Women, Resistance and Revolution (14 page)

Eleanor’s tragic free union with Edward Aveling and her eventual suicide are well known. If she glimpsed the possibility of a more honest way of living and a greater love, she faced the dilemma of ‘free’ women before and since, the impossibility of living and loving honestly in the existing world. Less is known of the work she did as a trade union organizer, both among East End dock workers and in forming women’s branches of the Gas Workers and General
Labourers Union. She was also active in the international socialist women’s organization which was becoming increasingly important, and in which revolutionary women from Germany, Russia and Italy, like Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai, Angelica Balabanov, were to play a prominent role. Eleanor Marx’s own interest in Shelley and in Ibsen, whom she translated, related closely to her commitment to a rejection of dishonesty, and the smothering destructive features of women’s situation in the ‘Doll’s House’ of the bourgeoisie.

In the eighties and nineties there was considerable overlapping and interaction between socialists and people in a progressive cultural circle, who were concerned in a purely personal way with what they sometimes described as ‘the new life’. This meant a vague aesthetic rejection of the ugliness and commercialism of nineteenth-century capitalism. It could mean sandals, Buddhism, cottages, market gardening, communal living, cooperative villages, acute bouts of self-consciousness, and the occasional free union. It could also mean the ‘New Woman’ and ‘Ibsenism’. Though socialists often reacted impatiently against the refusal of the new lifers to go further, admit class exploitation and accept the necessity for revolution, this cultural milieu had much more influence on the socialist movement in this period than is generally recognized. The main conflict between them was how far it was possible to effect a personal spiritual transformation of the self within capitalism, or whether such transformations had to wait until long after the revolution. There was a strong tendency for socialists in the 1880s to argue that cultural changes could only arise after the revolution, but then in practice to behave as if such changes were at once imperative and imminent. Indeed, they regarded their own organizations often as the new society of brotherhood in microcosm. This meant a favourable climate for understanding the interpenetration of private and public, psychological and material, characteristic of the ‘woman question’.

William Morris followed Shelley in his ideas about free unions, in his belief that people should not pretend to love, and in his hope that friendship would persist after sexual love had gone. He wanted to reduce romantic love to its proper proportions; it had become puffed out as other feelings of affection had been made impossible. He laid down no rules at all for human relationships in the future society, but saw infinite variations and great flexibility. Yet he is very firm in his commitment to women’s absolute equality and independence, and
abhorrent of jealousy and possession. Perhaps more than any other socialist of the period he had an ideal of the natural healthiness of human sexual relations. In ‘The Society of the Future’ he wrote, ‘I demand a free and unfettered animal life for man first of all. I demand the utter extinction of all asceticism. If we feel the least degradation in being amorous, or merry or hungry, or sleepy, we are so far bad animals and therefore miserable men.’
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His ideal of the socialist society was one in which people would be able to encounter one another in what he felt would be a more natural manner.

The publication of Edward Carpenter’s
Love’s Coming of Age
in 1896 did much to popularize the connection between the liberation of women and the socialist movement. It was based on the theories of Morgan, Engels and Bebel, and on pamphlets and lectures Carpenter had been working on for some time. Carpenter’s life and ideas expressed forcibly many of the prevailing tendencies current amongst a section of the progressive intelligentsia. He had moved from Broad Church Anglicanism to radical agnosticism in the seventies and made some study of the history of religion. He was attracted by eastern religion, especially Buddhism, and by primitive religion and an early interest in anthropology grew from these. In the early 1880s he became a socialist. A great admirer of Walt Whitman, Morris and Tolstoy, he was part of a diffuse group of intellectual socialists interested in a wide range of artistic, literary, psychological and anthropological questions. Carpenter for a few years became a link between the explicit revolutionaries, and workers in the labour movement, and men and women who were more concerned about internal spiritual enlightenment.

Carpenter believed in natural, uncluttered living. He called this simplification of life. He was opposed not just to the economic exploitation of capitalism but to the degradation and ugliness of cultural and spiritual life. He met some working men who were connected to a communal farm Ruskin had established near Sheffield. They were utopian socialists and influenced his already awakened radical class guilt. He determined not to be a parasite and live on anyone else’s labour. He took some land and grew his own produce which he sold in the market in town. Slowly he made contact with the tiny group of Sheffield socialists who met in the Commonwealth café, and his cottage outside Sheffield became a point of convergence for an extraordinary variety of people. Carpenter’s own personal life
was complicated by his homosexuality, but this forced him to confront problems which many upper-middle-class men of the period ignored. He was among the earliest socialist writers to identify with a sympathetic attempt to understand the sexual needs of homosexuals, whom he called the ‘intermediate sex’. Through his friendship with Havelock Ellis he was in touch with developments in the early study of sex psychology, and in his lecture notes he refers to Krafft-Ebing and Albert Moll.

In
Love’s Coming of Age
his concern with internal spiritual processes, his socialism, and his anthropological and psychological interests combine. He was enthusiastic about the women’s movement, which he saw as much as the growth of a new consciousness as specific campaign. He connected this to the workers’ movement, though he recognized that most working-class women were unaffected by the ideas of the new womanhood. He believed that ultimately only in a communist society could women have real independence because this must imply security in motherhood and no necessary dependence on a man. He shared similar ideas to Bebel about the communalization of housework under socialism. He thought this an essential part of the liberation of working women. It was of course very much an aspect of the crop of cooperative cottages in 1880s. He followed the utopian socialist and Marxist tradition too in imagining a more fulfilling and complete love in the society of the future.

But the real impact of
Love’s Coming of Age
was not so much in its predictions for the future but in the way it attempted to consider the psychological aspects of female sexuality at the time. Carpenter dwells on the effect of pregnancy, on the need for information about sex for the young. There is a vague cerebral commitment to female sexual enjoyment, though this is expressed in very high-flown language about primal nature. He felt existing forms of contraception to be unsatisfactory and unnatural, apart from the rhythm method, and advocated instead emotional sublimation. He favoured what he called ‘soul unions’ – protracted sexual intercourse without the male orgasm.

Both Carpenter and
Love’s Coming of Age
are forgotten now. His language, style and psychological theorizing have dated. The fashionable watery mysticism which appealed to many of his contemporaries now appears only mawkish. What has lasted, however, is the ‘entire and unswerving refusal to “cage” another person’, the insistence on
‘free’ and ‘spontaneous’ relationship between human beings – despite the knowledge that this ‘must inevitably bring its own price of mortal suffering with it’.
¹⁰
This freedom in love was impossible between people who were socially, economically and psychologically unfree. Thus he urged women to take the name ‘free woman’ proudly.

Let her accept the term with all the odium that belongs to it; let her insist on her right to speak, dress, think, act and above all use her sex as she deems best; let her face the scorn, the ridicule; let her ‘lose her own life’ if she likes; assured that only so can come deliverance; and that only when the free woman is honoured will the prostitute cease to exist.
¹¹

Thus he saw the liberation of women as being as much a conscious act of cultural commitment as an end product of social revolution. It was undoubtedly this emphasis which appealed to women at the time. It may be comforting in a distant sort of way to be told that far, far in the future, long, long after everyone else is free, a new world for women will be created. But it is unlikely to move anyone to action. Carpenter’s stress on the act of voluntary commitment and individual choice had a powerful emotional effect. ‘Too long have women acted the part of mere appendages to the male; suppressing their own individuality and fostering his self-conceit In order to have souls of their own they must free themselves, and greatly by their own efforts.’
¹²

We know very little about the impact of these ideas amongst women in the socialist movement at a grass roots level. A copy of
Love’s Coming of Age
travels around now with the T.U.C. history exhibition of ‘Things’. It belonged originally to a young woman who was a clerk and a member of the Hackney Social Democratic Federation in the early 1900s. But we have little information about the kind of people who bought the many editions of Carpenter’s book between 1896 and 1918; nor do we know whether these ideas within the socialist movement and the impact of the suffragettes meant that women in any numbers began to see themselves and each other in a different way. There is an interesting hint to be found in Carpenter’s correspondence that women who rejected some aspects of feminism and the new womanhood nevertheless were questioning the basis of marriage and the family, and the hypocrisy of conventional morality.

A woman called Edith A. Macduff wrote to Carpenter in 1894 having read some of his pamphlets. She was more interested in the personal and social aspects of women’s emancipation than the strictly political question of the vote. She makes an interesting comment on the need for female solidarity, discouraged by ‘the disloyalty of the average woman to her sex and to its cause. I suppose it is a survival from her days of slavery – an indirect flattery to her tyrant. Oh, if women would only be true to themselves and to one another I believe they could move mountains.’
¹³

Carpenter’s book upset many socialists at the time. There was considerable nervousness about connecting the idea of socialism with ‘free love’. Many, like Robert Blatchford, felt that they should make the social and economic changes first and let free love and women’s liberation creep in quietly when no one was looking later.

Not surprisingly revolutionary women were not willing to take this advice. Angelica Balabanov, the Italian socialist and feminist, once told Louise Bryant, an American journalist, ‘Women have to go through such a tremendous struggle before they are free in their own minds that freedom is more precious to them than men.’
¹⁴
This is a dangerous generalization to try to stretch but it fitted the kind of women coming to a consciousness at once of the need for socialist revolution and of a transformation of women’s situation in this period. It was very difficult to procrastinate with such women. They were too determined and too impatient to be fobbed off with vague promises. They retained too the close connection with tragedy which existed in the earlier period. If it was true of sections of the male socialist movement that personal life-style was as much a political statement as their theory, and indeed the two were quite inseparable, this was often even more true of women. Here the connections were painfully inescapable. Marx’s daughter was by no means alone in this discovery.

One of Eleanor Marx’s closest friends, Olive Schreiner, was part of the Carpenter circle. Brought up in South Africa, her novel
Story of an African Farm
is about adolescence and the passionate rejection by a young girl of the traditional role for women. The strong autobiographical element is apparent throughout the novel. She came to England in her early twenties, and through Havelock Ellis, with whom she had a brief unsuccessful love affair which was to develop into a life-long friendship, came into contact with Carpenter and the
vague intellectual grouping which combined political concern with intense involvement in experimenting with new ways of living.

It is difficult to categorize Olive Schreiner’s ideas. So much of what she started remained unfinished and unresolved. Carpenter in his autobiography,
My Days and Dreams
, describes a duality in her nature, a ‘mobile and almost merry-seeming exterior’ but underneath a ‘vein of intense determination’ and ‘ineradicable pessimism’.
¹⁵
Her commitment to the liberation of women was not so much a political decision as part of her whole being and life. Because she could not restrict her conception of liberation to political reform, she was forced to live out the tragic contradiction of emancipation. Because she felt ‘the evil lay deeper than any accusation against men could explain, or any mere reform of the suffrage could mend’,
¹⁶
she remained somewhat apart from the feminist movement. Similarly, though she was involved in the 1880s with the socialist groups, and subsequently active in the campaign against the Boer War, she remained both in her life and her ideas distant from the organized left. Her ideas about the relations of women and men are expressed in the form of mystical stories in
Three Dreams in a Desert.
In one of these she describes a vision in which the man and woman are bound together in pain.