Good Wives

by Margaret Forster

  Fanny was given a hard time by most of her husband’s male friends. She tried for a while to win them over, but never had the success she had with her in-laws – converting the lads proved far tougher, and ultimately impossible. Once she and Louis had left England, the poor relationship she had with his old mates did not trouble her as much, but nevertheless, as his wife, she had wanted to be liked and approved of by them. Her difficulties highlight those of many wives: what are they to do about their husband’s chums? Freeze them out? Compete with them? Relegate them to a separate compartment in his life? Make them their friends too? Or await events, see if they will just wither away of their own accord?

  We had many shared friends at the beginning, coming as we did from the same small city and attending the neighbouring boys’ and girls’ grammar schools, but then, while I was still at school, he went to Durham University and naturally made friends I didn’t know. Going to meet them wasn’t something I recall enjoying, but it didn’t seem too important to be liked by them when they were all going to go their different ways after university anyway. By the time we were married, only two of them had endured as friends and one of those had gone to live in America. That connection was, and is, maintained and kept alive with letters and photographs and the rare visit, but there has never been the slightest doubt so far as friendship goes that my husband is faithless. He doesn’t yearn for his old buddies, and when he went to a college reunion (and he loved his college days) he couldn’t seem to pick up where he left off. Sometimes I wish he had more friends of his own. Have I, as his wife, discouraged him from making and keeping them? Have I been a bad wife in becoming his only truly close friend? I don’t think so. Fanny might even have found that, if they had indeed stayed in England, Louis’s longing to carouse with his male friends would have faded (though it is true it had shown little sign of doing so). But when people marry young, as we did, the marriage can become almost a barrier to outside friendships – separate friendships aren’t needed in the same way, and those that have existed before are rarely strongly rooted enough to survive. And yet women seem more inclined to make other close friendships which exclude the husband and give them a degree of intimacy the men don’t achieve or necessarily want to achieve. I am no different from him in agreeing that he is my best friend as I am his, but nevertheless I do have women friends with whom I feel very involved and who give me something he cannot. This ‘something’ may not be important or significant, but it’s fun: those hours spent with each other droning on about what are often purely feminine concerns. Sometimes he can even get close to being a little jealous. ‘Where on earth have you been?’ he’ll ask. ‘You’ve been hours.’ ‘Just chatting to Susie,’ I’ll say. ‘What about?’ ‘Oh, nothing, it would bore you.’ ‘Tell me,’ he says, ‘tell me what you were talking about.’ And I can’t exactly. Two hours of what Elizabeth Barrett Browning used to call ‘the slip-slop’ of gossip can’t be summed up. When I try to recollect what’s been said between me and my friend all I come up with are a few banalities. He knows perfectly well that what I’ve said is true, I really have been talking about nothing, but it’s the implied cosiness he feels excluded from. And he has no counterpart with a male friend.

  This reminds me of how, when I was young, and one of my mother’s women friends was in our kitchen talking to her, and my father came home, the friend would automatically leave – the appearance of husbands was the signal to depart. A wife at all times gave precedence to her husband. That is no longer the unwritten rule, but I notice that if I am in a friend’s kitchen, or she is in mine, and our respective husbands come in, we stop. We stop and wait for them to go, or if we don’t precisely stop we talk differently till they’ve gone – and yet nothing whatsoever is being said which they could not hear. It’s all about atmosphere, but also about just a snatch of minor independence, keeping something to ourselves however trivial. I wish Fanny had had a woman friend to provide that kind of harmless intimacy when she so badly needed it. She had Louis, but at times she needed another ear, apart from Belle’s. It seems a pity she never had one.

  Fanny seems to me to have been a happy wife but not as fulfilled as she might have been. Her interpretation of the role of wife permitted her more independence than Mary Livingstone ever had, but not enough. That little job Fanny yearned for in Samoa (not that one was ever offered to her) would have made all the difference, as would the publication of what she called her ‘Diary of a Mad Housewife’. She felt too keenly her inferiority to Louis as the breadwinner and it sometimes made her bitter. She never for one moment deluded herself into imagining she had even a modicum of her husband’s talent – she knew he was a genius – but nevertheless she hankered after a more equal intellectual relationship. In daily conversation with Louis, she never felt any great distance between them, but his achievements were far superior to hers. And Louis could shut himself away and write, whereas she couldn’t. She had far too much to attend to, most of it in the interests of his comfort and well-being. A wife had to put the care of her husband first, before her own ambitions. She was financially dependent on him and if he wasn’t well looked after, how could he work? And it was his work, his career, which was important. Nobody could dispute that.

  But soon they could, and would.

  PART THREE

  Jennie Lee

  1904–88

  I

  MARY LIVINGSTONE AND Fanny Stevenson grew up in the full expectation of becoming wives. If they didn’t marry, it would have seemed that something had gone wrong in the general scheme of things. But Jennie Lee, born in different times, grew up absolutely determined never to become a wife. The very word was hateful to her, symbolising as it did ‘inferior’, as well as a great many other words synonymous with humiliation. Women, by the turn of the century, and more especially after the First World War, no longer thought of marriage as the only passport to security. They had access to others, and some women had in any case realised that this so-called security had its disadvantages. The changes in the status of women were happening fast as higher education was opened to them. Few women were like Jennie, deciding as a result that marriage was no longer worth the candle, but she was by no means on her own in regarding wifehood as a calling to be avoided.

  Towards the end of the previous century the Fabian and socialist Beatrice Webb had agonised over the meaning of marriage, for a woman intent on having a career. She came to the conclusion (aged twenty-six) that ‘marriage is to me a form of suicide’.1 Her work (investigating working-class social conditions and trying to improve them) was what mattered. She did not want to have to give it up when she became a wife and therefore some man’s slave – ‘I hate every form of despotism,’ she declared, and marriage she was sure was another name for it. Even after she’d met Sidney Webb (whom of course she did marry, and who never required her to sacrifice her career) she was writing in her diary: ‘I am fearful lest my work should be ended.’ It was what Jennie Lee was fearful of, but unlike Beatrice Webb she thought there was an alternative to marriage. She didn’t need the respectability it gave or the status. She planned to have lovers and enjoy all the advantages of the married state without the disadvantages.

  But she was not against marriage for all women, only for some, only for women like herself, unsuited to the domestic sphere and unwilling to obey a man. To Jennie, it was simple: some women, women like her mother for whom she had the greatest respect, were entirely suited to becoming wives and found true self-fulfilment in marriage. Both types of women had a place in society, and both roles – the wife and the career woman – should be honoured. But the place she assigned to herself bore no resemblance to the narrow niche accorded to the unmarried women of the previous century. Then, the worthy spinsters who consciously chose a career over marriage gave up a great deal. They had to. If you were not going to be a wife you were obliged to renounce sex, unless you were going to become a mistress and be disgraced, and with it all thoughts of having children. Jennie had no intention of denying her
self anything. Vowing never to become a wife did not mean vowing to have nothing to do with men. On the contrary, she envisaged entering into ‘free’ relationships within which she would enjoy sexual union as well as companionship without losing a modicum of her independence. She would have lovers, not one miserable husband. She would change her mind as often as she liked about whom she wanted to sleep with and never have to suffer the inconvenience of a divorce. Children would be no problem. She had no wish to have them, and would take steps to prevent the conceiving of them. It was all quite clear to her, growing up, but remarkably her determination never to become anything as ordinary and implicitly submissive as a mere wife was also accepted as gospel by her family. They didn’t laugh and say she would grow out of despising marriage and end up dancing down the aisle.

  And yet Jennie’s mother, just like the mothers of Mary Livingstone and Fanny Stevenson, had set a firm example of what a wife should be and had tried to train her daughter to follow suit – it was just that the training was rejected together with the example. Euphemia Lee was described as ‘a being without an ego’,2 ‘a dear Scottish dumpling, chuckling, resilient, selfless, alert, uniquely uncompetitive and unacquisitive’, the sort of wife who made it her life’s work to care for her husband and children, providing warmth and security and requiring little in return. Jennie herself paid endless tribute to what a good wife her mother was, commenting that she was a ferocious hard worker, ever up at dawn, cooking and cleaning without an hour’s rest the whole day. She’d been born one of thirteen children and had before marriage helped her mother run a hotel, doing the cooking for its dining-room. After she married James Lee, in 1900 at the age of twenty-two, she worked even harder, not only running her own home but still cooking at the hotel and helping to do its laundry. There was nothing anyone could teach her about housewifely arts and she excelled at them all.

  None of her skills was passed on to her only daughter. Jennie simply refused to learn. The extraordinary thing about this refusal was not that she would not copy her mother – there have always been plenty of rebel daughters in this respect – but that she was allowed to get away with it. Daughters in working-class families then were usually forced to help. The luxury of refusal was denied them when daily life was so hard for their mothers, with all the sheer physical labour involved in running a household. Wives exhausted themselves, and daughters were obliged to relieve them by learning as soon as possible to cook and clean and do the washing with all the hard work this involved. But not Jennie. No one whipped her into line. She got away with doing the minimum and did it badly. On Saturday mornings, her mother insisted that at least she should do the dusting in the house, one in a row of four-roomed cottages in Cowdenbeath (Fifeshire), but her attitude to this simplest of tasks was, in her own words, ‘negative’. Her mother dusted by clearing the surface to be cleaned, then wiping and replacing each object, but Jennie merely swiped the duster in and out of plates and ornaments with no interest in, or intention of, being thorough. Halfway through any household job she would stop and read a book. An attempt was made to instruct her in the important art of shopping, but she messed that up too. Saturday afternoons would find her down at the Co-op with a list of what to buy, but she invariably mixed up the order, broke the precious eggs and bought sweets without permission. She was a disaster as a trainee wife, and, moreover, proud of it.

  So, rather curiously, was her mother. Jennie exasperated her, but her scoldings were perfunctory – ‘She had not the slightest idea how to be stern,’3 commented Jennie, scornfully – and her efforts to make her daughter knuckle down were half-hearted. She seems, very early on, to have decided that Jennie had the right to reject her own values – here was a girl, a very clever and wilful girl, who was determined to be something other than a wife. There seemed no point in trying to force her to do what she not only did not want to do, but did incompetently. Example hadn’t inspired her, and chastisement would never work, not with Jennie’s character. It was best to let her concentrate on what she was good at, even if some people thought such tolerance amounted to spoiling her. And what Jennie was good at had nothing to do with dusting and shopping: she was good at talking and arguing, talents fostered by her father, not her mother.

  James Lee was a much tougher character than his wife. Jennie regarded him as ‘the all-wise infallible one’, the parent whose word she did obey and by whose opinions she was most influenced. It was her father she wanted to be like, not her mother, however much she loved her – what he said made sense to her, his critical socialist ideas finding an instant response in her heart as well as her mind. James Lee saw a revolution coming, one necessary to make the world a fairer place, and Jennie wanted to be ready to do her bit. Her father, for all his dedication to the socialist cause, was ‘only’ a miner, if one who chaired local labour union meetings, as his father and grandfather had done before him. He expected both his daughter and her younger brother Tommy to share his idealism, and they duly did, though Jennie was by far the more enthusiastic. ‘I was not fair and gentle like my brother. I was dark and stubborn’4 – stubborn enough to believe that against all the odds she could make something more out of her life.

  The odds undoubtedly were against her but, as she was well aware, not as hopelessly as they were against other working-class girls of her era. To start with, the Lees were not as desperately poor as most of the families among whom they lived. During Jennie’s childhood her father was never out of work and, because there were only two children, his wages made some treats possible. ‘I was one of the plutocrats,’ observed Jennie, recalling the overflowing Christmas stockings, and the presents of books and a double-jointed doll quite beyond the reach of other families. She had no experience of true deprivation, never had to endure hunger or cold, never lacked any basic necessity as many of her contemporaries did. She was an indulged, protected, much loved child who came home from school each day to a blazing fire in the hearth, a kettle boiling for tea in the kitchen, a tray of scones just coming out of the oven, and a white cloth on the table ready for her to sit down at. Even more impressive than all this material care and comfort were the time and patience bestowed on her by her parents. She was positively encouraged to air her half-formed views, and when socialist propagandists came to talk to her father she was not banished but invited to listen and learn. Never once was she told she was only a girl and that she should stick to girlish things.

  Yet there were some girlish things which did appeal to Jennie – she was not so much a bookworm that she scoffed at pretty clothes or being thought attractive. Her Aunt Meg, her father’s sister, was a decided influence, both in appearance and in how she conducted herself, and Jennie took note. As a young woman Aunt Meg had gone to America but she came back to Scotland on visits every second year. Her niece loved how she looked, so stylish in a fur coat and the most beautiful hats. Jennie’s mother was pretty but certainly not stylish and never looked like Aunt Meg who had about her an aura quite different from the other women around Jennie. And it wasn’t just a matter of clothes and make-up – Aunt Meg was stylish in everything. She had become a cook in America, where she’d done very well, and earned enough money to seem rich to the Lee family. There was never any air of domestic drudgery about this female relative, and when she eventually went off at the end of each visit she took a touch of glamour with her, leaving Jennie determined to have some of it herself one day. She wanted to fight the socialist fight but look glamorous and live artistically while she did it.

  Her mother, to her credit, was only too willing to help her. It was she, the housewife, who proved Jennie’s biggest champion when it came to education. Most girls left school at fourteen, but Jennie, who’d always shone academically, wanted to stay on and then go to college. Her father hesitated, proud though he was of her ability. The expense of keeping a girl at school scared him. She should be out at work and contributing to the family purse. But ‘mother was determined I should go on. Blindly determined … she would carry me on as far as
she could. She was game.’5 It was the ultimate proof, if Jennie had needed it, that though her mother excelled at being a wife she did not expect her daughter to follow exactly in her footsteps and learn to be what she herself was. Nor was it a case of Mrs Lee’s own ambitions having been thwarted by the lack of education Jennie was now receiving – on the contrary, she was content with her role in life and never expressed any yearning for a career. Her true worth was her recognition that all girls are not made for the same future and that they should be allowed an autonomy denied to her own and previous generations.

  It was a point of view Jennie put forward in a series of essays written in school exercise books. Women, she wrote, were obviously all different, so ‘why try to fit the infinite varieties into a rigid mould … [you] might as well force all women to wear size four shoes.’6 In another essay, grandly entitled ‘Do Women Lack Initiative?’, she fretted about the part love played in the lives of both men and women – ‘How is it that the same emotion influences the life and work of the two sexes so differently?’7 She lambasted ‘the dependence nature’ which she saw as having been imposed on women by men, and the way they had been ‘encouraged to acquiesce in their economic inferiority’. The trouble was caused, she deduced, by the institution of marriage, this desperation to become wives. ‘Marriage’, she wrote, ‘is no longer the sole future responsibility.’ Women’s emotional life needed to be ‘ennobled and enlarged’ and not repressed or stultified by marriage.