LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
The New Feminism
SIR.-I unfortunately missed Honor Croome's review of The Art of Being a Woman, but there are some points in Mrs. Henrey's letter which require further comment. It is true, I think, that there is a certain reaction from the suffragette movement of fifty years ago. Recently I invited a small class of sixth-form girls at a boarding school to choose some feature of late nineteenth-century history for individual study. The causes of the Great War, social reforms, ale the rise of the Labour Party, were popular. The Women's Movement was unanimously rejected. The reaction of which this is one example is not, perhaps, surprising. The causes for which their parents fought are generally stale news for the generations which enjoy the fruits of the struggle ; and, after all, the feminist writers arc sometimes (are they not ?) a little shrill.
Some parts of the letter seem to require clarification. What, for instance, does Mrs. Henrey understand by the " main issues" which women M.P.s are accused of rejecting ? And could she justify such an accusation of, e.g., Eleanor Rathbone ? Mrs. Henrey's real burden seems to lie in a complaint that economic and social pressures are now being used to suppress the feminine side of women and turn them into "near men." As regards economic pressure there may be something in this. Shortages of housing, foodstuffs and inaterials which bear hardly on everyone bear, perhaps, most hardly on women of the middle classes to whom they were the raw material for creating a certain standard of gracious or elegant living. There is financial pressure on the married woman to go out to work. The argument that it is patriotic to do so is. of course, a reflection of the present labour shortage. One hears plenty of arguments on the other side, especially from sociologists. For the rest, I feel that Mrs. Henrey exaggerates. I have noticed no inclina- tion among, for instance, the highly intellectual and extremely ornamental young ladies at Oxford and Cambridge to soft-pedal their femininity ; rather the reverse. It may be considered a political heresy to wish that linen and fine foods were within teach of the rich when they are not within reach of the poor, but not, I think, a feminine heresy to sigh for nylons and a house (not a room !) of one's own. If Mrs. Henrey wishes to cook, sew, iron and knit, no one, I'm sure, will seek to prevent her.
The real predicament of women is more fundamental than this letter suggests. Most women are in some degree two-sided. In some the feminine family home-making side claimed by Mrs. Henrey prepon- derates; but most have also an independent, active and often intellectual side. In Victorian times the first side was exalted and the second harshly suppressed. The degree and the results of this suppression are power- fully illustrated in Cecil Woodham Smith's biography of the very
feminine Florence Nightingale. Actually the harshest, if concealed, feature of this suppression was not the relegation of Victorian women to the home, but the gradual draining from the home of those creative housewifely activities which had absorbed the time and energies of earlier generations. This more than anything drove Victorian women to revolt. Meantime, the masculinity of the women's movement was a not unnatural over-assertion of the independent and active side of character which had been suppressed. It resulted,in a rather self-conscious aping of male customs, and this has to a small extent become a tradition after the circumstances which produced it have largely disappeared.
The fundamental problem, that of fulfilling both sides of the balanced female character, remains. When a man marries, his domestic nature finds expression without ruining (although it sometimes limits) his career. When a women marries, at least when she has children, her career and her serious professional interests pay the price. Of course, a hundred exceptions leap to the mind, of women who have had husbands and children and careers. They are, however, still exceptions. and 1 think that if they were analysed many cases Would be found where the price had been heavy to the husband or the children or the woman herself in overstrain. Generally speaking successful marriage still crowns a man's career and wrecks a woman's. I cannot see any easy answer to this problem, but I am sure the answer does not lie in over-emphasising the purely feminine element in women's character. In that direction lies reversion to Victorianism.
There is also at present a large class of women who can never get married (unless they choose to break up somebody's home) because women heavily outnumber men. And although they may sew and cook and read women's magazines if they wish, in the intervals of earning their living, they cannot fulfil the side dl their nature of which pleasure in these things is mainly a symptom. There is no easy answer to this either, but I am sure the answer does not lie in the sndless concentration on romance and the adornments of scx which some of the women's papers encourage. In the competition for husbands many are bound to fail. Surely the criticism of these magazines is that they induce foolish females to live in a dream world of happy endings, so that when they wake up to hard facts they are even•less fitted to pursue thejr way alone. No one wants to abolish the good women's papers.
The spinster more than anyone requires that those spheres of activity which our feminists forced open should be kept open. She requires neither to sacrifice her natural femininity nor in inessentials to emulate the male. But she must get the chance to fulfil one side of her nature if she cannot fulfil libth, and she must not be reduced like the Victorian maiden aunt to stultification all round. These are some of the real issues beyond Mrs. Henrey's complaint. am, Sir, yours sincerely,
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