Dreamers of a New Day (15 page)

The resulting ambiguity could be maddening to some, as it was to Natalie Barney, who nonetheless realized that Gertrude’s ‘obscurity’ functioned as ‘the better part of discretion’. Gertrude’s seemingly
opaque style made possible her ‘improper’ and audacious subject matter, so carefully disguised at times that the lesbian centre of her writing was never fathomed. Having read steadily through ‘Didn’t Nelly and Lilly Love You’, Natalie Barney claimed she couldn’t ‘make out whether they did or didn’t’. The chances being two against one they didn’t.
⁸⁷

If ambiguity enabled an avant-garde to explore sexual alternatives, there remained the question: what about the rest? By the 1920s women in ‘advanced’ circles could obtain sexological material fairly easily, but for the majority there was a lack of information about lesbian sexuality. The furore aroused by Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall’s
The Well of Loneliness
was partly because the book reached a middlebrow audience. The trial meant that both the book and its author came to be defined as notorious. However, notoriety also made for visibility, and launched a lesbian sub-culture in a Radclyffe Hall idiom.
⁸⁸

The crystallization of an explicit lesbian identity threw into new relief relations between women in which sexual feeling was amorphous and fluid. The British writer Vera Brittain, her husband Gordon, and close friend Winifred Holtby, all lived together from the mid-1920s. The arrangement was most convenient for Vera, though sometimes tense for Gordon and Winifred. It looked as if a crisis was looming in 1929 when Gordon decided he wanted to have an affair. Affairs, declared Gordon, were perfectly modern. Vera Brittain’s letter to him reveals the complexities of ‘honesty’ and the psychological contortions which could ensue when the personal collided with the political. Vera the modern woman accepted Gordon’s point about affairs; her concern was that her efforts to demonstrate that marriage and a career were perfectly possible would be jeopardized. Gossip might ‘smirch or spoil or render less dignified . . . our relationship [and] the success of our marriage matters to the world, to society, to politics, to feminism . . . one happily married wife and mother is worth more to feminism . . . than a dozen gifted and eloquent spinsters’.
⁸⁹
So many men had died in the war that marriage had become a competitive achievement. It enabled a modern woman to hold advanced views yet keep her mainstream middlebrow audience.

Vera Brittain’s
Halcyon or the Future of Monogamy
was published in 1929, just after
The Well of Lonelines
s had been banned as obscene. Though Brittain was not enthusiastic about the novel, she remarked that its censorship indicated a fear of enabling ‘women with homosexual
tendencies to recognise and understand them’.
⁹⁰
Brittain argued that the trial, along with the attempt in the US to ban a pamphlet on sex by the birth controller Mary Ware Dennett, indicated that a rearguard reaction was consolidating.
⁹¹
Despite the extraordinary shifts in attitudes and behaviour during the 1920s, radical women found themselves uncomfortably isolated and still exposed to attacks from their opponents on several fronts. The space gained for the expression of sexual heterodoxy was exceedingly fragile.

The ‘modern’ feminist women of the 1920s responded by stressing the need to change education and culture. They defined themselves as members of an emancipated minority, but they were in a vulnerable situation for many women did not accept the sexual changes they were advocating. As the impetus of the suffrage movement declined, this sense of belonging to a specific, distinct type accentuated the divide between them and other women. ‘Moderns’ were inclined to assume that sexual knowledge and experience gave them an edge. In 1927, Dora Russell insisted: ‘Women
are
unsexed at present by a steady and merciless process of elimination that leaves them atrophied or self-denying, advocating repression for others. Perpetual watchfulness against the snares of sex dries in them the springs of affection and sympathy.’
⁹²

Sexual competition is highly combustible, and this categorizing of other women as sex-starved infuriated anti-feminists and feminists alike. An irate Charlotte Perkins Gilman protested against the 1920s’ ‘wild excitement over sex’. By accepting they were ‘just the same as men’, she considered that women were having to adapt themselves to ‘the overdeveloped sex instinct of men’. She was of the opinion that modern feminists were misleading women with new inventions like psychoanalysis, a theory thought up by ‘the ingenious mind of man’ in order to retain the power that older systems of control ‘no longer assured him’.
⁹³
Whereas an earlier generation might have wrestled with the balance between inner and outer aspects of being and existence in religious or broadly spiritual concepts, the new generation was casting the dilemma in psychological terms. Their scrutiny kept raising those awkward questions about inner desires which did not ‘fit’ the outer framework of assumptions, contributing to a wider cultural uncertainty about the relationship between personal perceptions and public action.

Nevertheless, the 1920s saw a courageous and far-reaching redefinition of sexual radicalism which extended into the public sphere. Echoing the aspirations of free-love iconoclasts and new women, Crystal Eastman’s
programme of demands launched at the feminist Woman’s Party annual meeting in 1921 sought:

To rid the country of all laws which deny women access to scientific information concerning the limitation of families. . . . To re-write the laws of divorce, of inheritance, of the guardianship of children, and the laws for the regulation of sexual morality and disease on a basis of equality. . . . To legitimatize all children.
⁹⁴

In her 1926
Concerning Women
, Suzanne La Follette connected women’s sexual freedom to a critique of culture. She asserted that ‘the whole mass of taboo and discrimination arrayed against the unwedded mother and her child is the direct result of the subjection of women.’
⁹⁵
Aware that the unmarried mother was condemned by women as well as men, she believed this was because marriage remained most women’s only option. The woman who did not marry threatened ‘the economic value of the “virtuous” woman’s chief asset’.
⁹⁶
The implications of the changes sought by Eastman and La Follette presented a fundamental challenge to religious institutions, to the family and to existing patterns of work.

Elsie Clews Parsons (American Philosophical Society)

The utopian impulse persisted too in the glimpse of a transformed sexuality. Against an old-style morality of duty and fidelity, in 1924 Elsie Clews Parsons asserted a new culture of ‘reciprocity in passion, emotional integrity, and mutual enhancement of life’. The new sexuality she envisaged would be ‘all kinds of relations for all kinds of persons . . . with respect or tolerance for the individual and without hypocrisy’.
⁹⁷
Parsons turned her psychological understandings outwards in an attempt to theorize how a new sexual consciousness would arise. Denying that ‘rationalistic propaganda’ would bring change, she argued that external pressures such as housing congestion, fear of an over-populated world and the growth of urbanization would break down religious objections to non-procreative sex. She believed new forms of sexual culture had been held back ‘because the technique of contraception is still in the experimental stage, perhaps because in popular consciousness the morality of contraception in itself is not fully established.’
⁹⁸

Birth control was the critical battleground.

4

‘What Every Girl Should Know’

When, O, when will the great mass of humanity learn and realize that in ENFORCED MOTHERHOOD . . . is to be found the chief cause of the degradation that gives birth to human woe. When will they see that enforced motherhood is the curse resting upon and crushing out the life energies of woman; while on the other hand, the consciousness of being the mother of a DESIRED babe, a child conceived in a happy, a loving embrace, needs no other blessing, no other sanction, than such act itself bestows.
¹

When Rosa Graul made this passionate appeal against enforced motherhood in her novel
Hilda’s Home
in 1897, she voiced a subversive idea; that women should be able to exert choice over fertility. This concept of the individual woman’s rights over her body would constitute an important strand in ‘birth control’ campaigns in the early twentieth century.

Ideas about ‘voluntary motherhood’ sprang from the radical individualist tradition of rights which exerted a wide-ranging influence on very different reform movements in the United States. Free lovers, feminists and social-purity activists alike debated voluntary motherhood – which did not necessarily mean supporting contraception. Indeed they were inclined to suspect that contraceptives would
restrict
women’s control over their own persons, and instead favoured changing attitudes and practices. Celibacy, self-control, the woman as regulator of sex and non-penetrative forms of sexual pleasure were among the alternatives being proposed at the turn of the century.

Free lovers Lois Waisbrooker and Elmina Slenker were among those who distrusted contraception. In Waisbrooker’s view, ‘The sex fountain is the source of power and consenting to tamper with it to please man
diverts that power to man’s use.’
²
Elmina Slenker considered the solution to involuntary motherhood to be ‘Dianaism’ – the non-penetrative sexuality which she thought would stop all abortions and infanticides, and enable women to ‘have none but wished-for children’.
³
The Heywoods were influenced by the leader of the Oneida Community, John Humphrey Noyes, who argued for intercourse without ejaculation or ‘coitus reservatus’. They were, however, also prepared to support women’s right to use contraceptives; Angela Heywood advocated the vaginal syringe from the early 1880s.
⁴

Angela Heywood (Kate Sharpley Library)

In the late 1890s, when fierce opposition to both continence and Dianaism erupted in the pages of
Lucifer
, free lovers divided over contraception. Amy Linnett disputed the Dianaists’ assertion that the ‘free woman’ only used contraception to please her lover, insisting that the desire for sexual relations was mutual and not confined to men. Linnett said contraceptives meant that a woman could ‘please herself’ sexually. Declaring a war of the generations, she attacked her older opponents with the tart comment, ‘Perhaps the fact that I am not yet thirty instead of seventy has something to do with my feeling in this matter.’
⁵
Though
the idea of a woman’s right to experience pleasure had been part of early nineteenth-century radicalism, it was still an explosive desire for a woman herself to articulate in the 1890s. Linnett was breaking a powerful taboo in openly advocating contraception so that women could enjoy sex.

While feminist movements in both Britain and the US were extremely wary of topics which might damage their respectable image, ‘voluntary motherhood’ as a means of women exercising greater autonomy in sexual relationships was being raised. The daughter of the American radical feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriot Stanton Blatch, wrote a paper on ‘Voluntary Motherhood’ in 1891, in which she placed women’s control over reproduction in a wider social and economic context. Blatch contended that women should have control over conception and child-rearing, while also having access to a good education and means of financial independence. As she was living in Britain at the time and was in the middle of a difficult pregnancy, the paper was read to the National Council of Women of the United States in her absence.
⁶