Author Archives: Natalie Bennett

Meeting Dora Russell and Margaret Oliphant

December 24, 2012 – 10:38 pm

Reading Rosemary Dinnage’s Alone! Alone! Lives of Some Outsider Women, I was pleased to meet Dora Russell, one of the exes of Bertrand.

On English public schools she said: “I don’t see that you can get anywhere in creating a new society without getting rid of them. I’m not hostile to them; they do magnificent work in their field. But the you have it, in the heart of our society, a masculine hereditary tradition for generation aft generation; out of those schools come me , men who expect to take the highest posts in our society; and against that I don’t see how democracy, or women, are going to have any influence whatsoever.” (P86)

And on conservation and the natural world, for which she was a campaigner….” I wrote a review of a book recently on man’s responsibility for nature,and I said now that we’ve had a look at the cold moon, and our own earth in contrast, we realise what a precious thing we have here. We should be taking care of it, and enjoying it loving it; and to me this is worth everything else in the world that anybody could invent.” (P 283)

Also found interesting the life of Margaret Oliphant, forced by circumstance to be a journey woman writer when she might have been much more. Her second novel Margaret Maitland, “was unconventionally the story of a sturdy Scottish spinster – “we are not aware that the Maiden Aunt has ever before found so favourable representation in print” said the Athanaeum.” (P 245)

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Co-operative history

December 8, 2012 – 12:17 am

Notes from Nicole Robertson’s The Co-operative Movement and Communities in Britain: 1914-1960

p. 52 “Co-operative society membership gave an entitlement to the dividend – a cash return from the members’ local society at the end of every quarter or half-year. For Beatrice Potter, one of the main motives ‘that impels the rank and file of members … is the ‘divi’…. her criticism of these ‘dividend hunters’ who failed to engage with the ideology of the movement has contributed to the establishment of a ‘dominant narrative within labour history of the limited appeal of consumer co-operation’.”

p. 136 A pamphlet for the Co-operative Women’s Guild “attempted to ‘bring home to every woman the power and danger of the Capitalist Combines’ and to inform its members how ‘sometimes the separate capitalist firms in an industry join together in one great firm, as in the Soap Trade. When a Combine is supreme, it constantly restricts production in order to keep up prices’.(Indeed a 1921 survey found Co-op soap was consistently cheaper than that of the Soap Manufacturers’ Association members, even though its production was lower.

p. 154 “The movement was founded in the 19th century on a commitment to sell pure and unadulterated food at fair prices, and this remained of central importance to its work in the arena of consumer protection during the 20th century. The co-operative movement was involved with … food safety and testing, the problems caused by profiteering, and ensuring an equitable supply of food during periods of work … During the Second World War … it provided advice to civilians on a range of consumer issues. In the 1950’s, the cooperative movement actively supported the BSI’s Kite-Mark scheme, and in 1960 it was responsible for sponsoring and publishing the first book that explained to consumers their legal rights.

p. 179 “Co-operators were continually reminded that an alliance with the Labour Party was necessary, as independent representation on local councils and in general elections would involve ‘tak[ing] on all comers, including the Labour candidates … That would be political folly.’ However, this in no way meant that relations were always amicable. Sidney Pollard argues that, in the period immediately preceding the First World War, the ‘natural groundswell which drove the Co-operative movement into the arms of the Labour Party seemed to be irresistible’. However, an exploration of relations between the two parties at a grassroots level during the period 1914-60 challenges any assumptions of this being a wholly ‘natural’ or ‘irresistible’ alliance.”

p. 216 “Peter Gurney in his study of the movement from 1870 to 1930, argued that ‘just as there were historical alternatives to mass production, so too were there alternatives to mass consumption’ and the co-operative movement was one of these…. He argues however that whatever revolutionary potential the cooperative movement did posses, was lost by 1930, and during the interwar period the fact that the movement could not complete with the shopping experience offered by stores like Marks and Spencer and Lewis’s (‘the stress on utility meant that cooperative stores did not usually stock the latest fashionable designs’) is evident.

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Allomothers and human evolution

December 7, 2012 – 11:44 pm

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding begins with an unforgetable image – of a planeload of chimpanzees in the place of human passengers. “Any one of us would be luck to disembark with all ten fingers and toes still attached, with the baby still breathing and unmained. Bloody earlobes and other appendages would litter the aisles.” It’s a dramatic way illustrate the truly amazing sociability of the human race, the desire of strangers to at least get along and often empathise with each other. The aim of her book, she says, is to “explain the early origins of the mutual understanding, giving impules, mind reading, and other hypersocial tendencies that make this possible”. (p. 4)

At the core of her theory is a belief that at some time in human evolution, possibly as long as 2 million years ago, going back to Homo habilis or erectus, with what distinguished us from other similar species was that the young started to be too expensive for an individual mother to care for, so she had to rely on others – usually female relatives (“allomothers”), to provide extensive care and provisioning for the child, and the child had a better chance of survival if it was good at encouraging that care by its behaviour. This can also be used to explain human menopause.

I don’t by any means agree with all of it – there’s a few parts of rather crude socio-biology type analysis about modern societies – but an interesting read.

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Throw away the keys and lose the fear – no gates, no CCTV please

November 7, 2012 – 10:04 am

I was really pleased when residents in my block of flats voted recently against becoming a gated community – or at least against locking the gates we already, unfortunately, have installed. I don’t want to live in something that feels like a prison, when you have to rattle keys to get to your front door, with the gate clanging shut behind you as you walk towards it. And I think that having people around in the communal garden, a pleasant, social environment, as we have now – I regularly say hello to at least 20 of my neighbours, and know some people who use it as a walkthrough – is much better security than a lockdown that screams “something to fear here!”.

I found academic backing for that instinct in Anna Minton’s Ground Control, in which she concludes (talking here about the awful One Hyde Park in London where apparently the penthouses have bulletproof glass, iris scanners, purified air and panic rooms) “no matter how much military hardware is installed, the aim of creating a maximum security environment to make people feel safer is doomed to failure because … security is as much an emotional as a physical state”. (p. 66) (Even the attempt by owners to secure themselves against stamp duty has apparently failed.)

There’s evidence, as Minton wrote recently in the Guardian, that CCTV makes people feel less secure. I’d very much like to get rid of the one in our garden – and not just because of its recent controversy. Minto: “One of the most important studies is by criminologist Jason Ditton, who carried out a study for the Scottish Office of CCTV in Glasgow, which found that recorded crime actually increased after CCTV had been installed …. the majority of people supported its introduction and believed that it would make them feel safer, but the findings after CCTV was put in showed that there was no improvement in feelings of safety.” (p. 169)

She reports on the case of a Dutch architect brought to Liverpool astonished by public housing estates surrounded by walls and CCTV. Hans Van der Heijiden, she reports, worked for six years with local people in Fazakerley, consulting on a proposed scheme, more continental in design and relying on the presence of people for security, but the “Secured by Design” certificate was unlikely to be granted on this basis, so the scheme fell through, the architect was sacked, and a new one built a “traditional”, prison-like structure. His words on consultation are telling: “The consultation process was a big book with procedures we had to follow with boxes to tick. An enormous amount of money was spent on it – venues were rented and bus services were provided.” But their support for his scheme was ignored.
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A imaginative exploration of First Wave feminism – The Sealed Letter

November 4, 2012 – 9:57 pm

First published on Blogcritics

When we think about the first wave of feminists, we tend to be thinking not so much of the first pioneers, but of the later, radical women, the suffragettes and the truly freethinking women Sheila Rowbotham portrayed in Dreamers of the New Day. Yet in the 1860s there was an initial, cautious flowering of women saying what were then radical things, like married women should have some rights of their own – to their bodies, their property, their children – but still very cautious, and trapped within the framework of mid-Victorian thinking in which simply not being a doormat made them very nearly beyond the pale.

It’s in this milieu that Emma Donoghue has set her latest novel, which is based, very closely we learn from an informative postscript, on a famous divorce case of 1864, Codrington v Codrington, in which a pillar of the British establishment, Vice-Admiral Codrington, set out to prove his wife guilty of adultery, and thereby secure a divorce, while also showing that he hadn’t connived in her actions, or allowed them to run so that he could secure the said divorce.

This is a dense, gripping tale, by the end of which you’ll know a lot about Victorian divorce law, and a lot about the central character, not either of the main legal protagonists, but Emily Faithful, “Fido”, a leading early feminist who established a printing press, training women typesetters in the face of sometime violent industry resistance, and was at the heart of an early feminist core. She’s a fascinating character, as Donoghue presents her, and I’m pleased that she’s been rescued by this book from historical oblivion.
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A romp through a millennia of British home life

November 4, 2012 – 7:25 pm

First published on Blogcritics

How do you romp through a millennia or so of British history, painting a picture of life, events and characters? Heading away from the usual lists of kings and queens, or thematic examination of classes and groups in society, Lucy Worsley’s gone for the purely domestic in If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home.

And an entertaining, comfortable read it makes. She strolls from medieval great halls to 1970s Habitat bedrooms, with their wonderful innovation of the duvet, a far stretch from the domestic drudgery of the Victorian bedmaking – which as Worsley explains she’s tried out, hands-on, for herself as a television presenter.

If you’ve encountered a fair bit of social history there won’t be a lot of surprises here – the explanation for medieval and early modern people apparently sleeping half-sitting being sapping bed ropes I’ve read many times before, also that it was normal for ladies to go “commando” (as Worsley puts it – her casual modern language is sometimes entertaining and sometimes a bit grating) in the 16th-18th centuries, when huge skirts made any other arrangement hopelessly impractical.

But I did learn plenty of new things – including the fact that evening sleep was expected for many centuries to be in two parts, first and second sleep (which particularly made sense in long winter evenings). Worsley notes that a 17th-century French doctor recommended that between the two was the best time to conceive children – because then couples would have “more enjoyment” and “do it better”.

And that a garderobe was so called because the ammonia-rich environment would kill the fleas in robes hung there. (I already knew about the laundry use of urine, but did rather enjoy the 19th-century account of wealthy foxhunters having their red coats so douched by their servants, probably, as Worsley notes, without their knowledge.)

There were some errors of fact that did give me cause for concern – the heroine of The Women’s Room didn’t run off to Harvard to study literature to avoid housework, but was divorced and forced out of that role, and it wasn’t the class difference between the Earl of Castlereagh and his valet that scandalised peers enough to have him executed, but the act of sodomy. I wouldn’t rely on this work for any academic purpose.

As you’ll gather there’s rather a lot about sex in this book – Worsley’s clearly learned what sells books and television shows – and you do sometimes wish for a little more social analysis and explanation, but that’s perhaps not quite fair. This is clearly signposted as an entertaining read that will add to your trivia knowledge rather than your historical understanding, and it delivers on those terms.

Nonetheless, there’s an interesting conclusion which ventures on to very different ground – with a broad consideration of how the past can teach us about the necessarily low-carbon future, when homes will again need to use much less energy and be far more environmentally sensitive. Worsley notes: “I myself live in a tall glass tower, built in 1998, and must agree with Francis Bacon, who condemned the great, glass-filled palaces of the Jacobean age. In a house ‘full of Glass’, he wrote, ‘one cannot tell where to become to be out of the Sun or Cold’.” (p. 322)

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