by Koven, Seth
Past and present, dirt and sisterhood, sameness and difference, rage and desire collide in Steedman’s Landscape, producing intimate but also painful encounters between “sisters,” creating new wounds even before old ones can begin to heal.
The political and sexual economy of dirt loomed large not only in the imaginations of elite women slum workers, but also in their analysis of poverty and in the charities and reforms they spearheaded. The dirtiness of slum life played a significant role in motivating elite women to see for themselves how the poor lived and in shaping their political agendas. For some, slumming was merely an evening’s titillation, fodder for conversations at fashionable dinner parties. But for many others, their encounters with dirt stimulated an abiding desire to clean up the city, to gain deeper empathy for their poor sisters, and to live in loving communities with like-minded women.
“THERE WILL BE SOMETHING THE MATTER WITH THE LADIES”
Elite women’s willingness to “go dirty” (to recall Hodson’s phrase) made it possible for them to flout bourgeois class and gender expectations even as they acted as missionaries bringing bourgeois values and culture to the working poor. It also created a space in which they could explore their own same-sex and opposite-sex feelings and identities. “Going dirty” sometimes gave rise to “dirty” desires in elite women, especially middle-class spinsters, who paradoxically claimed the right to enter slum districts because of their own presumptive status as sexless agents of moral and social purity. As cultural anthropologists have argued, “dirt” is “matter out of order” by which societies define the sacred and the profane, the clean and the unclean. Elite women’s attempts to control dirt were accompanied by the perception that their lives as independent females contributed to the disordering of gender and sexual hierarchies and expectations.52 Finding a way to live inside this tension, to negotiate its contradictions, was crucial for spinster reformers.
Edith Sing, an avid supporter of settlement houses for educated single women in slum neighborhoods, recalled a friend’s reaction to her explanation of the object and methods underlying the movement. “But there will be,” Sing’s friend supposed, “something the matter with the ladies!”53 In both fictional and nonfictional accounts, elite women’s desire to live among the poor was often characterized as a kind of madness, just as their need to bring order to the slums was assumed to be a symptom of some disorder within them. What was the “something the matter with the ladies” who went slumming?
The doyenne of aristocratic slum philanthropy, Maude Althea Stanley, was one of those who took a dim view of most women’s motives for helping the poor. She unfavorably contrasted men’s noble “vocation” for visiting the poor with the hope harbored by some “idle” and bored women “to find in the homes of the poor a cure for what is called ‘a disappointment.’”54 Was Stanley correct to think that living or working in slum neighborhoods functioned as a philanthropic sublimation for unmet sexual and romantic needs? Some evidence, at least, supports such a view. The New Woman novelist Olive Schreiner moved to the East End in June 1887 to complete her work on a novel about life among the poor.55 But to her closest friends, she revealed her deeper motives: the East End for Schreiner represented a space free from the tribulations of West End romance that threatened to overtake her. She wrote the homosexual socialist Edward Carpenter that she prayed for the death in her of “all that longs or wishes for anything.”56 For Schreiner, living in East London constituted a form of sexual renunciation—just as her unfinished project to write a novel about slum life was a substitute for her unfinished romance with the eugenicist Karl Pearson.57 We find in Beatrice Potter’s career in East London a similar elision between slumming, social analysis, and sexual discontent. Potter turned to work as a lady rent collector in Whitechapel to satisfy her need to “play a part in the world,” to collect raw sociological data about social questions, and to escape from the torments of her feelings for the dashing political maverick Joseph Chamberlain, feelings that she identified with her “lower nature.”58 In March of 1885, as her perverse involvement with Chamberlain continued to preoccupy her, she noted in her diary that “all is chaos at present.” However, in words that might more aptly have been used to describe her tangled affairs with Chamberlain, she described her experiences in East London as “a certain weird romance, with neither beginning nor end, visiting amongst these people in their dingy homes.”59 Her perceptions of East London invariably reflected her ambivalence about her sexual and professional status. Would she choose the role of wife or spinster, socialite or sociologist? The cultural link forged in late Victorian London between “disappointment” and slumming achieved the status of conventional wisdom in the decades ahead. In Barbara Pym’s subtle evocation of the long shadow cast by Victorian manners and morals in the twentieth century, Excellent Women, two devout spinsters concurred that “people often do strange things”—by which they meant engaging in good works in East London—“when they’ve had a disappointment.”60
If freedom from opposite-sex entanglements and a desire to exercise power attracted single women like Potter to the slums, their experiences sometimes confounded their expectations. When women directed their inspectorial gaze on laboring people, they were astonished and unnerved to learn that their sexual status was the subject of lively commentary among their clients. While Potter and her close friends Ella Pycroft and Margaret Harkness reveled in their “glorified spinsterhood,” the residents of model housing in the Katherine Buildings, the focus of their collective efforts in East London, speculated boldly about the sexual availability and activities of the “odd women” in their midst. One East Londoner, Mr. Price, who lived in the adjacent Brunswick Buildings, took a fancy to Pycroft and shyly asked her out to dinner. Perhaps self-defensively, Pycroft minimized the threat he posed to her mission as a single woman and to her status as elite observer by trivializing his interest in her. As if to remind herself that her relationship to Price was that of ethnographic investigator and not potential lover, she concluded her thoughts about the incident with a dismissive aside: “These East End manners are too amusing.”61 She was even more unnerved when she learned that her neighbors detected a budding romance between her and a gentleman coworker, Maurice Paul. Pycroft, who spent her days inspecting the homes of the poor, resented speculation about her private life by her East End sisters because she felt it might interfere with her work. She claimed to be amused by the Cockneys’ inability to appreciate the pure and altruistic—not sexual—motives that underpinned her womanly philanthropy.
Philanthropic projects like Pycroft’s, Potter’s, and Harkness’s, which had been undertaken to build cross-class friendships and to dissipate sexual desire, could and did veer precipitously into all sorts and conditions of opposite-sex romance. Only two months after firmly rejecting Price’s offer and reaffirming her commitment to spinsterhood, Pycroft was stunned to learn that her clients had understood her situation far better than she. Mr. Paul had fallen deeply in love with her: “I suppose I was a great donkey not to have seen long ago what other people saw—but I didn’t…. If I had not thought of him as a boy I should have seen quickly enough—but he was very odd and unlike other men.”62 Two years later, still determined to sacrifice none of her life’s work in the slums, Pycroft embarked on an ill-fated engagement with Paul. If female social observers exoticized the landscapes of the slums, Pycroft’s story reminds us that working people in turn wondered about the romantic and sexual lives of the elite women who came to live among them.63
Plenty of philanthropic women did find romance with their male counterparts in the slums, especially those connected to Methodist and Congregationalist networks of benevolence, which actively encouraged male and female workers to marry and raise families in their adopted slum communities. There was nothing “dirty” about sexual attraction between men and women whose love, stimulated by the shared desire to help the poor, consummated in marriage. “There is a law of Settlement philosophy which we have often laid down i
n these pages,” proclaimed the editor of the Monthly Record of the Wesleyan Methodist Bermondsey Settlement in October 1903. “Marriage is no deadly drug, but a healthy tonic; the duties of settlement membership are widened, the outlook is broader, the work is stronger.”64 In the previous five years, many of the settlement’s key workers, male and female, had found their mates working together in the mean streets of south London. Grace Hannam began her distinguished career of social service with the West London Mission in the early 1890s where she was known as Sister Grace, but she soon moved to the Women’s Branch of the Bermondsey Settlement. She found herself drawn irresistibly toward the children “who sit eternally on the curbstones and in the gutters of our tenement house districts.”65 In marked contrast with the largely all-female, day-to-day life at Anglican women’s settlements such as St. Hilda’s and St. Margaret’s, Grace and other members of the women’s branch of Bermondsey Settlement were in constant and close contact with their male counterparts. No one was surprised when Sister Grace consented to marry the witty and fun-loving Dr. Charles W. Kimmins in July 1898. After all, Kimmins, the London County Council’s leading child psychologist, had worked for years at the settlement and had assisted Grace in running her pioneering programs for crippled children. Their wedding was a great public event for both branches of the settlement house (male and female) and the neighborhood; it was not only a ritual joining of two lives, but a symbolic enactment of the settlement’s ideals about class and gender relations.
The Warden [of Bermondsey Settlement, Rev. John Scott Lidgett] performed the ceremony, Mr. Borland was at the organ, children from the Guild of Play [founded by Sister Grace] formed the choir, both floor and gallery was so crowded by the cripples and children who so warmly love “Sister Grace” that friends from a distance had some difficulty in finding seats at all. The very front row was reserved for some of the members of the Guild of the Brave Poor Things [another organization founded by Sister Grace], and when Dr. Kimmins—who was apparently quite too happy to keep still—came in some twenty minutes before time to help in getting people to their places, he had to shake hands with every one of them.66
Their marriage demonstrated that Sister Grace’s romantic attraction to the unwashed children of the gutter was compatible with her “healthy” attraction to a single male fellow worker. While commentators could not pathologize such love affairs as symptoms of decadence, some, like the socialist H. M. Hyndman, cynically dismissed women’s slum philanthropy as a mere pretext used by bourgeois women to snare suitable husbands.67
Bermondsey Settlement may have welcomed marriages among coworkers, but the tone of life at its women’s branch was set by educated single women, such as its head, Mary Simmons, its treasurer Alice Barlow, and lifelong same-sex partners, Laura Robinson and Anna Martin. These women evinced little interest in matrimony for themselves. For them and for so many other educated women, social welfare institutions in the slums of London were safe havens outside the confines of marriage and male authority where they could most fully realize their aspirations. When Laura Robinson died suddenly in 1907, the settlement celebrated not only her achievements as an educator and social worker among girls, but also her “close and abiding friendship with Miss Martin.” “Here, in congenial association with the Warden [John Scott Lidgett], with whom her relations steadily deepened into friendship, and with her closest friend [Anna Martin] as fellow worker, we are glad to feel she found the opportunity she desired and at the same time, helpful comrades and the freedom needed by her original personality and vigorous mind.” Mary Simmons, the author of the obituary, also noted that “here too began my own eleven years’ intimate personal friendship with her—but of that I do not write.”68
Simmons’s moving tribute depicts a community of single women who openly shared their admiration for spinsterdom, for social reform and social hygiene, and for each other. As several scholars have shown, women’s social welfare institutions such as settlement houses and missions incorporated many of the intimate, domestic rituals of girls’ schools and women’s colleges—nightly cocoa, “gaudies,” intense female friendships—into the fabric of their day-to-day lives in the slums. Surrounded by dirt, these women, like Florence Nightingale’s nurses before them, were determined at all costs to guard the reputations of their institutions and themselves from any charge of impurity and unwomanliness.69 Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, fearing that marriage “would close all doors to deliverance” from her “limited little world,” found precisely the liberation she needed by joining the West London Mission and living with like-minded women in a community “to carry out the subversive principles of social sharing.”70
While philanthropic men who lived in the slums were praised for sacrificing their personal and financial ambitions, men often attacked women for enjoying precisely the freedoms that Pethick-Lawrence celebrated. One enraged clergyman condemned women’s settlements as a recrudescence of the medieval “barbarities” of sexual celibacy. Woman seeks “some demonstrative way of expressing her new-found liberty; and, as all the sweet domesticities of life—husband, children and the loving care of them—are closely associated in her mind with the fetters of her slavery” she naturally “eschews the banalities of home, shirk[s] its responsibilities” while gaining “glory of a mild kind” for her benevolence.71 Because so many of these women were graduates of women’s colleges, commentators likewise criticized them for being hard, mannish, and unfeminine. These stereotypes were so powerful and widespread that they passed for truth among some philanthropic spinsters themselves. When Winifred Locket returned to London from a six months visit to Ceylon, she reluctantly agreed to take temporary charge of a branch of the Charity Organisation Society in North Lambeth. The organizing secretary of the COS, Charles Loch, suggested she lodge at the nearby Lady Margaret Hall Settlement. “I think I rather expected to find a somewhat rigid community of hard featured women,” Locket recalled years later, “who combined hard living with high thinking.” She was delighted with what she did find there—“a fellowship of work and sympathy and prayer”72—and stayed for thirty years.
Contemporaries were uncomfortable with the rise of same-sex communities of independent women—including celibate Anglican sisterhoods—who lived and worked outside the institutional, sexual, and psychological borders controlled by men. But the widely accepted ideal of women’s “passionlessness,” in combination with their supposedly inherent tendency to “selflessness,” protected women from the charge of homoerotic license, which was leveled at their male counterparts. It also left them unable to articulate their thoughts about their own sexuality. “The inability to think about sexuality in terms other than sin,” Martha Vicinus concludes, “inhibited both women and men from a deeper consideration of the motivations of their behavior, their own and that of those they sought to help.”73 At the same time, philanthropic institutions did support a remarkable number of lifelong partnerships between women. Some spinster slum workers were literally sisters, such as Margaret and Rachel McMillan or Anna and Fanny Tillyard. The Tillyard sisters lived and worked in Canning Town as part of the women’s branch of Mansfield House, a university settlement house established along municipal and Christian socialist lines by the Methodist Percy Alden. They created a health clinic/hospital for women and children that was staffed entirely by women doctors and nurses. Anna felt that her nursing work allowed her to “penetrate the hidden recesses of the struggling life of these darkened homes … to alleviate the inevitable suffering and gloom.”74 But just as importantly, the Canning Town Women’s Settlement gave them a place where they could engage in satisfying and productive work and live together with other single women. The lifelong partnerships of prominent spinster slum reformers and activists such as Anna Martin and Laura Robinson, Eleanor Rathbone and Elizabeth Macadam, Esther Roper and Eva Gore-Booth provided an alternative, non-kin model of passionate sisterhood.
But what was the nature of these non-kin sisterly loves? Where along a continuum of romantic friendsh
ip and sexual love should we place them? Historians of cross-class brotherhood and slumming have a range of sexually explicit sources (diaries, letters, transcripts and newspaper accounts of sex trials) that make clear that some elite men translated love for their working-class brothers into physical sex as well as into spiritual and cultural elevation.75 But, with their female counterparts, we simply do not have comparable historical sources by which to assess the intimate workings of their relationships. What are we to make of this absence in the archive? It is partly the product of the systematic destruction of sources. For example, it seems likely that Eleanor Rathbone’s first biographer, Mary Danvers Stocks, destroyed any correspondence between Rathbone and Macadam that revealed the character of their intimate life with one another.76 But it may also be a simpler matter. It seems very likely that most elite women’s physical relationships conformed to their own rigorous standards of sexual purity. Sex acts that never happened, like sources that never existed, cannot be recovered, no matter how diligently historians may search.77