Commonplace 81 George & Post-Death Positivism. How Ethel Harrison Memorialised George. PART TWO
This is the 1908 letter Mrs Frederic Harrison wrote to the 'Queen' click, an influential (amongst the middle classes) women's magazine mainly focused on fashion and domestic trivia. To explore more click about the Suffrage movement and the Antis. In the second cutting, Ethel invokes the name of her one-time employee: George Gissing.
By the time Ethel decided to make use of George to back up her ideas, a reasonable enough job had been done on managing his legacy and attempts to whitewash out the mistakes and blemishes in his character had been mainly successful.
Ironically, emphasis here is on women not doing 'traditional roles' - and yet we know George hardly ever fulfilled his traditional masculine role! If enfranchised women were likely to be 'failing in their special work' - which we can interpret here as the traditional female role within the family - what about the 'special work' of men - which was primarily to provide for a family of dependants and to nurture their spouses? George abandoned two women who were not able to fend for themselves. He abandoned two children to the care of others, even though he could have brought them to live with him. True, he paid for things - but the real business of being a husband and father was of no interest to him - and he always acted out of self-regard, unless it was with his blood relatives - remember, George had said in his Commonplace Book I strongly doubt whether husband & wife ever become as much to each other as relatives by blood. And, yet, he allowed Alfred to go to strangers in Cornwall, rather than bring him to live with him in France, and Walter spent most of his childhood reaping the whirlwind of George's unheroic character.
Presumably Mrs Harrison realised that hardly any of the readership of the newspaper she wrote to would know the dirty secrets of George Gissing's life.
What Ethel should have said is this: Watch out, girls! If you have the vote then men will treat you like muck, much as George Gissing treated his wives and deserted his children when he sodded off to France with his mistress. Because men will always blame you for their woes, and because at bottom, it will always be about money - which they will always regard as theirs - you have to keep your mouths shut. But carry on letting them think they run the world - or they will come after you with vengeance.
Amongst the anti-suffrage propaganda we find some pretty horrifying concepts. Women who wanted the vote were demonised as unfeminine, unmarriageable, hideous viragos whose lack of intelligence and seriousness of mind would soon undermine the country should they be allowed to decide anything of significance. George blamed women for their situation whilst failing to lay the fault at thousands of years of oppression. Doing nothing in his fiction to offer a solution - George, the inveterate fence-sitter who didn't care enough to get involved in anything too contentious or likely to help situations he treated as copy - could only be a cold, distant observer. He never cared much for the public - the private was his territory. The infantilizing of women is bound up with attitudes to power and sexuality, and George's biggest personal concern was who would do his housework cheaply and nurse him through his sickness - and so the 'servant situation' - the large number of girls turning away from domestic work and entering business and manufacturing - probably affected him more than the Rights of Women. His views were expressed coldly and with a sort of philistinism that became apparent when he fell to wooing Gabrielle Fleury. He back-pedalled like stink to undo the concept she had of him (based on reading his books) as a misogynist, but, like many men with monstrous ideas, he blamed all that on the stupid public's misreading of his 'irony'. In the end, he did not have the courage of his convictions with his own convictions - we cannot expect him to be all that bothered about the convictions of others!
This is the 1908 letter Mrs Frederic Harrison wrote to the 'Queen' click, an influential (amongst the middle classes) women's magazine mainly focused on fashion and domestic trivia. To explore more click about the Suffrage movement and the Antis. In the second cutting, Ethel invokes the name of her one-time employee: George Gissing.
By the time Ethel decided to make use of George to back up her ideas, a reasonable enough job had been done on managing his legacy and attempts to whitewash out the mistakes and blemishes in his character had been mainly successful.
Ironically, emphasis here is on women not doing 'traditional roles' - and yet we know George hardly ever fulfilled his traditional masculine role! If enfranchised women were likely to be 'failing in their special work' - which we can interpret here as the traditional female role within the family - what about the 'special work' of men - which was primarily to provide for a family of dependants and to nurture their spouses? George abandoned two women who were not able to fend for themselves. He abandoned two children to the care of others, even though he could have brought them to live with him. True, he paid for things - but the real business of being a husband and father was of no interest to him - and he always acted out of self-regard, unless it was with his blood relatives - remember, George had said in his Commonplace Book I strongly doubt whether husband & wife ever become as much to each other as relatives by blood. And, yet, he allowed Alfred to go to strangers in Cornwall, rather than bring him to live with him in France, and Walter spent most of his childhood reaping the whirlwind of George's unheroic character.
Presumably Mrs Harrison realised that hardly any of the readership of the newspaper she wrote to would know the dirty secrets of George Gissing's life.
What Ethel should have said is this: Watch out, girls! If you have the vote then men will treat you like muck, much as George Gissing treated his wives and deserted his children when he sodded off to France with his mistress. Because men will always blame you for their woes, and because at bottom, it will always be about money - which they will always regard as theirs - you have to keep your mouths shut. But carry on letting them think they run the world - or they will come after you with vengeance.
Amongst the anti-suffrage propaganda we find some pretty horrifying concepts. Women who wanted the vote were demonised as unfeminine, unmarriageable, hideous viragos whose lack of intelligence and seriousness of mind would soon undermine the country should they be allowed to decide anything of significance. George blamed women for their situation whilst failing to lay the fault at thousands of years of oppression. Doing nothing in his fiction to offer a solution - George, the inveterate fence-sitter who didn't care enough to get involved in anything too contentious or likely to help situations he treated as copy - could only be a cold, distant observer. He never cared much for the public - the private was his territory. The infantilizing of women is bound up with attitudes to power and sexuality, and George's biggest personal concern was who would do his housework cheaply and nurse him through his sickness - and so the 'servant situation' - the large number of girls turning away from domestic work and entering business and manufacturing - probably affected him more than the Rights of Women. His views were expressed coldly and with a sort of philistinism that became apparent when he fell to wooing Gabrielle Fleury. He back-pedalled like stink to undo the concept she had of him (based on reading his books) as a misogynist, but, like many men with monstrous ideas, he blamed all that on the stupid public's misreading of his 'irony'. In the end, he did not have the courage of his convictions with his own convictions - we cannot expect him to be all that bothered about the convictions of others!
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Here, we see one of the biggest concerns - women outnumbering men in the population. This was made worse after the First World War when there were even less men to vote. Maybe the war work women undertook swung it in our favour - as is the received wisdom - but maybe men realised if they were outnumbered, they had better smarten up their attitude and recognise women were only going to rise up and claim what they previously had asked for.
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| Typical privately-funded 'Anti' propaganda - and the Suffragists were the peaceful ones! |
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