Dreamers of a New Day (38 page)

Though authoritarian forms of social maternalism stressed regulation, radical social motherhood advocates emphasized the democratic implications of including the mother within the terms of citizenship. In
The Economic Foundations of the Women’s Movement
(1914), the British Fabian and Schreiner enthusiast Mabel Atkinson argued that ‘No act of citizenship is more fundamental than the act of bringing into the world and protecting in his helpless infancy a new citizen.’
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This specifically
gendered approach to citizenship could be broadened into a claim on social resources which involved rethinking the economy, and the value of human activities in society. The entitlement of mothers to resources could consequently be expanded into a far-reaching case for a truly social democracy. The British socialist Dorothy Jewson adapted an idea put forward by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, writing ‘We believe women and children have a right to A SHARE OF THEIR OWN in the wealth of the country’.
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She observed, ‘Other services are concerned with the making of THINGS, but motherhood with the making of human beings.’
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Writing in the left-wing socialist paper the
Daily Herald
in 1912 on the need for the franchise, Mabel Harding also echoed Gilman’s vision of mothering as a potential for a social alternative to a male-defined, competitive capitalism. For Harding, ‘Motherhood in its wide sense’ implied being responsible for life beyond the immediate family:

Pure food, a municipal milk supply, healthy schools, the raising of the school leaving age, sound moral training without any squeamish holding back knowledge of the facts of life that boys and girls should know, the abolition of sweated labour, and a host of other subjects, are all woman’s concerns and part of her social motherhood.
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Ideas of the citizen-mother were not only expressed in terms of a state-led collectivism. They could also constitute an attempt to regenerate democracy by extending the reach of the household into the community and hence into the public realm of politics. Commenting on Margaretta Hicks’s advocacy of consumer organizing, June Hannam and Karen Hunt remark: ‘For a fragile moment some socialist women had started to imagine one way in which the border between the “domestic” and the “political” could be dissolved so that a socialist strategy could be forged which no longer privileged production over consumption.’
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Contesting the barriers which separated daily activities involved the adventurers in battles around the boundaries which marked out the domestic and intimate sphere as exclusively female, and the world of work and public politics as male. As a consequence of these conflicts, many women came to challenge the scope of politics and reimagine daily life and relationships.

Whether they sought to emphasize shared human rights or foreground the existing activities and needs of women, the women who dreamed of a new day were met with prejudice when they tried to put into practice
even the most moderate aspects of their larger visions. Democratic social citizenship proved a circuitous affair, and stratagems had to be renegotiated, over and over again. Like many other women, Margaret Ashton saw the franchise as a way of achieving wider social changes for women. But in the meantime she also wanted to contribute actively by becoming a local councillor. Patricia Hollis chronicles how in 1907 Ashton stood as an Independent in St George’s ward for a place on Manchester Town Council, on the basis of her knowledge of building. She was not successful. ‘The following year she stood in Withington ward. . . . No talk of her expertise in drains and ventilation this time, but about the need of women and children for homes, schools, clean water, baths and wash houses, adequate street lighting and safe trams.’
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A pragmatic Ashton cannily threw in women’s special need for well-built and properly drained houses along with paved courts and alleys. She proceeded tactfully, promising male voters that ‘if she were returned there would be no necessity for her to encroach upon the men’s work’.
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As Hollis wryly remarks, it was not ‘entirely clear what she had left them to do’.
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Ashton’s modus operandi was to stretch ‘women’s’ concerns and assure men that ‘Matters of great importance to women had been overlooked, not because men desired to neglect them, but because they never thought of them’.
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The Women’s Co-operative Guild’s membership card graphically depicts the organization’s aspiration to expand women’s workaday consciousness. A woman in an apron stands in the foreground, clutching her basket, with the tall chimneys of an industrial city below her in the valley; she is looking beyond them, gazing upwards and shielding her eyes against the sun. Yet the cool Bloomsbury eye of Virginia Woolf, scrutinizing members of the Women’s Co-operative Guild at their conference in 1914, detected only the pull of a culture which kept them earthbound: ‘Their lips never expressed the lighter and detached emotions that come into play when the mind is perfectly at ease about the present. No, they were not in the least detached and easy and cosmopolitan. They were indigenous and rooted to one spot.’
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To Woolf the women seemed so embedded that the exploratory intellectual enquiry so vital to her as an individual appeared impossible.

Nonetheless co-operative women did want the chance to live a better life as individuals, and their participation in the Guild was a means of gaining confidence and acquiring a broader culture. They theorized on the basis of what they knew and the Guild encouraged them to look
outwards, far beyond the basket and the chimneys. An alternative social order, self-realization and democratic citizenship nestle in the expansive ideal future outlined by Florence Farrow, a working-class member of the Derby Women’s Co-operative Guild, in 1919. Every mother should receive a pension for each child born to her. Women should not accept babies being deprived of milk because of high prices, but should demand municipal control of milk. There should be municipal baths, better housing, heating and lighting, and greater democratic control over energy supplies. Teachers should be better paid as a step towards improving the education of working-class children. Municipal cinemas should be set up where children could be shown ‘pictures which would bring out the best of them and give them a love of things beautiful’.
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‘The Woman with the Basket’ (National Co-operative Archive)

Here the vision of a better life for individuals is presented in social and relational terms. In imagining her motherly utopia, Farrow was typical of the women that American labour journalist Mary Heaton Vorse met on her visit to post-war England. Shaken by the bleak poverty she encountered, but inspired by the ‘enormous ferment’ of debate among working-class women, Vorse recalled:

I felt that an immense power would be unleashed if one would organize, not only the clubwomen of leisure but the working women and the housewives of workers. If they could be organized in England, why not in America? I wrote an article prophesying that ‘Ma’ would come out into the world as she had in England, for the stir among working women seemed to me the real feminist movement.
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The working-class women Vorse encountered were engaged in collective agitation over their social rights in relation to their families and communities. Ideas of women’s emancipation were articulated around shared needs as a class, and it was assumed that better conditions for women and children would also be beneficial to working-class men as husbands and fathers. However, a minority of women within the trade union movement were beginning to raise issues of equality vis-à-vis men. Varying concepts of rights and entitlements were thus emerging from the women’s labour movement. Like other elements in Webb’s wider women’s movement, they, too, were far from being homogenous.

Different concepts of citizenship had been able to coexist amidst the fluidity of the movement for enfranchisement, but as the momentum diminished after World War One, conflicts over priorities, strategies and policy crystallized. Disagreement among feminists, social reformers and women trade unionists over whether to claim citizenship on the basis of equal rights or of women’s specific needs, became polarized over the issue of protective legislation at work; however, this was really only the tip of a deeper contention around identity, nature and culture. These were not only theoretical disputes; they affected how the democratization of social and economic existence was envisaged.

In the post-war era, feminists in both countries were at odds about how femininity was to be conceived and valued. In her response to testimonies by modern women published in the
Nation
between 1926 and 1927, the American Jungian, Beatrice M. Hinkle, alluded to a dismissal among feminists of ‘their woman’s nature’.
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In both America and Britain a ‘new feminism’ emerged which focused on women’s needs around biological reproduction. In recognizing women’s dissimilarities from men, they went on to propose that these made alternative perspectives possible. Though some ‘new feminists’ thought the distinct values they envisaged arose from women’s particular position in society historically, rather than from a timeless ‘nature’, to their opponents, the egalitarians, any assertion of women’s difference tended to be regarded as a trap.
Writing in the 1924 symposium
Our Changing Morality
, the American Isobel Leavenworth complained that it was ‘most unfortunate that the majority of people hope to improve matters through an extension of the feminine ideals of the past.’
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She and other egalitarian feminists considered existing ‘femininity’ to be as distorted as the existing forms of ‘masculinity’.

Though these disputes were often bitter and painful, locally women continued to argue pragmatically for an amalgam of equality and special needs, simply because they could see that women required both. Even among women who ostensibly belonged to opposing camps the differences were nuanced, and there continued to be overlapping areas of agreement. The American Crystal Eastman, attached to the egalitarian wing of the feminist movement, attended the National Conference of Labour Women in Britain in 1925, and noted favourably a resolution to deal stringently with any representative of the Labour Party who did ‘not support sex equality, economically, educationally and politically’.
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Impressed by the range of debate, Eastman recorded how the women demanded a National Wheat Board to secure cheap bread, a trained nurse in every secondary and primary school, the extension of the suffrage to women under thirty, and birth control in health centres. The egalitarian Eastman conceded a ‘“women’s emphasis”’ in the political outlook of the women at the conference. By this she meant the weight given to ‘the supreme importance of human well-being, especially the well-being of children’. She concluded that ‘It is not so much that women have a different point of view in politics as that they give a different emphasis.’
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In contrast Eva Hubback, who had taken part in the British suffrage movement, did believe most firmly that women brought a different point of view to politics. She belonged to the ‘new feminist’ camp in the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship, which saw the egalitarians’ approach as outdated. In 1926 she was arguing that as legislative equality ‘was undoubtedly in sight’, the time had come to move on. As a ‘new feminist’ she believed ‘that the whole structure and movement of society shall reflect in a proportionate degree the experience, the needs and the aspirations of women’. For Hubback this meant recognizing that demands for family allowances and birth control were at the very ‘core’ of feminism, because maternity, childcare and housekeeping were what chiefly occupied the daily lives of most women.
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In 1929 Hubback aligned herself with Labour Party women in demanding special legislative protection for women.

In America Suzanne La Follette had come to precisely the opposite conclusion. The elevation of motherhood was merely ‘sentimentalism’.
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Instead of a woman-inspired future, she argued in
Concerning Women
(1926) that economic freedom was the next question to tackle. She did not think that women’s emancipation could ‘proceed much farther as an independent issue.’ Instead La Follette believed the time had come to ‘merge the feminist in the humanist’.
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She was, however, in agreement with Hubback on the need for wider social change: ‘every phase of the question of freedom for women is bound up with the larger question of human freedom’.
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