Book review: Dreamers of a New Day: Women who Invented the Twentieth Century

Published on Friday 23 April 2010 20:09

Dreamers of a New Day: Women who Invented the Twentieth Century by Sheila Rowbotham Verso, 312pp, £20

AS SHEILA Rowbotham points out towards the end of this excellent account of the contributions made by working-class and middle-class women, radicals and anarchists, mothers and singletons in Britain and America, much of the rights women take for granted today were won by those "who were not at the centre of power, nor were they engaged in heroic acts or glitzed with glamour". As a consequence, most of them have been forgotten.

Rowbotham is not questioning why these women have been sidelined, but the roll-call of the organisations they formed and ruled, the laws they saw overturned and aims they achieved, is astonishing, and surely begs the question. American sociologist and novelist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for instance, is best known to us as the author of The Yellow Wallpaper, the story of a newly married mother who has been told to stop writing by her doctor, and who is driven slowly mad through imposed isolation. But Rowbotham shows the extent of her political activism: she was in charge of a feminist journal called Impress and participated in a host of reformist organisations.

One of the most interesting aspects of her study is the debt paid by many of these reformers from the 1910s and 1920s to the fin-de-sicle rebels such as Beatrice Webb, co-founder of the Fabian Society, who first charted this path of feminist resistance to the status quo. Webb belonged to the generation that went to see Ibsen's A Doll's House and left stunned when Nora slammed the door on her husband and children and walked away: Webb would declare when she married her husband, Sidney, that work would always come first for her, even before marriage. Webb's generation was no rag-tag bunch of bohemian fantasists, though, even though many of them were well-off: they were committed women with practical visions of a better world, and they bequeathed those visions to those who would find themselves faced with a world war to contend with, as well as the fights for women's rights.

But gender wasn't the only issue raising its head at this time: race was also critical in the United States, with the development of black women's organisations and black women writers finding that the Harlem Renaissance didn't tend to include them. Like many white women's groups in Britain, these groups emerged from "resistance" movements such as church-sponsored temperance movements, as well as from political groups such as the various socialist or communist parties that drew both working-class factory girls and middle-class artists.

What Rowbotham is really exploring though, in chapters that deal with sexual mores, motherhood, the production of labour, consumerism and so on, is the negotiation that was emerging at this time between the public and the private. Time and again, we hear about the distinction between the two – whether it's the shocking statistic from the early 1920s that it was four times more dangerous to bear a child than work in a mine, or working-class women testifying to Marie Stopes how terrified they were of having another mouth to feed, there is a clear correlation between the way women lived their lives behind closed doors and the laws that the state inflicted upon them. The goal of most of these feminist pioneers was not just to change the laws: it was also to bring about a change in mind and heart and soul.

When Rowbotham writes that, by the 1930s, there seemed to be a "hostility among young women to 'feminism'"; that feminist reformers struggled over how to balance careers with being mothers; that they complained of unequal pay for equal work, we are reminded that there are still so many rights to be fought for, still so many issues to be debated. It is thanks to women like Margaret Macmillan, who fought for school clinics and meals for schoolchildren, or Dora Russell, who campaigned for sex education, or Clementina Black, who spent her life campaigning for the rights of women workers, and who was active on the Women's Industrial Council, that my generation of women can lead the kinds of lives we do. We are not reminded of that fact nearly often enough. Rowbotham's book is that nudge in the ribs we all need.