Women Writers, Generic Form, and Social and Political Activism

The early twentieth century abounded with movements that reshaped women’s lives—including those for women’s suffrage, peace, birth control, and better working conditions, among others. Women writers addressed these issues not only in socially and politically engaged journalism, but also in fiction, essays, and other forms of writing. This special issue explores the relationship between women’s writing and social and political activism, from the 1890s to the 1950s. The collection comprises a series of case studies, with a focus on non-canonical authors and under-read works. Responding to recent calls for more scholarship on women writers in the period, contributors seek to recover the place of social and political activism in shaping women writers’ relationships to modernity. The collection at once foregrounds neglected writings by activist women and highlights the diversity of generic forms through which activism was expressed, thus enriching our understanding of women’s contributions to early twentieth-century literary and cultural history. The essays included here engage with a wide range of genres, many of them understudied. Doing so enables contributors to reassess women’s writings that seldom feature in anthologies or syllabi—goals that have always been central to feminist scholarship and, as our experience working as literary scholars in the modernist period suggests, are no less pressing today.

Scholarship in feminist modernist studies has opened up important questions about the place of social and political activism in the lives and work of modernist women writers. A decade ago, in special issues in Modern Fiction Studies and Literature Compass, Anne Fernald (2013) and Jane Garrity (2013) charged that modernist women writers continued to be neglected within the ‘new modernist studies’. Four years later, in the introduction to a special cluster on Modernism/modernity’s PrintPlus Platform, ‘Mind the Gap! Modernism and Feminist Praxis’, Urmila Seshagiri (2017) observed that a survey of two decades of special issues, roundtables, and archival pieces published by the journal revealed an overwhelming preponderance of work on Anglo-European men, with no women writers featured. The publication of a number of studies on modern(ist) women writers and the feminist public sphere have gone a substantial way toward redressing this decades-long imbalance (DiCenzo 2000; DiCenzo, Delap, and Ryan 2011; Green 2017; and Clay 2018, to name a few). Inspired by this turn toward the place of feminism in modernist-era literary studies and the renewed attention to cultural history in this era, this special issue aims to advance our understanding of the complex activist affiliations of women writers in this period, and the generic forms in which those affiliations were given voice. In so doing, we strive to complement current scholarly work across disciplines such as that appearing in special issues of Women’s History Review (Sharp and Stibbe 2017a), on women’s international activism during the interwar period, and Women: A Cultural Review (Jones and Periyan 2020), on politics and aesthetics in interwar women’s writing.

Notably, however, our collection has a broader temporal scope, and our focus is not limited to modernist texts. The breadth of this special issue enables us to bridge the divides that too often separate the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to trace the continuities in women’s activist writing across a range of literary periods. Essays in the collection encompass the work of several generations of women, including writers typically associated with the ‘middlebrow’, among them Vera Brittain, Storm Jameson, and Rebecca West. The breadth of the collection also allows us to engage the question of generational influence, whether through the feminist historiography traced in Barbara Green’s article on Brittain’s Honourable Estate (1936), or through the silsila, or chain of predecessors, explored in Sreejata Paul’s work on the Muslim essayist Sofia Khatun.

The latter example underscores the transnational scope of the writings and authors referenced in this collection as well—from late colonial Bengal to the UK and Europe—and the importance of considering women’s writing and activism through an international and intersectional lens. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked a significant growth in international networks such as the International Council of Women (ICW), founded in 1881; the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), founded in 1902 and from 1926 known as the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship (IAW); the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), founded in 1915; and the International Federation of University Women (IFUW), founded in 1919, to name only a few. As Sharp and Stibbe argue, far from experiencing a decline in the interwar and postwar eras, international women’s movements flourished in this period, with women remaining active in a variety of political and social movements, some conservative and some radical (2017b: 165).

The 1930s have long been acknowledged as a rich period of activist writing, and recent scholarship has enriched our knowledge of women writers working in this decade (e.g. Periyan 2018a; Ewins 2015), including Storm Jameson and Vera Brittain, both of whom figure prominently in our collection. A still powerful myth of literary history suggests that this decade witnessed a unique departure ‘from an aesthetic ideal of formal autonomy to one that pursued active and politicized engagement between life and art’ (Wipf-Miller 1998: 136). However, this emphasis on the novelty of the political engagement of 1930s writing ignores earlier traditions of activist writing by women. Ann Ardis argues that by valorizing a narrowly defined modernist aesthetic, scholars have eclipsed the contributions of new woman novelists, who ‘produce an aesthetic of political engagement that is quite different from the (ostensibly) apolitical formalism of high modernism’ (1990: 170). Our collection contributes to a growing body of scholarship that considers politically engaged women’s writing, including studies on suffrage literature (e.g. Green 1997; Chapman 2014; Brown 2020), the middlebrow (Humble 2004; Hammill 2007), and inter/modernism (Bluemel and Lasser 2018).

Feminist principles are central to many of the writers whose work is addressed in these essays, in some cases implicitly rather than explicitly, but their presence (or absence) raises the question of feminism’s status during this long era and its relationship to other forms of activism. This period was a transformative one in terms of the long struggle for women’s rights, including access to higher education and the professions, spanning the women’s suffrage and universal/adult suffrage movements as well as the evolution of feminism in the interwar period, in the years following the extension of the franchise to women householders aged 30 and above in 1918 and to women 21 and older without a property qualification in 1928 (Holton 1986; Bolt 1993; Alberti 2000). The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), which had long been led by the constitutional suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett, became the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC) in 1919, with Eleanor Rathbone at the helm. Scholars have traced the divisions in the interwar period between ‘old’ feminists, who espoused equal rights for women based on their ‘common humanity’ with men, and the ‘new’ feminists associated with the NUSEC, who argued for protective legislation for women in their capacity as wives and mothers (Clay 2006: 32–33; see also Wallace 2000: 42–43). The ‘Six Point Group’, founded by Lady Margaret Rhondda in 1921, fought for fair treatment for women in a range of areas ranging from support for widowed and unmarried mothers to equal opportunities for women teachers and civil servants, and the group’s journal, Time and Tide, published the work of many women writers who also identified as activists, though sometimes with an ambivalent position toward feminism.

Such ambivalence often took the form of a questioning of the meaning of feminism, as both term and concept. In a 1926 article in Time and Tide entitled ‘Feminism Divided’, the novelist and journalist Winifred Holtby disavowed the ‘very name of feminist’:

I dislike everything that feminism implies. I desire an end of the whole business, the demands for equality, the suggestions of sex warfare […] But while the inequality exists, while injustice is done and opportunity denied to the great majority of women, I shall have to be a feminist. (qtd. in Ewins 2019: 61)

Revising her position somewhat in Women and a Changing Civilization (1934), Holtby lamented, ‘Why, in 1934, are women themselves often the first to repudiate the movements of the past hundred and fifty years, which have gained for them at least the foundations of political, economic, educational and moral equality?’ (96). And perhaps most famously, in Three Guineas (1938), Virginia Woolf argued for the destruction of the word altogether:

What more fitting than to destroy an old word, a vicious and corrupt word that has done much harm in its day and is now obsolete? The word ‘feminist’ is the word indicated. […] The word ‘feminist’ is destroyed; the air is cleared; and in that clearer air what do we see? Men and women working together for the same cause. (101–102)

As Barbara Green (2021) has argued, building on the work of scholars including Naomi Black (2004), Sowon Park (2005), Laura Marcus (2010), and Clara Jones (2016), Woolf’s relationship to feminism and suffrage resonates with ‘the complex temporalities of earlier movement fictions that also incorporated acknowledgement of feminist ambivalence’ (Green 2021: 365). Woolf’s writings do not feature centrally in this special issue, but her evolving position toward activism and working-class authorship—most notable in the revisions to her ‘Introductory Letter’ to Margaret Llewelyn Davies’s collection of writings by working-class women, Life As We Have Known It (1931) (Periyan 2018b)—assists us in mapping the complex and shifting terrain of social and political activism during this period.

While some women writers disavowed feminism as a word, and for still others, it had less purchase in the interwar and postwar era than it had had at an earlier moment, others explicitly claimed the term as an organizing principle for feminist remembrance (Green, in this issue; Parkins 2007). Viewing feminism as one form of activism in the time period covered by this special issue reveals the variety of forms of conflict and collaboration explored in these essays. Indeed, as we discuss below, the question of form is central to this collection, as contributors explore not only the diversity of forms through which women’s activism was expressed in this period, but also the ways in which form itself comes into question—a central aspect not only of the modernist literary text, but also of a wide variety of textual modes in early twentieth-century women’s writing.

The writers featured here not only had deep political and social commitments, they engaged in a variety of forms of activism. In the 1920s, the now obscure Muslim writer Sofia Khatun promoted Bengali women’s suffrage; feminist and pacifist Vera Brittain worked as an activist for the Six Point Group and the Peace Pledge Union; Storm Jameson, as president of PEN, supported exiled writers and opposed fascism; and Rebecca West, in the prewar years, was a member of the WSPU and the Fabian Society and, after the second World War, became an anti-communist. These women’s writings are an extension of this remarkable record of political and social activism.

As literary scholars, we seek to contribute to interdisciplinary studies of women’s writing and social and political activism by foregrounding the diversity of generic forms through which women’s activism was expressed during these years. The emphasis on diverse genres enables us to recuperate and reassess women’s writing that has fallen through the cracks of a modernist canon still shaped by a narrow aesthetic tailored for male authors (e.g. Joyce, Eliot, Pound). Our contributors explore the affordances and limitations of such forms as the silsila, the literary introduction, the family saga, and the counternarrative. In ‘Sofia Khatun’s Silsila’, Sreejata Paul argues that Khatun succeeds in adapting the patriarchal form of the silsila to feminist and anticolonial ends. The essay historicizes Khatun’s contributions to an emerging Bengali women’s print culture, identifying multiple roots to Khatun’s pro-suffrage feminism. In ‘Remembering the Suffragette for Interwar Feminism’, Barbara Green approaches suffrage writing from another historical and geographical vantage, shifting our focus from the British suffrage polemics and conversion narratives of the prewar period to consider the status of the British suffragette after the war. She argues that Vera Brittain mobilizes the subgenres of the historical novel, the family saga, and the diary form to at once revisit the recent history of suffrage militancy and map a way forward for interwar feminism. Without oversimplifying the suffrage conversion narratives of the prewar years, Green finds more room for ambivalence in these postwar documentary forms. In ‘Introducing Lilo Linke and Hilary Newitt’, Jake O’Leary also shines a new light on women writers of the thirties, arguing that in the hands of Storm Jameson, the literary introduction becomes a form of feminist collaboration and antifascist activism. The final essay in our collection, Debra Rae Cohen’s ‘Anti-communism and the Culture of Celebrity: Mediating the Meanings of Treason’, argues that as a celebrity writer, Rebecca West was keenly sensitive to the impact of bad press and misinformation, and that this sensitivity shapes the form and content of her anticommunist writing of the 1950s. In considering the multiple editions of West’s well-known political essay, The Meanings of Treason, Cohen further argues that in the wake of both national and personal betrayals, West became less tolerant of competing perspectives on historical narratives and more inclined to ‘impose a single meaning’ as a counternarrative to what she regarded as a misinformation campaign.

With first-wave feminist writings in mind, Sowon Park asserts that ‘women’s writing and political engagement have always been evidently mutually dependent’ (2010: 172). That link may be more evident to scholars of suffrage literature or of the anti-fascist writings of the 1930s than it is to the fields of modernism or early twentieth-century literature as a whole. Collectively, the essays in this collection expand our understanding of the generic, cultural, and political diversity of women’s activist writings from the 1890s to the 1950s. They illuminate the work of more familiar figures and invite us to discover lesser known writers, reminding us of how much we still have to learn about women’s writing in these decades.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.