Perhaps you who read this are a housewife with no ambition to make a career outside the home; perhaps you will say that the coming of Fascism would make no difference to you. But you would be wrong. (202)
Ethel Mannin’s Women and the Revolution was written in 1937 and first published by Secker and Warburg in 1938 but the copy I have is the US first edition published in 1939 by Dutton. Therefore, I can claim this piece as a celebration of its eightieth anniversary. The contemporary relevance of a book following a very particular and decidedly minority line might seem negligible. Mannin was a member of the Independent Labour Party (I.L.P.) and a supporter of the P.O.U.M. in Spain. The most likely place people will have come across discussions of her politics (very few indeed will have come across any discussion of her fiction) are in books about her fellow I.L.P.-member (and soldier with the P.O.U.M.), George Orwell, such as John Newsinger’s Hope Lies in the Proles: George Orwell and the Left (2018). However, unlike Orwell, Mannin did not abandon the I.L.P. position after the outbreak of the Second World War but remained opposed to it as an imperialist war and adopted a specifically pacifist stance. (It should be noted that this sometimes led her into anti-Semitic positions such as arguing that Jewish interests wanted the war and downplaying Nazi atrocities against the Jews at least up until 1942 – see Newsinger, p. 88).
While those arguments lay ahead in the future, Mannin was aware of a different set of contradictions embodied in her dedication of Women and the Revolution to her friend, Emma Goldman. In the opening ‘Dedicatory Letter’ to Goldman, Mannin writes:
There will be those who will no doubt find it paradoxical that a book which quotes from Marx and Lenin and advocates social revolution for the establishment of a Workers’ State along Marxist lines (though not as interpreted by the Stalinist bureaucracy) should be dedicated to you, an Anarchist, and as such opposed to any Centralized State. (np)
She goes on to specify that the difference between herself and Goldman is that rather than see Marxism as inevitably flawed, she still believes in ‘a real dictatorship of the proletariat which would not deteriorate into the dictatorship of a bureaucracy’. Mannin argues that such a free workers’ democracy would become indistinguishable from the ‘Libertarian Society of Anarchism’ advocated by Goldman. But this isn’t just a hypothetical discussion, the possibility of common ground between the two is rooted specifically in the collaboration between the P.O.U.M. and the Anarchist-Syndicalist C.N.T. –F.A.I. in the Spanish Revolution of 1936 (the details of which are best known today to a British readership from Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia [1938]). Therefore, Women and the Revolution is written for a particular political context as a political intervention during a particular moment in which a window of opportunity had opened up (rather like Walter Benjamin’s concept of the Jetztzeit or revolutionary now-time, when it is briefly possible to act outside the normal circumscriptions of tradition and historical weight). However, as Mannin was aware, this window of opportunity was rapidly blinking out of existence:
At the time of writing this (October 1937) the most that can be said is that though the revolution received a severe set-back after the May rising, all is not lost, though the effects of the revolutionaries are yet to be seen. (185)
Her arguments carry a sense of urgency which speaks out of its time – and the now-dated concerns of the respective ‘lines’ of the I.L.P., the Anarchists and the Communist Party – to us today in the midst of the political and cultural crises of 2019. Mannin focuses on the situation of Spanish women, who, under the influence of the Catholic Church, were kept away from public life and within narrowly delineated passive roles. They didn’t have the social freedom of women in England; a fact presented by Mannin as completely outside the norm for modern life. From the beginning of Women and the Revolution, she seeks to establish female emancipation as not just a facet of modern life but the defining feature of modernity, which has come about not just through progress and reform, but through the radical agency and revolutionary activity of women:
There has been in our time a revolution for women – the revolt of Woman against the oppression of Men, which culminated in the full enfranchisement of women in 1928. … (30)
Therefore, her discussion of the struggle of Mujeres Libres (Free Women), a group backed by the Anarchist trade unions, ‘to emancipate women from the triple slavery of ignorance, traditional passivity and exploitation’ and find new ways for men and women to live and work together without excluding each other, while supporting women nurses, teachers, doctors, artists, chemists and skilled workers, is key to the whole book. The rapid progress of women in revolutionary Spain by the summer of 1937 is attributed to ‘women’s emancipation marching side by side with the revolutionary movement’. However, all these advances are threatened:
. . . since then the Mujeres Libres organisation has been suppressed – part of the work of the counter-revolution which suppressed the P.O.U.M. after the May rising. But nothing short of a Fascist regime can now suppress the feminist movement itself; the women have tasted freedom and will no more tamely retire behind their grills, to be dominated by husbands, fathers, priests, then the women of England retreated from their new found place in commerce, industry, professions, when the [First World] War was finished. (190)
Viewed from the condescending and often uncritically historicist perspectives that we so often adopt from our present to the past, the struggles of the Women’s Movement before the 1960s and 1970s often seem like merely precursory steps to a modern progressive, feminist consciousness but Mannin makes clear the absolute centrality of these issues to 1937. While the situation in Spain hangs in the balance, the dystopian spectre of what is already happening in Nazi Germany menacingly overshadows the prospects of all European women:
All that progressive women have worked for for years has been lost. Women professors, doctors, civil servants, have been sacked. Women are no longer eligible for Government posts, and may not be appointed to municipal positions. That women should be displaced in medicine and teaching, two spheres in which women can do such valuable work, seems fantastic, but it is all in line with the Nazi policy of woman’s subservience to male domination. (196-7)
As discussed in my previous post on Mannin’s Confessions and Impressions (the Penguin paperback version of which was another direct intervention in to 1937 British public life), Mannin addresses her readership as sharing a progressive perspective with her but she is not assuming they are an educated or middle-class reader; rather the assumption seems to be that her readership are the same working- and lower-middle-class women readers who read her fiction in large numbers. The implication of her writing is that there is a mass audience for what she has to say and that she is articulating values with a wider social currency. It is difficult, for example, to pigeonhole Mannin as a highbrow writer such as Virginia Woolf and therefore claim she is only speaking for a minority (although we know from the letters Woolf received, that Three Guineas didn’t just speak for a highbrow readership). Rather, Mannin, her books and her readership suggest that the 1930s were a self-consciously modern decade and that the Fascist project to reverse the emancipation of women was seen as just as much of an antiquated, regressive, reactionary backlash as manifestations of Trumpism and related reactionary movements are seen today. It is in this context, that suggestions of a return of the politics of the 1930s are problematic because Fascist or Trumpist politics were not characteristic of the 1930s but were as much an alien intrusion at that time as they are now. A modern, emancipated society was in place and it is the culture and structures of feeling of that society which we should be trying to make links with from the perspective of 2019. Only a mature, feminist public sphere could give rise to all the cultural, social and economic networks necessary to support the publication in 1938 alone of books such as Women and the Revolution, Three Guineas and Naomi Mitchison’s The Moral Basis of Politics. Mannin’s insistence that there has been a revolution for women and her discussion of the Communard Louise Michel (45-50) remain relevant as interventions today and, indeed, can be found in the work of an activist-journalist such as Paul Mason (see Mason 2015: 290; Mason 2019: 283-8).
To be sure, women in 1930s Britain didn’t have the same abortion and divorce rights as they do in the 2010s but Mannin’s discussion of ‘Marriage and Divorce’ (214-227) argues that this is an anachronism resulting from pre-contraceptive and pre-state-support history. Here, her argument is again directed at the mass of working- and lower-middle-class women and can be seen as a continuation of positions advanced in her novels, such as Venetian Blinds (1933):
The Mord divorce had an unsettling effect on the street. Feminism ran riot amongst the women. Mrs. Wray expressed it as her opinion that the time would come when women would be able to get divorces as easily as men; a man could divorce a woman for a single act of adultery, whereas a woman had to prove cruelty as well as adultery; it wasn’t fair, and when women had the Vote the men would have to sit up and take notice; things wouldn’t always be as they were, with the men having it all their own way. It was all very well to laugh at the Suffragettes, but there was more to it, all the same, than smashing shop windows, slashing Academy pictures, and knocking off policemen’s helmets; even her husband admitted that. (Mannin 1933: 71)
This scene is set before the First World War but it is written for a 1930s female readership, who had the vote, and therefore could reasonably expect equalisation of rights in these other areas. But Mannin’s wider point is that only revolutionary change can ultimately achieve full emancipation:
Reforms of one kind and another can do much to make the lives of women freer and easier and happier, but women’s real need is for moral revolution in the society in which she lives, and you cannot get moral revolution by reformist methods; to achieve that the whole of the existing form of society must be smashed and something new fashioned nearer to the heart’s desire. (208)
The deployment of the phrase ‘heart’s desire’ by a writer who was certainly regarded in some contexts as a women’s writer or a romantic novelist is significant here because it privileges desire as a source of agency and a force for change. The epigraph for Mannin’s Confessions and Impressions is Edna St. Vincent Millay’s ‘My candle burns at both ends:/ It will not last the night;/ But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends,/ It gives a lovely light!’ This concept of having it all resonates with what I have described as the post-scarcity emotional economy in Mitchison’s We Have Been Warned: ‘there is no inherent conflict between individual self-realisation and group welfare if the type of society is one which is capable of giving expression to, and support for, a diverse range of identities and relationships’ (Hubble 2017: 20). Both Mannin (225-6, 276-7) and Mitchison use the experience of women in the Soviet Union – despite both having criticisms of that society – as support for the argument that revolutionary change is necessary for women to be able to freely express themselves:
These free, natural women will be beautiful with health and freedom and happiness – can you not see them, with their fine teeth, their natural healthy hair, their strong athletically graceful bodies, their good skins whose loveliness is more than skin-deep? These emancipated women getting the most out of life in both work and play. They are the women of To-morrow, the women of the Revolution. (270)
This remarkable book gives the reader a direct sense of what was at stake in 1937 – and, by implication, what is also at stake in 2019 – and implies that there was no default position by which the social situation of that time could have been somehow preserved. There was only social change or social regression – revolution or reaction – on offer. People understood that in the late 1930s and chose accordingly. Even if we view the 1945 political settlement in Britain as a small ‘c’ conservative resolution of the much wider range of possibilities for social transformation opened in the interwar years, it still marked a society radically different from that of before the War. In Women and the Revolution Mannin frames the social questions confronting ordinary women in the late 1930s in explicitly political terms. Although this book is not anywhere near as overtly self-reflexive (it does include reflections on her own schooling and other acknowledgments of personal experience) as Mannin’s autobiographical and autobiografictional output of the period, it raises questions about the relationship between social change, self-reflexive writing and political consciousness that are central to this project.
Further Reading:
Hubble, Nick. The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question, Edinburgh University Press, 2017.
Mannin, Ethel. Confessions and Impressions, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1937 [1930].
Mannin, Ethel. Venetian Blinds, London: Jarrolds, 1933.
Mannin, Ethel. Women and the Revolution, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co, 1939 [1938].
Mason, Paul. Clear Bright Future: A Radical Defence of the Human Being, London: Allen Lane, 2019.
Mason, Paul, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. London: Allen Lane, 2015.
Newsinger, John. Hope Lies in the Proles: George Orwell and the Left, London: Pluto Press, 2018.
Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. London: Secker and Warburg, 1938.
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