Dreamers of a New Day (39 page)

The dilemma of whether to stress women’s similarities with men or to assert their differing needs as women also presented itself within the trade union movement. The secretary of the National Federation of Women Workers, Mary Macarthur, acknowledged differences in women’s relationship to paid employment, but insisted that there was ‘no inherent sex incapacity’ in the recognition of the need to unionize.
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However, while Macarthur was an adroit operator within the trade unions, their bureaucratic structures were daunting and alien to many women; nor were male trade unionists necessarily woman-friendly.
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On the other hand, by the 1920s separate women’s trade unions did not seem to be the answer because they could not adequately defend vulnerable women workers.

Radical British women in the immediate post-war era, encouraged by the increase in unionization during the war, approached women’s position in the workplace with a new resolve. Workplace organizing was regarded as a key arena for democratic engagement, a space for exercising social and economic power which could be expanded even further. When Barbara Drake wrote her path-breaking
Women in Trade Unions
(1920) she acknowledged both male hostility and the structural and cultural obstacles holding women back. However, she was hopeful that the Standing Joint Committee of Industrial Women’s Organizations, which had already brought women co-operators into combination with women trade unionists, might extend to include professional women’s organizations. Drake wanted to break down the social gulf between consumers and workers, as well as the class distinctions between workers of hand and brain, in a broader movement of labour:

The forward attack by labour on capital, which aims at giving a new and nobler direction to industry, will almost certainly be led by men,
but the less dramatic yet equally vital movement whose object is to secure a full share of wealth, not only to the poorest of the workers, but to the least of all citizens, may not improbably find its leaders amongst women.
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Drake’s thinking on industrial democracy, redistributive justice and a broader trade unionism was, however, shaped by the structure of the labour market; men predominated in heavy industry. The new labour citizenship was to be equal but complementary.

Drake was influenced not only by Fabianism, but by the industrial militancy of the pre-war years, when she had come into contact with Guild Socialist ideas of workers’ control. William Morris was one of the inspirations for Guild Socialism, and the movement seemed to present a way of activating participatory democracy around economic and social needs without strengthening the centralized power of the state. Drake wanted to transform both the possibilities for organizing and the labour process itself. In
Women in Trade Unions
she asserted that the ‘democratic control of industry’ would give rise to ‘such a new respect for human labour’ that the worker would become ‘a “directing intelligence”’.
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Though ostensibly discussing ‘Woman’s Place in Industry’, she switched to using ‘he’ when she predicted this broadening of democracy at work – a revealing indication of how concepts of the dignity of labour and workers’ control were implicitly perceived around a gender-blind, male model. Feminizing the theorizing of democracy in the workplace proved as sticky as changing habits of labour organizing.

In the United States, women who had gained experience of labour issues by participating in radical and reforming projects before and during the war were similarly grappling with the dramatic changes in industry. Several moved from a focus on women’s issues to the industrial question as a whole, and sought to redefine the terms of industrial democracy. Nelson Lichtenstein comments: ‘World War I and the social turmoil of its immediate aftermath briefly tripled the size of the union movement and generated a wave of institutional experimentation that included government arbitration, works councils, employer representation plans, producer co-operatives, and nationalization schemes for industry.’
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Lichtenstein suggests that for women reformers ‘industrial democracy’ was a more palatable formulation than ‘workers’ control’, which was linked not only to the syndicalist left, but closely associated with skilled male workers’ defence of privilege.
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The writer Lewis Mumford, Helen Marot’s colleague at the
Dial
, has recorded how at the end of World War One hope flared in America for ‘reconstruction’ through ‘shop committees, industrial councils and democratic participation; perhaps national guilds to control the major industries and ultimately their government ownership’.
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He recalled Marot’s enthusiasm for the soviets in Russia and for British Guild Socialism in 1918.
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In her 1914 book
American Labor Unions
, Marot had expressed respect for the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World’s recognition of workers’ initiative. She believed in self-determination, learning through doing and human agency, echoing the syndicalists when she asserted: ‘whenever labor attacks the evils which beset it,
new power is created
’.
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But, though Marot had been impressed by the anarchists’ and anarchosyndicalists’ role in the Lawrence textile strike and shared the libertarian left’s suspicion of statist solutions, in her 1918 book
The Creative Impulse in Industry
she rejected workers’ direct action, saying that British shop stewards and the IWW were simply ‘protecting the workers’ share in the possession of wealth’. They ‘did not
develop
the idea of industry as an adventure in creative enterprise’.
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Lewis Mumford comments that her intention was ‘to appraise the productive process, not just in terms of profits, wages and the physical output of goods, but in terms of the kind of human being it nourished’.
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Marot was acutely aware of the tensions between the self-expression of the individual and a wider social group. She also retained elements of the utopianism of earlier radical dreamers, who had been prepared to imagine new forms of human relationships. Both personal fulfilment and co-operative transformation were integral to her ideas about how to democratize life at work.

Marot applied John Dewey’s educational ideas to production. Work should be about the self-actualization of the worker: a process of realizing the capacities of every individual. She was not, however, an individualist. She theorized in relational terms, fusing the Bergsonian creative impulse with a Ruskinian critique of the social purposes of economic activity. Echoing Helen Campbell and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s phrase, the ‘art of living’, Marot stated: ‘Art in living together is possible where the intensive interest of individuals in their personal affairs and attainments in their social group, in their vocation, in their political state is deeply tempered by a wide interest and sympathetic regard for the life of other groups and people.’
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Despite her reservations about mass production, like Barbara Drake she put her faith in the associative possibilities
which modern industry opened up for ‘relationships which are socially creative’.
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The American social reformer Mary Parker Follett was also interested in the debates within the British Labour Party on increasing the democratic participation of workers in industry. She was aware, too, of the ideas of left-wing shop stewards like J. T. Murphy as well as the Guild Socialists, but feared their approach would foster ‘group selfishness’.
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In her book
The New State: Group Organization The Solution of Popular Government
(1918), she argued the state should ‘Include industry without on the one hand abdicating to industry or controlling industry bureaucratically’.
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However, in this work her vision of group organization centred not on industry but on democratic engagement within neighbourhoods. Follett was articulating what other women adventurers had struggled towards in practice, through those myriad attempts to create forms of social provision which met human needs.

Follett’s new state was rooted in Idealism. It combined the social liberal T. H. Green’s organic Neo-Hegelianism with social housekeeping, and a dash of John Dewey’s learning through doing. Follett defined the ‘essential political problem’ as ‘how to be the state’.
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She believed the answer was genuine community action which could overcome the divide between individual and state: ‘If we want milk and baby hygiene organized, our own local doctors should in proper co-operation with experts on the one hand and the mothers on the other organize this branch of social service.’
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Active participation would ensure needs were met, save time, and integrate further investigation into the actual predicament of the neighbourhood. She insisted that ‘The community itself must grip its own problems, must fill its own needs, must make effective its aspirations,’ and criticized ‘reform associations’ which substituted themselves for action from the community, along with municipal services which she saw as robbing people of their ‘responsibilities’.
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Along with her wariness of state provision, Follett retained her social-housekeeping suspicion of Tammany Hall-style intrigue and thought that as society organized itself, politics would simply dissolve. ‘The platitudes and insincerities of the party meeting will give way to the homely realities of the neighbourhood meeting’.
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The neighbourhood groups were to act as the means of translating needs from civil society to the sphere of power. They were the key to a citizenship which was ‘active’, ‘responsible’ and ‘creative’,
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based not on ‘individual self-expression but community self-expression’.
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A sanguine Follett believed this
participation process would enable ‘local, intimate and personal concerns’ to be expressed.
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By dissolving the spatial boundaries between home and city, as well as the conceptual divide between private and public, she sought an internalized sense of democracy. She wanted politics to cease being ‘external’; instead, people themselves were ‘to be politics’.
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Follett’s mistrust of purely external remedies was characteristic of social reformers and radicals influenced by organic Idealist approaches to state and society. Fostered by Protestantism, this rejection of ‘externalism’ had been a feature of nineteenth-century charitable endeavours. It had transmuted during the late nineteenth century into an ethical concern to link inner transformation with political and social democracy, shifting somewhat in the early twentieth century when differing forms of consciousness and an interest in irrational influences on politics were being theorized. While Follett tried to connect internal consciousness with external action for change, Elaine Showalter shows how during the 1920s an avant-garde among American feminists were reassessing their preoccupation with public action.
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For some, the supposedly heroic political and social struggles of their youth were beginning to look like a terrible waste of energy. Ideals had withered. Others wanted to explore desires which could not be bundled neatly into demands, and to express doubts which did not fit into campaigns – even campaigns around personal issues, such as birth control. ‘I have traded my sense of exhilarating defiance (shall we call it feminism?) for an assurance of free and unimpeded self-expression (or shall we call that feminism?). In other words, I have grown up’, declared Ruth Pickering, a former member of the Heterodoxy Club.
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Striking a personal note could signal retreat from involvement in external causes; but it could equally be a means of simply reflecting on unresolved emotions. Earlier generations of activists had also tussled with intimate feelings which they could not square with their political views. Emma Goldman, filled with tempestuous passions aroused by her unfaithful and bumptious lover Ben Reitman, was troubled by the contradictions she saw in herself. She was publicly advocating free love in her lectures, yet felt bruised and humiliated by his infidelity. She said, ‘I have no right to speak of Freedom when I myself have become an abject slave in my love.’
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Looking back on her youthful bohemian experimenting, Mary Heaton Vorse dissected the collapse of her first long-term relationship:

I had . . . insensibly altered our relations over a period of years, and did it without realizing it. . . . The more I worked, the less he did. What did my success do to him? It dimmed life in some way. It sapped some vital force in him. There he was, suddenly no longer needed. . . . And his sickness with himself reacted on me.
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While an awareness of a rift between politics and the personal was not unique to the 1920s, the psychological validation of the subjective voice certainly enabled women to express personal perceptions which disturbed their political beliefs, and permitted a greater degree of self-consciousness about any discordance between public political stances and private feelings. Psychological confessions flowed into a popular idiom of women’s writing. In an article for
Cosmopolitan
on ‘Why I have failed as a mother’, Vorse observed that men and women continued to have very different attitudes to work. Hence women who tried to combine love and work were likely to experience a ‘double failure’.
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Though the confessional style was less prevalent in buttoned-up Britain, in 1928 Leonora Eyles ruminated frankly on her divorce in
Good Housekeeping
. She had crushed her ‘overmastering desire for love-making and romance’, because she distrusted expressing longing for her former husband. She had been too ‘proud – or it may be too mean-spirited – to let a man see how much he is needed’.
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