Cicely
Fairfield (Rebecca
West) was
born
in Kerry, Ireland in 1892. She was educated
at George Watson's Ladies' College, Edinburgh
and the Academy of Dramatic Art (1910-11). She had a brief career
as an actress before becoming a journalist, taking the name Rebecca
West after the heroine of Ibsen's Rosmersholm).
West, a
supporter of the National
Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) wrote
for The Freewoman before becoming
a staff member of The
Clarion in 1912. She also
wrote articles for the Daily
News, Star,
New
Statesman and New
Republic.
In 1912
West met H.
G. Wells and
in 1912 gave birth to his son, Anthony West. Her first novel, Return
of the Soldier (1918), was about a soldier from the First
World War suffering from shell-shock.
This was followed by the novels
The Judge (1922), The Strange
Necessity (1928) and Harriet Hume
(1929). She also wrote a study of the author D.
H. Lawrence (1930).
West continued
to take a keen interest in politics and was
a supporter of the Popular
Front government
in Spain during the Spanish
Civil War.
She joined with Emma Goldman, Sybil
Thorndyke, Fenner
Brockway and
C. E. M. Joad to establish the Committee to
Aid Homeless Spanish Women and Children.
After
the Second
World War West became more conservative in her political views
and wrote for the Daily
Telegraph and
the New
Yorker.
She published a large number of books including The
Meaning of Treason (1949), The
Fountain Overflows (1957), The
Court and the Castle (1958), The
Birds Fall Down (1966), McLuhan
and the Future of Literature (1969) and 1900
(1982). Rebecca
West died
in 1985.
(1)
Rebecca
West,
Time
and Tide
(9th February, 1923)
The real reason why women teachers are paid less highly than
men who are performing the same work is the desire felt by the mass
of men that women in general should be subjected to every possible
disadvantage. Men like women in particular; for their wives, their
sweethearts, their mothers, and their sisters they can feel as generous
and self-sacrificing love as the world knows. But all save the few
who have cut down the primitive jungle in their souls want women in
general to be handicapped as heavily as possible in every conceivable
way. They want this not out of malignity, but out of a craving to
be reassured concerning themselves and the part they are playing in
the difficult universe. They fear they are not doing well enough.
(That fear, enchantingly humble, should keep us forever from bitterness
against them. For they do marvellously well.) It would help them to
have faith in themselves if they could see others doing much worse.
So, hiding their purpose from themselves by a screen of argument they
set about contriving that women shall furnish them with this welcome
sight. If we are honest and not tainted with the modern timidity about
mentioning that there is such a thing as sex-antagonism we must admit
that they do this in various unpleasing ways. They exclude her from
as many occupations as possible on the ground that she is incapable
of following them,
thus providing the double benefit of filling the male practitioners
of those occupations with a proud sense that they are doing something
which half the world cannot, and of embarrassing the woman worker
by restricting the market for her labour. They debase the specific
work of women as wives and mothers by urging that they should undertake
it because they
are too weak and foolish to succeed in any other. And wherever possible
they arrange that women shall face life in that unequipped condition
which comes of having too little money. A person insufficiently fed
and clothed is apt to be most satisfyingly inferior to a person who
is sufficiently fed and clothed. It is this savage form of sex-antagonism
which makes people desire that women teachers should be paid less
highly than men who are performing the same work. Since there are
so many women engaged in the profession of teaching, and the payment
of men teachers is none too high, this affords a pleasing prospect
of female discomfort and inferiority on a large scale.
(2)
Rebecca
West,
reviewed Jailed for Freedom by Doris Stevens in Time
and Tide
on 24th March, 1922.
They (members
of the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage) found that the police
while constantly
arresting them for minute technical offences, would not interfere
when they were assaulted by hooligans, and later on led Government-organised
crowds of uniformed soldiers and sailors against them. They went to
prison and, in an interesting penal institution called the Occoguan
workhouse, were fed on worm-crawling food and exposed in insanitary
conditions and when they denounced this state of affairs, not only
on their own account but (as has always been the gentlemanly suffragist
way), on behalf of the ordinary offenders, the administration called
to mind a penitentiary in a swamp, which had been declared unfit for
human habitation nine years before, and put them there. All this they
endured and thereby, without any doubt at all, acquired the vote.
With extraordinary naivety the United States Government failed to
cover up its tracks and left it patent that it gave women the franchise
not because of any consideration of justice, but because they were
a nuisance. There was no such magnificent exhibition of the art of
climbing down in the grand manner (with classical quotation from Mr.
Asquith) as our Parliamentary debate on the passing of the Act. A
crude, new country America; but no doubt it will learn.
The resuscitation of the
suffrage agitation in the United States from the catalepsy of unhopeful
routine into which it had fallen at the death of Susan B. Anthony,
was due to Alice Paul, whom many of us remember as a brown wisp of
Americanism who had rather unaccountably strayed into the ranks of
Holloway prisoners. It appears that she returned home an inspired
leader. She was equipped with that gift of double vision which, though
we speak of those prophets we respect as single-eyed, is nevertheless
the first necessity of great leadership: a Talleyrand-like awareness
of the baseness of our enemies and the infirmities of our supporters
combined with a Franciscan faith that innocency is the normal condition
of human affairs, and will prevail again when these quite temporary
disturbances are quelled. She had magnificent courage of the profound,
enduring sort. This she needed badly, for apart from the rough and
tumble of street attacks and forcible feeding (which she had already
experienced in Holloway) she was exposed to great mental torture.
When she led a hunger strike in the Washington District Jail the authorities
sent doctors to her, who made it plain to her that they were examining
her with a view to sending her to the State Asylum as a victim of
persecution mania, on the ground that she had an obsession on the
subject of President Wilson. As this had no effect on her resolution,
they then put her in a psychopathic ward among criminal lunatics,
who were awaiting dispatch to the asylum, and ordered a nurse to go
to her once every hour all through the night and flash an electric
light into her face, so that she was prevented from sleeping for more
than a few minutes at a time. This also had no effect upon her, and
she carried on the hunger strike till
the Administration was beaten and had to release all suffrage prisoners.
(4)
Rebecca
West,
Time
and Tide
(16th July, 1926)
Dora Marsden conceived the idea of starting the Freewoman because
she was discontented with
the limited scope of the suffragist movement. She felt that it was
restricting itself too much to the one point of political enfranchisement
and was not bothering about the wider issues of Feminism. I think
she was wrong in formulating this feeling as an accusation against
the Pankhursts and suffragettes in general, because they were simply
doing their job, and it was certainly a whole time job. But there
was equally certainly a need for someone to stand aside and ponder
on the profounder aspects of Feminism. In this view she found a supporter
in Mary Gawthorpe, a Yorkshire woman who had recently been invalided
out of the suffrage movement on account of injuries sustained at the
hands of stewards who had thrown her out of a political meeting where
she had been interrupting Mr. Winston Churchill. Mary Gawthorpe, was
a merry militant saint who had travelled round the provinces, living
in dreary lodgings on $15 or $20 a week, speaking several times a
day at outdoor meetings, and suffering fools gladly (which I think
she found the hardest job of all), when trying to convert the influential
Babbits of our English zenith cities. Occasionally she had a rest
in prison, which she always faced with a sparrow-like perkiness. She
had wit and common sense and courage, and each to the point of genius.
She lives in the United States now, but her inspiration still lingers
over here on a whole generation of women.
Last updated: 6th August, 2002
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