Dreamers of a New Day - Sheila Rowbotham

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Ford promised a high-wage economy and the democratization of consumption, while others recoiled from boom-time materialism and headed for rural communes, craft workshops or Paris’s Left Bank. The vibrant market economy absorbed aspects of the adventurers’ faith in self-realization, which, when grafted onto the enterprise culture, stimulated private consumption rather than social transformation. Arts and crafts became a matter of form; neutralized as taste, contributing to 1920s ‘modern’ living in which simplification and lack of clutter were a means of streamlining existence. Similarly, enthusiasm for the ‘natural’ was detaching itself from any social utopia to focus on the bronzed athletic body, revolutionizing fashion and ideals of beauty. Daily life had changed, but not on the terms the innovators had imagined.

      The same trends affected British society, but were constrained by long-term economic decline and by a different political context. The existence of the Labour Party, backed by the trade unions and labour women’s organizations as well as Liberals sympathetic to reform, constituted a much stronger lobby for state intervention locally and nationally than in the US. Though suspicion of the state persisted among both Liberals and strands of the libertarian left that had been opposed to the war, the need for state resources seemed self-evident to large swathes of male as well as female reformers. But in the 1920s, a series of bitter industrial disputes and mounting unemployment meant that the earlier glimpses of a new dawn would be tempered by severe hardship. They emerged muffled and modified by party resolutions and local government committees. Amidst the long struggle for small gains against the economic grain, hopes of democratizing relationships at work, in communities and between individuals could seem like idealistic luxuries from an unrealistic past.

      Nevertheless hope died hard. In 1927 the British socialist and feminist Dora Russell envisioned a future in which human beings could feel ‘at home in the world, not fearing change but perpetually developing in suppleness and wisdom, perpetually devising new forms and new sources of delight’.58 The dreams of a new day morphed; nonetheless they survived.

      2

      How to Be

      Advanced women’s claims to education, meaningful work and independence presented them with unique choices and decisions about personal behaviour. They questioned not simply how life might be lived but, more existentially, how they might be. Appearance, identity and relationships were disputed, along with the very boundaries of private and public experience. From the early 1890s the dilemmas raised by this re-creation of self, and of self in relation to society, were explored in a slew of articles and books written by women. On the Threshold (1895), a novel by the British socialist and feminist Isabella Ford, depicts a new woman heroine struggling with the claims of family, the decision of whether or not to marry, and her yearning for an active, independent life. The image of the ‘threshold’ is also there in a poem by another socialist and feminist, Dora Montefiore. She described the fin-de-siècle new woman in 1898 as ‘Pausing on the century’s threshold/With her face towards the dawn’.1 The threshold not only marked the advent of a new era in terms of time; it symbolized inchoate aspirations and a powerful sense of unknown possibilities.

      Being poised on the edge of the unimaginable encouraged a reliance on inner-directed defiance. The anarchist Lizzie Holmes declared in 1896: ‘No barrier, no code, no superstition should stand in the way of woman working for the best thought within her, with her best strength, according to the brightest light glowing within her breast.’2 When Helena Born died in Boston in 1902, a friend from the Liberty anarchist circle, Emma Heller Schumm, described the journey from respectability Born and Miriam Daniell had made when they left the protection of convention:

      Fabian Women’s pamphlet (Fabian Society)

      They were serving their apprenticeship in the new life of their choice. There was much enthusiasm for ideas, much storm and stress, much material hardship; but it was all very beautiful. How I longed to shelter them from the world’s rough handling.3

      Reflecting on Helena Born’s life, Schumm declared, ‘Hers was certainly the experimental life; there were no rut marks on her.’4

      New selves, it seemed, could be made from old if only the will was sufficiently strong. This faith in human beings’ capacity to experiment in personal behaviour simply by asserting individual judgement against established moral codes and conventions, influenced not only anarchist adventurers, but feminist and socialist new women in the late nineteenth century. ‘What is thought proper now will very probably not be thought proper in the year 1919; therefore, let no mere conservative bias thwart our judgement,’ predicted Jane Hume Clapperton in 1885.5 She would be proved right. The resolve to follow inner conviction in sweeping aside the outdated clutter of conformity was reasserted from differing perspectives by rebel women on the left, in the feminist movement and in the artistic avant-garde. ‘We are regimented by conventions, habits and customs and ideas persist amongst us and control us because we do not submit them to trial by our commonsense’, the socialist and feminist Teresa Billington-Greig told the youth group connected to the Clarion newspaper, the Clarion Scouts, in Glasgow in 1914.6

      An immediate practical difficulty when women decided to behave differently was their inability to move about easily. Fashionable apparel was of little use if you wanted to work, to walk through city slums or take off into the countryside on your bicycle. One of the delights of social work, for Mary Simmons at the Bermondsey Settlement in South London, was that she could wander happily through the streets ‘with neither hat nor gloves, nor so much as even the hallmark of a sunshade’.7 Future suffragette Florence Exten-Hann came from a socialist working-class family in Southampton. In the 1890s she and her mother were members of the Clarion Cycling Club there: ‘Mother and I rode bicycles and wore bloomers, but had to carry a skirt to put on when riding in a town for fear of being mobbed.’8 A less inhibited young Crystal Eastman was to be found hurtling through the small New York town of Glenora, on the shore of Seneca Lake, ‘on a man’s saddle in fluttering vast brown bloomers’.9 Her parents, who were both Congregational ministers, believed in women’s rights. Nonetheless she startled her father by the open display of ‘bare brown legs’ when she wore her swimming costume: ‘he would not want to swim in a skirt and stockings. Why then should I?’10

      Bloomers had a long history. Adopted initially by utopian socialists and advanced women in the mid-nineteenth century, this overtly emancipated clothing had attracted such obloquy and derision that the next wave of rational dressers took care to make their bloomers look exactly like skirts. The veteran American feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton was intrigued by their ingenuity at a Glasgow suffrage meeting in 1882: ‘all the garments are bifurcated but so skilfully adjusted in generous plaits and folds, that the casual observer is ignorant of the innovation.’11 The Rational Dress Society was formed in 1888 to encourage comfortable, healthy clothing based on reason, utility and simplification. It extended beyond women’s wear, intimating a new lifestyle. By 1889 babies had been brought into the Society’s remit: the advanced baby in ‘simpler’ dress should sport either white flannel attached with a safety-pin between the legs, or white flannel shirts wrapped in front and ‘little warm bootikins’.12

      The strict application of reason and utility were never entirely satisfactory, and Romanticism also served as a wellspring for several waves of alternative fashion. An early exponent was Mary Paley, one of the pioneering group of Cambridge graduates who became a lecturer in political economy, teaching first at the new University College in Bristol, then at Oxford and Cambridge. An admiring student compared her to Tennyson’s learned Princess Ida: ‘She wears a flowing dark green cloth robe with dark brown fur round the bottom (not on the very edge) – she has dark brown hair which goes back in a great wave and is very loosely pinned up behind . . .’13 The aesthetic Mary Paley married the economist Alfred Marshall in 1877 and faded over the years into the role of great man’s helpmate, earning the scorn of Beatrice Webb as an example of how definitely not to become.

      If

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