Dreamers of a New Day (14 page)

However, a radical minority were resolved to choose their own sexual destinies. Feminism encouraged small clusters of lower-middle-class and working-class women to try and relate their sexual feelings to new sexual theories. The diaries and letters of Ruth Slate and Eva Slawson chronicle the aspirations of two young Londoners who were not highly educated but were bursting with ideas. They read widely, attended meetings on left politics, on ethics, on aesthetics, and were interested in ‘The Sex Question’. Eva Slawson found Edward Carpenter’s
Love’s Coming of Age
‘full of suggestion’, and in 1911 she was attending the
Freewoman
discussion group. But the two young women were circumspect, sufficiently
cognizant of power to select who they could be honest with. Ruth Slate reminded Eva, ‘When you were sleeping with me . . . you said “Be careful to whom you give your confidences, for people do not see things as you mean them”.’
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Eva Slawson became involved with a working-class woman called Minna, and this new relationship made her think that ‘too much spiritual and physical love is reserved for sexual union. We ought to be able to mingle soul and body, woman with woman, man with man – glorifying, caressing, embracing with the whole body – not simply the touch of hands and lips.’
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A few working-class women made an outright break with respectability. The anarchist Rose Witcop, who came from a strict Jewish working-class immigrant family in East London, lived in a free union with the anarchist-communist Guy Aldred and became a birth control campaigner. Ada Nield Chew had gradually grown apart from her husband George Chew, though to live separately was a decision that took her a long time. Her daughter recalled how shortly ‘after his death she said pathetically and almost in bewilderment, “You know, I’m happier without him.”’
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Alice Dax, whom D. H. Lawrence portrays as Clara in
Sons and Lovers
, was an intellectual working-class woman, active in the suffrage movement in the Midlands village of Eastwood, interested in new ideas about personal freedom and the simplified lifestyle. Unlike Lawrence she never escaped into a wider world; she and many women like her were forced to temper their dreams of freedom.

Personal discomfort with convention could draw working-class women to labour organizing and radical political ideas. In 1918, Mary Archibald, an American clerk, active in the Seattle Woman’s Card and Label League, which pledged consumers to buy from stores which stocked union label products, described herself in the
Seattle Union Record
as: ‘A square peg in a round hole. I was not domestic by nature. . . . And this is my quarrel with marriage – there are too many square pegs in round holes.’
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Becoming involved in radical politics could bring an expansion of personal possibilities. There were movement love affairs. The American trade union leader Rose Schneiderman met Maud Swartz, an Irish-born printer, at a suffrage rally in 1912 – they became lifelong partners. Another woman trade union organizer, Pauline Newman, fell in love with an upper-middle-class woman, Frieda Miller, who left her job as a research assistant at Bryn Mawr College to become secretary of the Philadelphia Women’s Trade Union League. When Newman wrote
to her friend Rose Schneiderman for advice in 1917, Schneiderman urged her to take risks for ‘joy’, reflecting: ‘There must be thousands of women who feel like us, eurning, eurning [sic] all the time for warmth and tenderness from a loved one, only to be worn out and settled down to the commonplace everyday grind.’
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In the post-war world, the risks for joy seemed rather more feasible. Modern 1920s women seemed to have shifted the rules of the game. Elsie Clews Parsons, writing on ‘Changes in Sex Relations’ in Freda Kirchwey’s 1924 collection
Our Changing Morality
, wanted to know ‘What of the actual sex life?’
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Dorothy Parker, one of the New York writers who met to talk at the Round Table literary gatherings, started to write about sex in humorous verse which sent up sincerity and squeezed a brittle humour out of the perplexities of modern love. Round Table women talked sex with a new twist – they joked about it, not just together, but in male company. When Frank Adams arrived for a Round Table lunch after playing tennis with his shirt open showing curly black hair, Peggy Leech stared and quipped, ‘Well, Frank – I see your fly is open higher than usual today.’
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The new frankness was not confined to the intelligentsia. Popular, confessional ‘true’ romance magazines took the delights of self-revelation into the mainstream. Advertisers discovered the new ‘sex appeal’ and packaged the promise; an advertisement for Camel cigarettes showed a young man lighting a woman’s cigarette accompanied by the caption ‘Pleasure Ahead’. Mae West, famous for her witty sexual innuendos, wrote and performed in the 1926 Broadway hit musical
Sex
.
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‘Sex’ suddenly seemed to be overt and everywhere. Greenwich Village’s pre-World War idealization of ‘outsider’ groups had focused initially on ethnicity and class. However, by the 1920s jazz and the blues were transporting a lyrical and metaphorical sexual imagery from the culture of poor blacks to fashionable white audiences. Much was lost in translation; it passed through a prism of incomprehension. The white intelligentsia, in casting off their Protestant guilt, was inclined to envisage a uniform black America which they constructed as a primitive ‘other’. This put educated black women seeking independence and sensual expression in a difficult predicament. Erotic affirmation could simply confirm racist stereotypes.
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Despite the razzmatazz of the 1920s, resistance to sexual radical ideas continued to be powerful at many levels in both societies. In the US, Comstockery was far from exhausted and moral reformers in organizations
such as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which had lobbied successfully for prohibition in 1919, exerted considerable sway. In Britain the Catholics steadfastly opposed birth control, the Anglicans’ Church Penitentiary Association favoured the disciplined regime of rescue homes for the contrite unmarried mother, while non-conformists were wary of any loosening in sexual attitudes. The moral guardians comprised a formidable redoubt. In 1925 the socialist feminist Dora Russell castigated the London County Council in her book
Hypatia
for turning down ‘the suggestion of sex-teaching in elementary and secondary schools’.
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Four years later the writer Vera Brittain complained in
Halcyon or the Future of Monogamy
(1929) that the London County Council was still rejecting sex education. Exasperated by ‘the superstitious identification of virtue with ignorance’,
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Brittain quoted the American campaigner for birth control, Mary Ware Dennett: ‘At present sex knowledge is being conducted on a boot-leg basis’.
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However, while rebels in the Labour Party and the Women’s Co-operative Guild challenged violence and rape in marriage and argued for sex education, for the rights of unmarried mothers, and control over fertility, the majority of Labour women pushed diplomatically for the democratic equality of companionate marriage. Radicals and reformers alike were confronted by a gap between their aspirations and lived realities.

Dora Russell was distressed by 1920s working-class women’s low expectations of sexual pleasure. Women told her, ‘He doesn’t bother me’, or ‘He bothers me all the time.’ She reflected: ‘They evaded sexual relations as far as they possibly could because they were terrified of having more children. Rejecting their husbands’ advances was the only means they had of protecting themselves.’
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In
The Woman in the Little House
(1922), the popular writer and journalist Leonora Eyles quoted a woman as saying, ‘I shouldn’t mind married life so much if it wasn’t for bedtime.’
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From talking to working-class women Eyles deduced that much sexual unhappiness arose because the education they had received from the church, from schools and from the press was completely inadequate. This was compounded by material circumstances: bad housing, bad food, a harried, rushed life and too many pregnancies.
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It was also the case that working-class women, having been defined by the Victorian middle class as more animal than the refined and ladylike middle class, aspired to a ‘respectability’ in which ignorance was the mark of virtue. For working-class men who shared the same assumptions, the implications were frustrating. A collier confided to Eyles: ‘A
nice girl like Kit – she knows nothing, and it makes it blooming hard for a fellow with a girl like that – the way they lead you on without knowing where they are going.’
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The dread of pregnancy also contributed to women’s fear of sex. Annie Williams, a young Welsh woman in service in 1920s London, relates how ignorance fostered a complicated mix of desire and anxiety. She slept with her future husband Douglas before they married: ‘And he used to say that I was the hot bitch then, because I used to plead with him to stay.’ They used withdrawal, and ‘Every month it was murder, I was waiting for my periods and all this, and I thought the only thing to do is that I’ll have to get married, you see.’
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The socialist paper
Lansbury’s Labour Weekly
provides intriguing glimpses of the sexual uncertainties of young working-class men and women in the 1920s. ‘Martha’, who wrote on ‘Problems of Real Life’, took a stern line. In 1925 she rebuked ‘a most foolish and mistaken young man’ who had written in about his ‘problem’. ‘You
can
control yourself if you want to. The trouble with you and boys like you is that you don’t want to. You think that girls are only made for your convenience, and that every impulse is to be followed to the bitter end.’ She referred him to Kipling’s advice to get a large hoe and shovel and to dig until he ‘gently perspired’.
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In contrast, Leonora Eyles aimed to popularize some of the ideas of the earlier generation of sex reformers like Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter for a 1920s audience, by serving them up in the idiom of romance literature. She assured her labour readers that sex was not just for procreation, and warned that sexual denial could lead to ‘nervous breakdowns’ and ‘neurasthenia’.
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In March 1925 she called on women to value their bodies: ‘Not many women nowadays think half enough of their bodies. They think that bodily love is just one of the side-issues of marriage, part of the man’s “rights”. What tragic nonsense. If only a woman could realise that this is something tremendous that she is bestowing, her man would think so too.’
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That September she resolved to tackle ‘Doing Wrong’ because so many young people were writing in about sex, although ‘I know my older readers don’t much like me to discuss it, and although George Lansbury tells me to do so as rarely as possible.’ She remarked that since the war, ‘so many ideas have gone by the board’. Young people were saying, ‘“The love of the body is a happy and beautiful thing. Why should I deny it? Why should I wait till I am married?”’ The main reason Eyles gave women for waiting was the terror of having an illegitimate child who would be looked down upon, because they had ‘given way’
to their emotions. Eyles adopted an intimate and subjective voice to get alongside her readers: ‘And we are all having such a devil of a fight with our emotions, and most of us are getting on top of them, so that we hate those who can’t control themselves. There may be a little jealousy in it – I don’t know.’ After this laborious preamble, her own opinion was startlingly subversive. ‘I do most honestly say that I see no wrong in the love of two young people for each other. And I don’t see any logical reason why a civil or religious marriage should make holier something already holy.’ Then, quickly hedging, Eyles added that she could not advise sexual intercourse, because young people often did not love the actual person but the bodily ‘thrill’. Bodily thrills, it was implied, were a step too far. Moreover, Eyles pointed out pragmatically, following through on the ‘thrill’ could tie people down. Instead girls should regard their bodies as a ‘beautiful secret’.
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The sexual freedom of the 1920s was implicitly framed within an assumption that heterosexuality was the norm. Though many women in reform circles in the late nineteenth century and early 1900s had been involved in relationships with other women, their sexual choices were necessarily discreet. Ironically, for women attracted to other women, the bohemians’ success in disseminating sexual disclosure into mainstream culture would prove to have disadvantages. Margaret Anderson, a friend of Emma Goldman’s and editor of the
Little Review
, a journal which pioneered work by the modernist avant-garde, had lived with her lover Jane Heap, but retreated to a utopian colony in New Jersey after the war. During the 1920s several lesbian writers and artists joined the literary coterie Natalie Barney had established in Paris. They were partly fleeing the commercialization and standardization of their own country, but Paris held another attraction. In Andrea Weiss’s words, ‘It left its foreigners alone’.
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Shari Benstock suggests that Gertrude Stein’s interest in subverting ‘grammar’ was partly about her own efforts as a lesbian to shift the parameters of gender. Stein’s story of her encounter with her lover and companion, Alice B. Toklas, in ‘Didn’t Nelly and Lilly Love You’ in 1922, jumbles ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘we’ and ‘I’.
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Even those within her own milieu could find this bewildering. As Andrea Weiss observes,