faceless ‘enemy’ always in the wings. One thinks of that very decent, humane man, George Orwell, who had to have a ‘Fascist’ to fight against in Spain, but who, in the event, could only find at the receiving end of his anarchist grenades and gun, some illiterate, hungry peasant boys conscripted by Franco, or else

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260 | Part Three equally hungry Communist Party workers in the streets of Barcelona. Hating within the family is both a rehearsal for hating ‘the enemy’ outside, and, since it has to be repressed, a subconscious reservoir of suppressed aggression, ready to pour at any time. How else could we in the West have switched quite so swiftly in 1945/6 from hating Germans to hating Russians? How else could the Germans themselves have managed to see one another as ‘the enemy’ for so long on each side of a wall? How could North and South Koreans still maintain so petrified an adversarial posture? Or Shia fight Sunni off and on for centuries throughout the Muslim world? Multiply our own imperfect, un-ideal, conflict-ridden families five thousand million times – can we now begin to see why so many unhappy humans are always ready to answer the call and slay the dragon of the other side, killing people whose very names we do not know and whose faces we cannot see? Better in this case to slay the devil you don’t know rather than the devil you do! Better, because so very much more comforting, to play out that old infantile rôle of ‘Goodie’ versus ‘Baddie’, rather than acknowledge our real part in the universal play: the all too fallible hurter of our own nearest and dearest. Not protective family love, but failure at family love, may be the root of irrational war. What would I give for a heart of flesh to warm me through? Instead of a heart of stone, ice cold whatever I do. Hard and cold and small Of all hearts the worst of all. (Christina Rossetti, ‘What would I give’)

And why are we so quiescent and ever-ready to collude with that other prospect in war time – not killing, but being killed? Could the prospect of being wiped out in the end of the world be secretly felt as a relief – the ultimate insurance policy, guaranteed to erase both the memory and the consequences of our private failures to be the husband/wife/mother/ father/child/friend we once imagined that we would be? Is there any reason, we subconsciously feel, why sentence of death should not be passed upon us? As tame H Bomb and Neutron Bomb fodder, we have pretty clearly passed that sentence on ourselves already. Our un-ideal past and present cause us to despair, and tempt us to make future irreparable mistakes towards those closest to us impossible. The First World War convinced Freud that our Will-to-Death is stronger even than our libido (Civilization and its Discontents). Within the Family

In the World Outside

Emotional Failure – Guilt – Despair

Kill – and be – Killed

How nihilistic can you get, Sybil?

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Righteous Violence | 261

PART TWO ‘In the destructive element immerse.’ (Conrad, Lord Jim ) In the first part of this essay I opened up the taboo subject of our emotional failures in the family where our children quarrel in apparently unappeasable jealousy or our marriages founder in the competition for emotional space. But although a final war to end all wars – and all life – may seem, subconsciously, to be a solution to the problem of human conflict, it is clearly not the best solution. Perhaps the ultimate cause of our temptation to despair and die is our very idealism – we so badly want to be good we cannot bear our badness. But it would be perverse to expiate the guilt of our suppressed violence at home by acquiescing in actual mass-murder abroad. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for my kids” must not be translated into: “There’s no crime, including child-killing, I wouldn’t commit, to save my children – (and distract me from confronting my failures with them.)” It is for our children’s sakes that there must be some crimes we cannot commit; they don’t want monsters for parents. Shaw said: “I have no enemies under seven.” But it is the under sevens of the world who, today, are in the front line; our ‘enemy’s’ children whom we must protect from ourselves, saving the world’s children from the grown-ups. What have our private failures taught us? Is there anything that we have learned from being our un-ideal married/parent selves that we can relate to this urgent problem of living together in the world? Like Socrates, we parents have learned that we are fools. Time and again we have understood, if too late, what it was that were doing wrong in the family. But that very realization of inadequacy and error is our wisdom. We who know we are fools are wiser than our leaders who claim a monopoly in ‘realism’ and rectitude. We should be too grown-up to join in their lethal kids’ game of Goodies versus Baddies in the world playground. We know, on our pulses, that what is most deeply true of our own experience of marriage and parenthood – the anxiety, the exhaustion, the exasperation, the amusement, the tenderness, the remorse – is precisely what is most deeply true of the experience of marriage and parenthood the world over. We bear the same stigmata. We are all Goodies-andBaddies every single day. And somehow we must see that feelingly before it is too late. ‘All that brings out the significant resemblances between men’ wrote Freud to Einstein in September 1932 ‘must serve as our antidote to war.’2 We family-dwellers know one hell of a lot about conflict. But in so far as our families have survived, we also know a lot about anticipating and defusing conflict: “No sharp sticks in the car! You could put each other’s eyes out!” “No need to grab, there’s enough to go round for every-one.”

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262 | Part Three “I know he broke your Lego but you can make your Lego again; you can’t make him another eye!” “If all you can do is fight, then separate!” “Take turns!” “Who’d like to stop argy-bargying and come with me to the woods?” And after the row is over, there are the necessary healing rituals of ‘making-up’. Is it so impossible to transfer parenting skills from the family to the world? What I have written I have written in the belief that I am not alone. But we shall only be able to bear one another’s burdens, and above all the burden of our collective propensity to the righteous violence of war, if we confess that we do carry a burden in the first place. What is that burden but deep emotional damage? Damaged ourselves, we inflict damage in our turn. May it not be irreparable! As Unamuno wrote in The Tragic Sense of Life: I am convinced that we should solve many things if we all went out into the streets and uncovered our griefs, which perhaps would prove to be but one sole common grief, . . . A miserere sung in common by a multitude tormented by destiny has as much value as a philosophy. It is not enough to cure the plague: we must learn to weep for it. Yes, we must learn to weep!

Notes 1 The world’s literature overflows with examples of catastrophic, destructive failures to love within the family – Cain versus Abel, Isaac versus Ishmael, Jacob versus Esau, Joseph and his brothers, David and Absalom in the Old Testament; while in Greek mythology and tragedy the recurrent subjects are infanticide, parricide and matricide in the Theban plays, or in the House of Atreus’ Oresteia or in Medea; and in Hindu literature we have the Pandavas versus the Kauravas in the Mahabharata. In Shakespeare, Lear is tortured by two of his daughters, Gloucester by one of his sons and Hamlet is caught in the net of his stepfather/uncle and mother in Elsinore. In modern tragedy there are the dreadful families of Ibsen, Strindberg, O’Neill and Arthur Miller, all bearing out Larkin’s ‘This be the verse’ – ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad/ . . . But they were fucked up in their turn . . . ’ Finally, there is Sharon Olds’ poetry, discussed in the chapter above, where she traces a causal connection between damaging cruelty within the family and mega cruelty – ‘mass-destruction’ – in the world. 2 Nathan and Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace, Avenel Books, New York, 1981, p. 199.

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Index Abegg, Elisabeth, 188 Adam, Dr. Margarethe, 182 Addams, Jane ,2, 94, 124, 130–142, 187, 237 Africa (esp. women’s rights in), 106, 107, 108, 153, 163, 211, 222, 226–227, 242, 251–252; and see Algeria; Kenya; South Africa Age of consent for girls, 80–81, 101–109 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 258 Akehurst, Mary, 12 Alain (Emile-auguste Chartier), 144, 162 Algeria, 106, 153 American Independence, 6, 16–17 Anarchists, Spanish, 148, 162 Andreas, Ruth, 188 Angell, Norman, 131 Angermeier, Frau, 188 Anglicanism, 10, 13, 16 Anouilh, Jean, 168 Antigone, 147, 157, 160, 165–176, 196, 205, 206, 211, 216–217, 219 Anti-Semitism, 151, 239 Arab girls, rights of, 103, 108 Argentina, women’s rights in, 80, 86 Aristotle, 208 Armenians, 222, 251 Ashton, Margaret, 115, 225 Augspurg, Anita, 181, 194 Aurelius, Marcus, 160 Australia, women’s rights in, 80, 81, 83, 91 Austro-Hungary, including Bohemia, Rumania, Serbia, 80, 85, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 135 Bach, J.S., 160, 203, 222 Balch, Emily, 94, 95, 124, 133, 142 Barclay, Robert, 12, 17 Barnett, Henrietta, 115, 116 Basque refugees, 103, 227 Baxter, Richard, 9

Barnardo, Dr., 77, 79 Beek, Cato Bonties van, 190 Beicht, Martha, 188 Belgian refugees, 122–123 Belgium (esp. incl. women’s rights in), 80, 90, 91, 92, 226, 231 Belize, 106 Bell, Bishop, 231 Bell, Julia, 115 Berkowitz, Liane, 190 Bernanos, Georges, 148, 151, 162 Besse, Joseph, 11,12, 13, 14–15, 16, 20, 21, 65 Biography, 1, 2, 60, 65–66, 67, 220–229 Birth control, 228–229 Bismarck, Prince Otto von, 122, 137, 155, 158, 159, 217 Blake, William, 28–34, 45, 174, 257 Blaykling, Ann, 12, 20 Boer War, 124, 128, 222, 227; and see South Africa Bodichon, Barbara, 1, 64, 68–75 Bonham-Carter, Violet, 185, 226 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 211 Borelli, Lydia, 188 Brecht, Bertolt, 146, 162, 169 British Women Humanitarians (1900– 1950), 225–229 Brittain, Vera, 226, 230–232 Brockdorff, Erika, Countess von, 189, 193 Brontë, Charlotte, 64, 68 Buch, Eva, 190 Bulgaria, women’s rights in, 80 Bullestrem-Solf, Countess, 188 Bunyan, John, 9 Burke, Edmund, 6, 23, 33 Burma, women’s rights in, 87, 88 Burns, Robert, 29, 33 Buxton, Dorothy, 116, 226 Cammens, Mina, 181 Camus, Albert, 143 Canada, women’s rights in, 80, 83

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264 | Index Capital Punishment, 9, 17, 24, 53, 55, 226 Carpenter, Mary, 64, 66, 72 Carter, President, 258 Case, Janet, 169–170, 172, 175 Catholic Church, 106 Catt, Carrie Chapman, 87–88, 99 Charles II, 8, 9, 15, 17 Chekhov, Anton, 52–53 Chesterton, Cecil, 128 Chew, Ada Nield, 14, 124 Chile, 228, 243, 251, 258 China, incl. women’s rights in, 80, 86, 87, 89, 222, 223, 225, 251 Christ, Jesus, 6, 17,140, 161, 210 213, 209, 215 Christianity, 5, 6–7, 8, 10, 13, 17–20, 39, 64, 120, 189, 204, 208, 213, 225 Churchill, Winston, 94, 105, 133, 231 Civil Defence, 145 Civil Liberty, 11, 12, 144 Civil Service, women in, 76, 78 Civil War, English, 7, 8 Clark, Alice, 115 Clark, Dr. Hilda, 98, 226 Claudel, Paul, 198 Clemenceau, Georges, 122 Cobbett, William 22, 35, 41, 42, 49–50, 55 Coate, Winifred, 224, 226 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 23, 24, 33–34 Collins, Beatrice, 115 Colonial imperialism, 101–103, 105, 106, 107, 108–109, 153, 163, 223 Communists, 137, 143, 149, 177,179, 181, 183, 184–185, 190, 192–193, 195, 245 Concentration camps, 116, 183, 197, 216, 222, 225, 227–229, 255; and see Ravensbrück Condorcet, Marquis de, 6, 39 Congo, Belgian, 222, 224 Conrad, Joseph, 261 Conscientious Objectors, 123; and see No Conscription Fellowship; Pacifism Cooper, Selina, 114,124, 226 Coppi, Hilde, 190 Courtney, Kate (Lady Courtney of Penwith), 116, 122, 123, 124, 126, 226

Courtney, Kathleen (later Dame), 115, 226 Cromwell, Oliver, 8, 10 Czechoslovakia, 151, 163, 228; and see Bohemia under Austro-Hungary Daladier, Edouard, 151 Davies, Emily, 73, 74 Davies, Margaret, Llewelyn, 115, 170–171, 226 Debs, Eugene, 236, 238, De Gaulle, Charles, 143, 157 Despard, Charlotte, 82, 94, 114, 226 Dickens, Charles, 1, 36, 47–55 Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), 62, 65, 67 Diener, Lore, 189 Dos Passos, John, 238 Doty, Madeleine, 133 Douglas, Bill, 258 Duncombe, Samuel, 14, 15 Edgell, Zee, 106, 109 Egypt (incl. women’s rights in), 80, 86, 87, 88, 227–228 Einstein, Albert, 2, 239, 261, 262 Ellis, Marian (later Lady Parmoor), 120, 123, 124, 226 Eliot, George, 64, 77, 78 79, 81–82, 175 Eliot, T. S., 143, 162 Emecheta, Buchi, 106, 108 Ender, Emmy, 180 Engels, Friedrich, 50, 55 Evans, Dorothy, 115 Evans, Elizabeth Glendower, 133 Family Allowances, 101–102, 107, 228 Fascism, 139, 146, 147, 149, 151–152, 153, 164, 172–173, 174, 183, 207, 222, 230 Fawcett, Millicent, 64, 92, 93, 95, 96, 98, 100, 115 Fell, Margaret, 8–9, 11, 12 Fellowship of Reconciliation, 227 Female circumcision, 107, 227 Feminism, 61, 63–64, 67, 70, 74, 75, 80–100, 101, 102, 139, 178, 181, 193, 220, 224, 225–229 Fight the Famine Council, 122, 124, 226 Flaubert, Gustave, 163 Fostering and adoption, 77, 79 Fox, George, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

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Index | 265 France, incl. women’s rights in, 80, 84–85, 90, 91, 95, 127, 143–164, 199–200, 205, 240 Franco, General, 103, 147, 220, 259, Franco-Prussian War, 77, 163 Fraser, Marjorie Kennedy, 115 French Revolution, 17, 18, 24, 30, 33, 34, 45, 148 Freud, Sigmund, 2, 65, 175, 223, 260, 261 Friedrich, Karin, 188 Fry, Elizabeth, 64, 66, 69 Fry, Joan, 122, 123, 124, 125, 227 Fry, Margery, 227 Fry, Ruth, 124, 227 Galen, Bishop von, 189, 204, 218 Gandhi, Mahatma, 105, 108 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 65, 68 Germany,incl. women’s rights in, 80, 81, 84, 91, 92, 93, 95, 98, 103, 118–119, 122, 127, 128, 129, 135,137, 151–152, 163, 177–195, 196–219, 198, 222–223, 227, 229, 231, 239, 240, 260 Giese, Therese, 181 Gislaria, Sister, 189 Godwin, William, 35, 41 Goebbels, Joseph, 182, 187, 192, 211, 220 Goethe, Johann von, 192, 217 Goldman, Emma, 234–235, 241, 255 Gore-Booth, Eva, 114 Graf, Willi, 205, 218 Great Britain, women’s rights in, 80, 81, 82, 90; and see Fawcett and Women’s Suffrage Greece, incl. women’s rights in, 80, 222, 226, 228, 231, 240, 243 Greek Tragedy, 117, 165–176, 262 Greenham Protest Camp, 124, Haag, Anna, ii, 194 Haag, Lina, 181, 182, 183–184, 193, 194 Haecker, Theodore, 208, 213, 218 Hague Women’s International Congress (1915), 94–95, 113–117, 121, 127, 133–135, 141, 222 Hallgarten, Constanze, 179, 181 Hamburg White Rose, 190, 195, 216, 219 Hamilton, Dr. Alice, 133, 134, 142

Hamilton, Molly, 115 Handel, Georg Friedrich, 203 Hardcastle, Frances, 115 Harmsworth, Lord, 128 Harnack, Arvid and Falk, 190, 195, 211 Harris, Alice and John, 224, 227 Hartnagel, Fritz, 198–202, 203, 205, 209–211, 217 Hazlitt, William, 1, 19, 20, 29, 33, 34, 35–47, 53, 55 Hegel, G. W. F., 147, 168, 175 Heilans, Alison, 115 Heine, Heinrich, 192, 197 Herrmann, Liselotte, 185, 193 Heymann, Lida Gustava, 94, 95, 133, 180, 181, 194 Hill, Octavia, 76, 79 Hirohito, Emperor, 220 Hitler, Adolf, 1, 122, 128, 143, 146, 149–150, 152–154, 156, 159–160, 164, 174, 177, 180–183, 185–187, 189–191, 193, 195–197, 202, 204, 207, 211–214, 218, 220, 222, 230, 239, 240, 247 Hobbes, Thomas, 5, 131, 141 Hobhouse, Emily, 114, 116, 224, 227 Hobhouse, L.T., 126 Hoevel, Anneliese, 190 Hölderlin, J.C.F., 168, 210 Holiday, Winifred, 115 Homer and The Iliad, 148, 149, 155–156, 160, 161, 164 Hong Kong, 103, 223, Howgill, Francis, 9, 12 Hubberthorn, Richard, 11, 12, 26 Huber, Professor, 211, 213–214 Huch, Ricarda, 182, 195, 218–219 Huddleston, Father Trevor, 224 Hughes, Mary, 116, 227 Human Rights, UN Charter, 1, 23, 140; and see UNIFEM Humanitarians, British women, 220–229 Ibsen, Hendrik, 262 Independent Labour Party (ILP), 118 India (incl. women’s rights in), 80, 86, 87, 88, 101–109, 225–227, 229 Indo-China, French, 153 International Court at The Hague, 126 International Women’s Suffrage Association (IWSA), 80–100, 117, 130

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266 | Index Iran, 106, 251 Ireland, 80, 90, 170, 228 Islam, 90, 107, 260 Italy (incl. women’s rights in), 80, 85–86, 90, 211, 240 Ius Suffragii, 80–99 Jacob, Johanna, 182 Jacobs, Dr. Aletta, 84, 94, 98, 113, 116, 123,133, 134 James, Epistle of, 6, 7, 10, 11, 17, 204, 218 Japan (incl. women’s rights in), 80, 88, 136, 222, 240–241 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 185, 189 Jewish Refugees, 103, 224, 227, 231 Jews (French), 151, 222, 227, 231 Jews (German), 173, 178,180, 183, 185–189, 194, 213, 222, 230 Jews (Polish), 191, 206, 222 Jews (Russian), 202, 222 Joachim, Maud, 115 Kant, Immanuel, 126 Keller, Helen, 2, 233–242, 245, 254, 255 Kenya, girls’ rights in, 103 Kierkegaard, Søren, 168, 208–9, 218 King, Martin Luther, 140 Knight, Elizabeth Dr., 115 Kollwitz, Käthe, 179, 182, 194 Korea, 124, 222, 243, 247, 260 Kosovo, 129 Kropotkin, Prince Peter, 126 Kunke, Steffi, 184–185 Langgässer, Elisabeth, 188 Larkin, Philip, 262 Lawrence, Susan, 115 League of Nations, 90, 99, 122, 138, 145, 154, 226 Lee, Vernon, 117–120, 122–124, 126, 228 Le Fort, Gertrud von, 182, 194 Lenin, Vladimir, 132, 239 Leopold II, King of Belgium, 220 Lerner, Gerda, 60–61, 66–67 Levertov, Denise, 233, 242–243, 246–251, 254, 255 Liebermann, Max, 182 Little, Alicia, 223, 227 Lucker, Gertrud, 189 Lugebiel, Erna, 188

Luther, Martin, 258 Luxemburg, Rosa, 160, 184, Macaulay, Catherine, 60, 64 MacCarthy, Desmond, 173 McLaren, Eva, 115 Macmillan, Chrystal, 95, 97, 98, 115, 227 Malthus, Thomas, 1, 22, 23, 31, 35–47, 53 Mann, Erika, 179, 181 Mann, Thomas, 182, 198, 216 Marat, Jean Paul, 6, 17 Maritain, Jacques, 198, 204, Marshall, Catherine, 113, 115, 227 Martineau, Harriet, 65, 68 Marx, Karl, 223 Matters, Muriel, 115 Matthaei, Louise (later lady Howard), 115, 176, 227 Maurras, Charles, 158 Mayo, Kathleen, 102, 103, 108, 109 Mayor, F. M., 1, 124 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 138, Medicine, women in, 63, 72, 73, 81, 90, 103–104, 106, 115, 156–157, 225–229 Meikle, Wilma, 116, 124 Mehrtens, Hanne, 192, 193 Midgley, Mary, 38, 46 Mill, John Stuart, 70, 71, 82, Miller, Alice, 252, 256 Miller, Arthur, 262 Mironovitch, Zineide, 86–87 Mitchell, Hannah, 114, 124, 227 Modersohn-Becker, Paula, 198 Montessori , Maria, 151 Morrell, Ottoline, 114 Mussolini, Benedito, 220 Muth, Carl, 208, 218 Nansen, Fridtjof, 138 Napoleon, 6, 45, 158 National Union of Women Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), 82, 94, 96, 115–116 Nazism, see Fascism; Hitler Netanyahu, Benjamin, 258 Netherlands (incl. women’s rights in), 80, 81, 84, 91d, 93, 113–117, 132–133, 198, 205, 231, 240 New Zealand, women’s rights in, 80, 81, 83, 91

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Index | 267 Nightingale, Florence, 65, 69, 72, 76, 78, 79 No Conscription Fellowship, 123, 125 Northcliffe, Lord, 128 Northcote, James, 19, 20 Nuclear disarmament, 227–228, 232, 241 Olds, Sharon, 2, 251–226, 256, 262 O’Neill, Eugene, 262 Orwell, George, 231, 259 Oswenda, Sister, 189 Owen, Robert, 69, 70 Pacifism, 127, 136, 144–145, 146, 147, 148, 151, 153, 173–174, 176, 179, 180, 194, 196, 221, 225–229, 230–232, 234, 240, 241; and see Conscientious Objectors Paget, Lady Muriel, 220, 224, 228 Paine, Thomas, 5–8, 11–14, 16–21, 23, 239 Palestine, 103, 222, 224, 226–228, 231 Pankhurst, Christabel, 119 Pankhurst, Sylvia, 114, 115, 133, 228 Paulilla, Sister, 189 Peace, 2, 8, 19, 24, 83, 90, 91, 97, 98, 119, 120–121, 123, 124, 126, 129, 131–132, 134, 137, 139–140, 144, 153, 154, 230–232, 238, 245; and see Pacifism Peace Council, British National, 124, 126, 127 Peace Pledge Union, 170, 231 Pethick-Lawrence, Emmeline, 114, 133, 227 Pfühl, Ottilie, 190 Pfülpf, Toni, 181 Philippines, women’s rights in, 80, 88 Playne, Caroline, 115, 126–129, 228 Poland (Galicia), 80, 89, 90, 92, 205, 206, 209, 224 Pommer, Frau, 173, 176 Poor Relief in Britain, 40, 45, 76, 77, 115 Portugal, women’s rights in, 80, 86, 90 Probst, Christoph, 205, 218 Pye, Edith, 115, 228 Pym, Francis, 258 Quakers, 1, 6–21, 64, 73,114, 120–121, 123, 124, 127, 222–223, 226–229, 231

Racine, 160 Racism, 153, 181 Raphael, Sister Dorothy, 224 Rathbone, Eleanor, 1, 101–109, 185, 218, 224, 228 Ravensbrück, 183, 188, 189 Reddish, Sarah, 115 Refugees, 221–222, 225–229, 233; and see Basque refugees; Jewish refugees Religion, 5, 6, 10, 13, 17, 18, 24, 32, 70, 88, 141, 172, 198, 204, 220, 225; and see Christianity Remarque, Erich Maria, 192 Rembrandt, 160 Resistance, Preface, 1, 9–10, 11–12, 19, 40, 41, 42, 144, 151, 157, 165–174, 176, 177–195, 196–219 Rhondda, Viscountess, 185 Rich, Adrienne, 259 Richelieu, Cardinal, 158, 164 Robertson, Janet, 115 Romans, Epistle to, 210, 218 Romantics English, 1, 23–34 Roosevelt, Theodore, 133 Rose, Lisbeth, 190 Rosenberg, Alfred, 178 Rossetti, Christina, 260 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 28, 42, 43, 46, 50, 53, 55, 69–70 Rothe, Margarethe, 190, 193, 216 Royden, Maude, 94, 98, 114, 115, 141, 228 Rukeyser, Muriel, 233, 243–246, 251, 254, 256 Russia (incl. women’s rights in), 80, 81, 86–87, 91, 92, 95, 98. 128, 138, 195, 202, 209, 211, 212, 216, 220, 222, 224, 226, 229, 238, 240, 251, 258, 260 Russian Revolution, 146, 147, 238 Salter, Ada, 115, 228 Salvation Army, 226, 228 Sand, George, 163 Sanger, Sophy, 115, 228 Sargant-Florence, M., 115 Save the Children Fund, 122, 226–227 Sayer, Dr. Ettie, 115 Scandinavia (incl. women’s rights in), 80, 81, 83–84, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 211, 216

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268 | Index Schiller, Friedrich, 175, 191, 205–206 Schlösinger, Rose, 190, 193 Schmorell, Alexander, 205, 218 Scholl, Hans, 197, 202–203, 204, 205, 208, 209, 211, 213–218 Scholl, Inge, 197, 204, 217 Scholl, Magdalena, 196, 215 Scholl, Robert, 196, 197, 215 Scholl, Sophie, 176, 190–191, 193, 194, 195, 196–218, 233 Scholl, Werner, 197 Scholz, Elfriede, 192 Schreiner, Olive, 114, 133 Schubert, Franz, 217 Schulze-Boysen Libertas, 190, 195 Schumacher, Elisabeth, 190 Schumann,Maurice, 161–162, 164 Schwimmer, Rozika, 85, 90, 91, 94, 118, 133, 134, 239 Scott, Sir Walter, 23, 33, 34, 40–41 Seele, Gertrud, 189 Seghers, Anna, 181 Sender, Toni, 181 Senior, Jeanie (‘Mrs. Nassau Senior’), 65, 76–79 Serbia, 129, 226, 227; and see AustroHungary Shakespeare, William, 43, 44, 160, 192, 258 Sharp, Evelyn, 115 Shaw, George Bernard, 198 Sheepshanks, Mary, 1, 80, 88–100, 117, 122–123, 124 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 24–28, 29, 33, 34 Shirazi, Manny, 106 Siemsen, Anna, Dr., 181 Simon, Shena, 176 Slavery, 6, 9, 13, 16, 19, 30, 31, 43, 45, 103, 143, 144, 160, 174, 222, 223, 224, 227–228 Socrates, 140,160,198, 261 Somalia, 107 South Africa, 80, 87, 90, 124, 128, 224, 228 Sophocles, 160, 169, 262; and see Antigone Soviet Union, see Russia Souvarine, Boris, 143, 145 Spain, 80, 103, 243 Spanish Civil War, 147, 148, 150–151, 227, 239, 240, 243 Stalin, Josef, 146, 149, 150, 220, 224 Stawell, Melian, 115

Steiner, George, 168–169, 173, 174, 175, 176 Stöcker, Helene, 181, 194 Stokes, Richard, MP, 231 Strindberg, August, 262 Sturge, Sophia, 126, 228 Sudan, 227 Sullivan, Annie, 234–235, 239, 240, 241, 255 Suttner, Bertha von, 91, 126, 128 Swanwick, Helena, 98, 115–116, 121–123, 228 Switzerland (esp. women’s rights in), 80, 81, 91, 92, 93, 216 Syal, Meera, 107, 108 Szymborska, Wyzs‰ava, 221 Tchaykovsky, Dr. Barbara, 115 Terwiel, Marie, 189, 218 Thadden, Elisabeth von, 189, 193 Thatcher, Margaret, 258 Thomas, Dr. Henrietta, 115 Thorndike, Sybil, 185, 228 Thorsson, Inga, 140–141, 142 Tillard, Violet, 115, 229 Tolstoy, Leo, 126 Touati, Fettouma, 106 Trade Unions, 40, 145 Treaty of Versailles, 119, 121–122, 135, 137 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 127, 150, 175, 178 Turkey (incl. women’s rights in), 80, 86, 222 Ugresic, Dubravka, 129 Ukraine, 224, 228 Unamuno, Miguel de, 37–38, 46, 262 UNESCO, 126 UNICEF, 101, 107 UNIFEM, 99, 101, 107 Union for the Democratic Control of Foreign Policy (UDC), 119, 122, 127 United Nations, 139, 140, 154 USA (incl. women’s rights in), 80, 81, 82–83, 90, 91, 94, 130–131, 135, 136, 137, 139, 213, 231, 233–238, 240, 241–242, 243–244, 246–248 Utilitarianism, 23, 31, 44, 46 Vietnam, 227, 232, 242, 243, 245, 246–247, 258

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Index | 269 Wales, Julia Grace, 133 War, problem of, 2, 5, 8–9, 13, 16, 22, 23, 26, 32, 33, 85, 91, 92–93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 113–125, 126–129, 137, 140, 141, 144–163, 196–217, 230–233, 236–256, 257–262 Weigel, Helene, 181 Weil, Simone, 1, 2, 124–125, 143–164, 196, 206, 209, 213, 215, 219, 220, 230, 233 Wells, H.G., 118 Wheeldon, Alice, 114, 124 Whitehead, George, 11, 12, 15, 20 White Rose Resistance Group, see Hans Scholl; Sophie Scholl; and Hamburg White Rose Wilkinson, Ellen, 185 Wilkinson, Spencer, 127 Williams, Dr. Cicely, 225, 229 Williams, Dr. Ethel, 115, 229 Willis, Irene Cooper, 115, 117 Wilson, Woodrow, 95, 122, 134, 135, 136, 139, 237 Wolf, Christa, 183, 187, 194 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 64, 70 Women Humanitarians (British, 1900– 1950), 225–229 Women Quakers, 10, 12, 13, 14–15, 16, 20, 114, 115, 120–121, 122, 126 Women’s Biography, 66–67, 80, 220–229 Women’s Co-operative Guild, 91, 114, 115, 127, 170, 226

Women’s Institutes, 229 Women’s International Congress (1915), see Hague International Congress Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), 95, 98, 98, 114, 121–2, 124, 137, 139, 257 Women’s Labour League, 114 Women’s Peace Crusade (1916–18), 114 Women’s Peace Party, 133, 136, 236–237 Women’s Self-emancipation (education, employment), 1–2, 60–67, 68–75, 80–100, 101, 102, 108 Women’s Suffrage Movement, 69, 73, 74, 75, 80–100 Woolf, Leonard, 140, 170 Woolf, Virginia, 1, 2, 60, 63, 67, 78, 79, 165, 169–176, 196, 206, 219, 229, 233, 259 Woolman, John, 16 Wordsworth, William, 24, 33, 34, 223, 243, 256 World Health Organization (WHO), 225, 229 Wyon, Olive, 115 Yeats, W.B., 26, 28, 216, 219, 242, 258 Zetkin, Clara, 84

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