Suffrage and subjectivity: reassessing May Sinclair’s feminist writings

ABSTRACT

This article reassesses May Sinclair’s feminist writings, arguing that the subjectivity foregrounded within them is not evidence of ambivalence or conservatism, but rather a means for Sinclair to strengthen her unconventional yet deeply held feminist conviction. I examine the subtly wrought arguments in Sinclair’s feminist non-fiction to demonstrate how she used these texts to articulate her own relationship to the increasing militancy of the women’s suffrage movement and develop her own critique of the patriarchy. I argue that Sinclair arrives at a far-sighted conception of feminism which is informed by her status as a walking woman writer, as she marches in women’s suffrage demonstrations under the banner of the Women Writers’ Unit. Sinclair’s self-conscious following in the footsteps of her nineteenth-century literary forebears has consequences for her feminist writings. Sinclair’s feminist non-fiction writings thus elucidate her commitment to an egalitarian feminism which condemns the gendered conventions of nineteenth-century womanhood.

KEYWORDS:

• May Sinclair
• modernism
• feminism
• women’s suffrage
• subjectivity
• activism
• militancy

Sinclair’s writings on feminism have often been understood as evidence of her introversion and reluctance to align herself with the increasingly militant activism of the suffragettes. Philippa Martindale has suggested that Sinclair’s involvement in the women’s suffrage movement was complicated by “the tension between her ambivalence as a private, individual woman and her awareness as a public, and even famous, female citizen, that women also needed to act together at certain moments towards their common goals.”¹ Sinclair’s writings on feminism and the suffrage movement thus negotiate the relationship between her individual position as an independent, feminist writer, and the wider suffrage movement, which encompassed disagreements on its aims and use of militant direct action. Suzanne Raitt has argued that Sinclair’s “commitment to the movement had in fact always been somewhat ambivalent,” citing Sinclair’s concern that enfranchisement would leave her with less time and energy to “earn her living as a novelist.”² However, Raitt’s claim may inadvertently further the suggestion that Sinclair’s pursuit of a creative, writing life privileged individualistic fulfillment at the expense of political conviction. Choosing to view the relationship between Sinclair’s political convictions and her creative output as ambivalent renders her vulnerable to being read as inconsistent and contradictory, conservative, even. Sinclair addresses the subject of feminism in numerous essays, many of which appeared in Suffragette publications. “How It Strikes a Mere Novelist” appeared in Votes for Women in December 1908; her pamphlet Feminism was published by the Women Writers’ Suffrage League in May 1912; her essay, “A Defence of Men,” was published in the English Review in July 1912.³ Diane Gillespie and Jim Gough have done work to emphasize Sinclair’s feminist position. Gillespie fruitfully traces the reverberations of Sinclair’s feminist non-fiction in her novels Mary Olivier (1919) and The Tree of Heaven (1917) in particular, while Gough addresses the convergences between Sinclair’s political and philosophical position, and her resulting “Idealism-Feminism.”⁴ This essay re-examines Sinclair’s writings on feminism and the suffrage movement, and the implications of their subtly wrought arguments, revealing her deeply held feminist conviction and commitment to women’s suffrage. The intricate tonal shifts of Sinclair’s feminist non-fiction reveal themselves more readily when one attempts to look beyond the catch-all term ambivalence, which frequently enforces division of Sinclair’s ideas into a “feminist”/“anti-feminist” binary. I want to argue that Sinclair was undeniably feminist, though her interpretation of the term was unconventional within her own political context.

Sinclair’s involvement in the campaign for women’s suffrage was episodic, which both Raitt and Theophilus Boll regard as evidence of her hesitation to commit to physical, active forms of protest. Sinclair had become friends with other women involved in the Suffrage campaign as early as 1906, including the Women’s Suffrage and Political Union member Evelyn Sharp, yet her first forays into Suffragist activism were forestalled by her “natural inclination […] to communicate her support by writing from the unbroken peace of her little studio in Kensington.”⁵ Boll and Raitt date Sinclair’s first forays into physical activism to March 1908, when she stood collecting donations on a street corner in Kensington with Sharp and others.⁶ The occasion is marked by her self-consciousness at being seen as a visible activist, and both suggest that Sinclair experienced discomfort at making what was, compared to her previous experience, a highly public political statement.⁷

Sinclair first publicly voiced her support for the Suffrage movement in March 1908, in a brief letter titled “I Have Been Asked to Send a ‘Message’ to the National Women’s Social and Political Union,” which was published in Votes for Women that month. She voices her “whole-hearted sympathy” for the aims of the suffrage movement in the message, “admir[ing] to the utmost the devotion, the courage and the endurance of the women who are fighting for the Suffrage to-day.”⁸ There is irony evident in Sinclair’s reference to herself in the letter as “an unpractical and uninstructed outsider” to the movement. Such rhetoric prefigures the “self-professed naivety” and “self-criticism” which Isabelle Brasme identifies in Sinclair’s Journal of Impressions in Belgium (1915), the aporetic account of her anticlimactic attempts to join the war effort on the Belgian front in October 1914.⁹ The Journal documents Sinclair’s disappointment at being regarded as a “superfluous” older woman who had only been encouraged to join the unit because of her affluent position.¹⁰ Sinclair’s earlier reference to herself as an “outsider” to the women’s suffrage movement may therefore also belie anxieties about her age. Born in 1863, she was a generation older than those at the forefront of suffrage movement’s increasing militancy, including Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst.

Sinclair’s 1908 essay “How It Strikes a Mere Novelist” outlines her relationship to the suffrage movement with unprecedented candor. However, this is complicated by an apparent disjuncture between her publicly and privately voiced opinions regarding suffragists’ militant activism. The opening paragraph offers an apology to the suffragists of the Women’s Social and Political Union engaged in militant forms of activism, whose methods she had previously disagreed with:

I want, first of all, to congratulate the Union on the success of the very tactics which, with so many of its too, too “timid critics,” I deplored–before the event. The event has proved its leaders once more abundantly right, and, as I presumed privately to criticize those tactics, it is only fair to tender, in public humility, my apologies.¹¹

Sinclair’s use of the phrase “before the event” suggests that a specific incident was the catalyst for such a change in perspective. Philippa Martindale, who reads Sinclair’s essay as evidence of the tensions between Sinclair’s public and private persona, does not comment on this.¹² Instead, she counterbalances Sinclair’s emphatic support of militancy with evidence from an unpublished letter mentioned by Raitt, which cites Sinclair’s unease “from the outset about the tactics of the Women’s Suffrage and Political Union, writing a private letter of protest to Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence about a meeting in late 1908 when a suffragette lashed out at the face of a steward with a whip.”¹³ There is good reason to suggest that Sinclair is referring to this particular event in her opening statement, which revises her previous reservations about militancy in favor of public support for the tactics of the Women's Suffrage and Political Union. Further credence is given to this notion when one reads Sinclair’s following statement:

When a nice, sensible man, your friend, tells you that if he interrupted a meeting he would be ejected with violence, whereas “we women” are merely removed with every circumstance of consideration for our charm and weakness, you can only wonder where the gentleman mislays his morning paper.¹⁴

What does remain clear, however, is that “How It Strikes” offers considerable evidence that the vilification and misrepresentation of suffragettes like Helen Ogston were instrumental to Sinclair’s enlarged understanding of (and support for) militant forms of protest.

“How It Strikes a Mere Novelist” is highly characteristic of Sinclair’s approach, in that it presents an idiosyncratic combination of deeply held political convictions and dry, self-aware humor. Strangely, critics do not tend to read Sinclair in this way. It is especially puzzling that Raitt–whose biography of Sinclair remains the most comprehensive study of her life to date–offers us tantalizing glimpses into unpublished letters and essays which are difficult to access without making reference to the wry, ironic tone which is visible in Sinclair’s feminist writings. Martindale also does not consider the presence and function of ironic humor in Sinclair’s feminist pieces. She does not greatly diverge from Raitt’s highly influential argument, which draws on passages from “How It Strikes” to amplify Sinclair’s individualism and ambivalence towards becoming “actively involved in party politics.”¹⁵ The following passage, first cited by Raitt, is regularly referenced by critics in condensed or partial form:

So that now I have no hesitation in stating that if I were not a mere novelist I would be a Suffragette, in Holloway or out of it. As a mere novelist every selfish desire and selfish ambition is against the Suffrage. For the position of an unmarried woman novelist earning enough to live on, cannot be improved, and may be injured, “when we get the vote.” She will have to distract her mind with unpeaceful questions which have never before occupied it. She will have to receive canvassers. And I am told that the canvasser invariably calls at eleven o’clock in the morning, and is not to be deterred even by a savage dog on the doormat. Further, the advent of the political woman will be fatal to her reign. The mere novelist cannot hope to compete with the power and attraction of the political woman, “when we get the vote.” Unless, indeed, she picks up a precarious livelihood by describing her and her doings.¹⁶

Raitt quotes only the first three sentences, and subsequent critics offer little corrective to her suggestion that Sinclair “[s]ometimes […] worried that enfranchisement would make it harder, not easier, for her to earn her living as a novelist.”¹⁷ This, in turn, renders Sinclair more vulnerable to the suggestion that she is unsupportive of the suffrage campaign. Raitt argues that Sinclair’s “response to attempts to gain the vote” is thus “ambivalent.”¹⁸ Viewed in this light, Sinclair appears hesitant to offer her unequivocal support to an increasingly militant suffrage movement. However, an alternative interpretation begins to open up when one revisits the passage from “How It Strikes.” I would argue that Sinclair’s comments about the inconvenience of canvassers calling at her door, thus interrupting her writing time, are voiced with her tongue planted firmly in her cheek. The reference to herself as a “Mere” novelist appears highly ironic in this context, as her reputation as a writer had been established by the success of her novel The Divine Fire (1904), which resulted in a “triumphal tour” of the East Coast of the United States.¹⁹ Significantly, Sinclair would later go on to become far more closely involved with the suffrage movement in the period from 1908 to 1912, during which time she continued to pursue an active writing life; it would seem, then, that her support of the suffrage movement and writing career were not incompatible.

“How It Strikes a Mere Novelist” is filled with positive fervor which is fundamentally female-oriented. The essay is indicative of Sinclair’s feminism, as she believes that women’s agency is catalytic to the rejection of a nineteenth-century ideology which was predicated upon women’s virtuousness and confinement to the domestic sphere. This is revealed in her damnation of the nineteenth century as “an age of material cock-sureness, and of spiritual doubt.”²⁰ Such language pithily skewers the phallocentrism inherent to nineteenth-century ideology, whilst suggestively rendering the subjugation of women concomitant with a lack of metaphysical certitude. Sinclair’s essay concludes by reiterating the suffrage movement’s centrality to such transformation; “And this thing, this desire of all the ages, this spiritual certainty will, I believe, come through the coming revolution, by the release of long captive forces, by the breathing in among us of the Spirit of Life, the genius of enfranchised womanhood.”²¹

Sinclair subsequently became more directly involved in the campaign for women’s suffrage. Though she had previously watched her friends marching on demonstrations through London, it was not until 18 June 1910 that Sinclair herself joined one of the Suffragette demonstrations through the city, giving explicit political realization to her walking practice for the first time. When Sinclair joined the “From Prison to Citizenship” march on 18 June 1910, it was, crucially, as a “woman worker: she walked proudly under the banner of the Women Writers unit.”²² Sinclair’s outward show of solidary with other employed women demonstrated a renegotiation of her earlier position. By walking though London, she and the other Suffrage campaigners reasserted their right to exist as visible, public, political women, and, crucially, as women writers. The march consisted of “between ten and fifteen thousand women, with forty bands and 700 banners and Charlotte Marsh as the WSPU color-bearer at its head.”²³ The heightened atmosphere was strengthened by the fact that

[a]lmost all the participants carried flowers […] and the garlands, the banners, the light summer dresses with brilliant touches of colour [sic] in the academic robes, the festive music and infectious delight of the participants, all under a cloudless June sky after weeks of national mourning [the King’s death], gave the impression of a sudden carnival rather than a political demonstration.²⁴

The march was walking as feminist protest, then, but with its militant undertone softened by the carnivalesque spectacle of brightly attired women engaging in peaceful demonstration. The demonstration was particularly well-received by the media, in stark contrast to the more radical actions undertaken by the campaign for Women’s Suffrage in subsequent years. Sinclair’s protest march with the Women Writers Unit in 1910 exemplified her relationship to the campaign. Walking alongside her friends, other women writers, Sinclair was “among those who [carried] […] a black and white banneret with the name of a well-known woman writer such as George Eliot, Fanny Burney or Elizabeth Barret Browning.”²⁵ With banner in one hand and a goose quill in the other, Sinclair was, as Boll puts it, “summoning up the spirit of […] English wom[e]n writer[s] of the past.”²⁶ Though she was by extension part of the wider contingent of the march, it is telling that Sinclair chose to align her cause with that of employed women writers foremost, as her own writing represents a continuing preoccupation with the values associated with such nineteenth-century writers.

In the four years since the publication of “How It Strikes a Mere Novelist,” Sinclair’s relationship to feminism and the Suffrage movement had gained greater cogency. She had taken on a more active role in the Suffrage movement, as evidenced by her membership of the Women’s Social and Political Union, the Women’s Freedom League, and the Women Writers’ Suffrage League–she attended meetings, took part in fundraising initiatives and demonstrations, such as the march “From Prison to Citizenship” in 1910. Sinclair’s friendships with other women in the movement, including Evelyn Sharp and Ella Hepworth Dixon, played a large role in her increasing involvement.²⁷ Sinclair’s feminist principles were thus borne of her friendships with other politically minded women. This offers a corrective to the notion that her solidarity with other suffragists, and the wider feminist project by extension, was overshadowed by an individualistic desire to pursue a career as a writer.

It was in this spirit of feminist solidarity that Sinclair wrote her robust and fearless riposte to the virulently misogynist and anti-Suffragist rhetoric of Sir Almroth Wright, a medical public figure whose caustic criticism of the Suffrage campaign, “Suffrage Fallacies: Sir Almroth Wright on Militant Hysteria,” was published in a letter to The Times on 28 April 1912.²⁸ Wright speaks of how

no doctor can ever lose sight of the fact that the mind of woman is always threatened with danger from the reverberations of her physiological emergencies. It is with such thoughts that the doctor rests his eyes upon the militant suffragist. He cannot shut them to the fact there is mixed up with the women’s movement much mental disorder, and he cannot conceal from himself the physiological emergencies which lie behind.²⁹

Sinclair’s pamphlet Feminism (1912) is an outgrowth and refinement of her response to Wright’s anti-Suffragist and anti-feminist rhetoric. Her solidarity with womanhood at large is reinforced by the measured, skillful skewering of Wright, who “argues as if all women were physically unhealthy, and all potentially, when not actually insane.”³⁰ Her initial remark, “Heaven forbid that I should pledge myself to the assertion that there are no hysterical, neurotic, or degenerate subjects in the Suffrage movement,” appears less ambivalent in light of her following point, that notions of “neurosis, hysteria and degeneracy” are the product of modern society. For Sinclair, “neurosis [is] the scourge of modernity,” and therefore just as likely to affect both men and women.³¹ She thus regards Suffragism as a cure for, rather than a symptom of, hysteria; “many women […] have found their cure in the work exacted by the suffrage leaders; and when they have found it, their medical man knows them no more.”³²

Feminism lays the foundations of Sinclair’s political convictions bare via a rhetoric which is polemical, and her later novels are testimony to her abiding preoccupation with feminism. Sinclair takes particular issue with Wright’s suggestion that women are subordinated by their “physiological emergencies,” by which he means their experiences of menstruation and menopause.³³ For Wright, “physiological emergencies” are further evidence of women’s propensity to hysterical, neurotic and degenerate behavior. However, Sinclair is quick to deconstruct such a position, reiterating that men display an enlarged capacity for “physiological emergencies” of their own, which pose a far greater threat to women’s lives:

Worse than all, Sir Almroth Wright argues as if “physiological emergencies” were the monopoly of women, and as if hysteria, neurosis and degeneracy were the monopoly of the unmarried among them. What of the innumerable women who are martyrised every day, in ways innumerable and unspeakable, by the “physiological emergencies” of men? What of the hysteria and neurosis that spring directly and indirectly from that martyrdom?³⁴

The cornerstone of Sinclair’s argument is a nuanced critique of the patriarchy, whose multifarious and insidious workings Feminism displays an innate knowledge of. It is crucial to bear this at the forefront of one’s mind when considering Sinclair’s politics within the context of her society. Her anger is directed at patriarchy as a system of oppression, at the hands of which all people suffer, albeit in differing ways. Suffragism, Sinclair suggests, thus becomes a highly useful tool for both articulating and overcoming the anguish of such injustice. Sinclair’s reticence to call herself an “ultra-feminist” notwithstanding, her feminism loses some of its apparent ambivalence when one reconsiders her fundamentally egalitarian principles, which were no doubt influenced by her close familial and intellectual relationships with men: “I am not an ultra-feminist, and I do not think that the Suffrage movement is a war of one sex against another. I was brought up with men; and I hold no brief for woman against man, or for her virtues as superior to his.”³⁵ Sinclair thus upholds a forward-thinking feminism which calls for the equality of the sexes, which can only come about through mutual assistance of the sexes.

Her strongest emphasis is reserved for Wright’s inability to conceive that many women pursue working lives because of a desire for independence, and, crucially, out of economic necessity. Sinclair’s tone is thus revealing of her feminist affective militancy when she states that “It does not occur to Sir Almroth Wright that [woman] is simply there to get her own living.”³⁶ Feminism shows that Sinclair’s militancy is feminist, as she is verbally combative in criticizing the patriarchal hegemony which Wright both represents and upholds. Her feminist militancy is inherently affective, as her words are imbued with an intensity of feeling which reveals her deeply held political conviction that women’s need for economic independence is unquestionable. Feminism’s affective climax, its coup de theatre, is that Sinclair reorients the abstract notion of the “indestructible” “Life-Force” within concrete politics by stating that the Suffrage campaign (and its inevitable, concomitant militancy, which she addresses in the final section) is its direct manifestation. Here, the interdisciplinarity of Sinclair’s intellectual preoccupations is reiterated, demonstrating the confluence between her political and philosophical convictions. Sinclair’s use of the term “Life-Force” is a translation of Henri Bergson’s élan vital: she refers to this in her unpublished philosophical typescript, “The Way of Sublimation,” which formed the blueprint for her “Clinical Lectures on Sublimation I and II,” published in The Medical Press in 1916.³⁷ In “The Way of Sublimation,” Sinclair equates Bergson’s élan vital to “the eternal, indestructible Libido [,] […] Jung’s sense of Creative Energy, […] the Will to Live in Schopenhauer and Hartmann, the ‘need’ or ‘Want’ of Samuel Butler, and even to the Puritanic, void of all offence.”³⁸ For Sinclair, the “Life-Force” is “the ‘reverberation’ at the bottom of the Suffrage movement; the Enthusiasm of Humanity; that passion which is above sex and above self.”³⁹ Consequently, “women are justified in desiring the vote on economic grounds,” i.e. equal pay and working conditions, because “equal rights for women will mean equal rights for all.”⁴⁰

The final section of the pamphlet directly addresses the question of militancy, and indicates her far-sighted, nuanced view of its significance within the Suffrage campaign. Her careful statement that she is “not going to justify or defend Militancy” is not an expression of ambivalence tending towards conservatism, as she is quick to show her solidarity with the Suffragists who have employed such tactics; “still less do I condemn the women who have been driven to it.”⁴¹ Sinclair positions women within a long, continuous history of violence, which they “hate and fear to commit […] more than they hate and fear to suffer it.”⁴² She is quick to remind her audience that political violence must be viewed within a future-oriented historical context, and that “the final judgement of History has assigned the last responsibility for violence–for crime even–to the Governments that have provoked it.”⁴³ Feminism leaves the lasting impression that Sinclair therefore sees militant action as a necessary, almost certainly inevitable, means to achieve women’s enfranchisement; “The end–if it indeed can only be accomplished through violence–will justify it.”⁴⁴

Sinclair continued to refine her relationship to feminism and Suffrage in her essay “A Defence of Men,” which appeared in The English Review in July 1912. Contrary to the potentially anti-feminist or anti-Suffragist connotations of its title, the essay does not capitulate on the progressive feminist argument of the Feminism pamphlet.⁴⁵ It examines the structures of power which govern the relationships between the sexes, while interrogating notions of biological determinism. The essay does not make concessions to its readership, but rather becomes subtly provocative in its use of irony, evident from the opening statement; “It is commonly supposed that no man really understands woman, and that no woman understands man. Genius (in the male sex) is held to be an exception.”⁴⁶ Her supposedly distancing references to “my friends the Feminists” appear similarly disingenuous.⁴⁷ “A Defence of Men” is quick to once again condemn the grotesque version of masculinity represented by Sir Almroth Wright, whose “pomposities, vacuities, profundities of pitiable egoism appeared in [his] ultra-medical showing up of man.”⁴⁸ Sinclair applauds the vigorous popular discourse about the Suffrage campaign and the expression of opinions both for and against it, yet this is not suggestive of ambivalence; rather, she believes that “all this plain-speaking on both sides […] is good,” because it “clears the air” and “destroys prejudice.”⁴⁹ It also reiterates her perceptiveness in viewing the Suffrage movement within a wider historical continuum, as such debate “makes in the long run for mutual understanding.”⁵⁰ If “The Woman Question has brought a most formidable Man Question in its train,” Sinclair argues, it is the responsibility of all people to address the issues arising from both questions together.⁵¹ Sinclair reconstructs numerous essentialist gender tropes whose persuasive power is diminished through careful interrogation. She dispels the notion “that man has no virtues” as overly simplistic, not least because her own relationships with men have demonstrated that “most of them” have displayed a capacity for “honour [sic], tenderness and a splendid courage […][,] chivalry and charity,” although they “were not angels.”⁵² However, she quickly refutes any suggestion that these “are exclusively male virtues; I know that they are not.”⁵³ Sinclair is highly conscious that the “consecration of woman’s womanhood to suffering, that fore-ordained sacrifice of her flesh” is inherently unjust.⁵⁴ Yet her sympathy is tempered by the pragmatism that this is simply “the stern economy of Nature,” which happened to give gestational capabilities to women rather than men.⁵⁵ Sinclair’s lasting impression, however, is that both sexes have suffered; because “woman’s spirituality has been bought at the sacrifice of [man’s],” he “has paid with his spiritual prospects as she has with her body.”⁵⁶

At the crux of “A Defence of Men” is the assertion that “[t]he two sexes hang together.”⁵⁷ Sinclair argues that the sexes have brought out deplorable aspects in each other and are thus mutually responsible for dismantling the existing structures of power which continue to reinforce this dynamic. She illustrates such a commitment to an egalitarian feminism in a burst of affective intensity. Her harsh condemnation of “the debilitating, the disastrous influence of the Early and Mid-Victorian woman,” whose “willful ignorance […] sentimentalism [and] sex-servility amounted to positive vice, and could only be productive of viciousness in the unhappy males exposed to it,” is not inherently anti-feminist, as she does not, unlike Sir Almroth Wright, equate such behavior with intrinsic womanhood.⁵⁸ Rather, she places the Victorian woman within a historical continuum, showing that “if we may judge from the letters and memoirs of their times, the women of a century and more before her were not like her.”⁵⁹ Her criticism of nineteenth-century womanhood is thus an implicit criticism of nineteenth-century values, which have “trained her [the Victorian woman] to repression,” and “deceived and corrupted” the Victorian man.⁶⁰ Consequently, “[i]f we are what men have made us, men are, on the most favorable showing, what we have permitted them to be.”⁶¹ The irony wrought within such a statement is self-evident.

The final section of the essay casts a hopeful eye to the future. In the opening decade of the twentieth century, woman has undergone a “spiritual change” which is, ultimately, a political awakening; “she is conscious for the first time of Herself as an individual with inalienable rights.”⁶² Sinclair believes that “opposition to [women’s] political emancipation will be a dead thing to-morrow [sic].”⁶³ Such optimistic assertions are underscored by her intrinsic belief that the Suffrage movement is instrumental to the creation of a truly egalitarian society. Sinclair is conscious that it would be impossible to enact a complete “affective untangling” of the sexes, to appropriate Wendy Truran’s term, as they are biologically dependent upon one another to reproduce.⁶⁴ However, “A Defence of Men” suggests that radical change is possible–and is already occurring–if the sexes seek to understand this affective entanglement and resituate it as a positive force for political change. Sinclair thus sees the Suffrage movement as an expression of solidarity between the sexes, as she believes its aims will be beneficial to all; “Woman is laboring at man’s deliverance through her own.”⁶⁵

Sinclair continued such nuanced advocacy for feminism in both her fiction and non-fiction after her Women’s Suffrage and Political Union membership had lapsed in 1912.⁶⁶ In an unpublished essay of 1913, “Women’s Suffrage” (of which only an incomplete typescript remains), Sinclair first offers characteristically wry, erudite counterpoints to populist anti-suffragist rhetoric, before emphasizing the ways in which women’s enfranchisement is as much inevitable as it is also a component of the wider, vital feminist project, which began in the “remote past with the growth of the first woman who read a book for her own amusement, and […] further back with the first woman who produced an independent judgement as to the feeding of a baby or the fashion of a gown.”⁶⁷ Though the impetus of the women’s suffrage movement was subsumed by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Sinclair’s essay “Women’s Sacrifices for the War” (1914) resituates the worth of female labor by emphasizing the enormous value of women’s war work away from the battlefield.⁶⁸ The essay suggests that women’s smooth transition into previously male-dominated forms of work was made possible by the campaign for women’s suffrage, whose organizational networks could now be repurposed to labor towards a new common cause: the War. The essay contributes to this narrative of radical transformation by declaring that

[a]s soon as war was declared the militant suffragists gave up their militancy […] The premises of the Women’s Social and Political Union are now free from police raids. Miss Christabel Pankhurst has become a recruiting agent […] At the office of the East London Federation of Suffragettes Miss Sylvia Pankhurst is giving cost-price meals of two courses for 2d. to the very poor, and free meals to the destitute children.⁶⁹

Sinclair shrewdly presents the war as instrumental to the furthering of the feminist project, as “it has given chances and opportunities for women to prove their endurance and capabilities,” and “found them more than prepared to do the work of men, if necessary.”⁷⁰ “Women’s Sacrifices for the War” seeks to recalibrate the notion of female “sacrifice” into “service”; the essay thus walks the line between pro-war propaganda and feminist polemic. For Sinclair, the war was especially timely because its encroachment into all aspects of daily life demanded a more immediate re-evaluation of female labor than was possible during peacetime. As her essay “A Defence of Men” revealed, Sinclair’s feminism calls for a mutual assistance of the sexes. In “Women’s Sacrifices for the War,” the unavoidably collectivist aspect of war comes to represent the advancement of her vision.

Similarly, Sinclair’s novel The Tree of Heaven (1917) draws on Sinclair’s involvement in the women’s suffrage movement to conceptualize the complex interrelationship of individuality, intellectual fulfillment, and collective political action, via numerous iterations of subversive womanhood. Men and women take to the streets to demonstrate for women’s suffrage or respond with ritualistic fervor to the declaration of the First World War, thus imbricating collective and individual consciousness. The novel’s female protagonists, Dorothea Harrison in particular, echo Sinclair’s own heightened affective responses to such displays of ideological conviction, which she previously addressed in her correspondence and essays. Consequently, for Sinclair, imbrication of the private and the public realm, and entering into the “Feminist Vortex,” is inevitable.⁷¹ This ethos is epitomized in Dorothea’s response to the militant rhetoric of the suffrage campaign meeting early in the novel. Dorothea baulks at Maud Blackadder’s call for women to sacrifice everything, including their independence and their personal relationships with men, to the cause. Instead, Dorothea offers her service to the suffrage campaign: “I’ll work for you; I’ll speak for you; I'll write for you; you; I'll fight for you. […] But I won’t give up my liberty of speech and thought and action. I won’t pledge myself to obey your orders.”⁷² Her passionate response is wrought with feminist affective militancy, and demonstrates a deeply held commitment to furthering women’s emancipation. As long as she can retain her selfhood, “She [will] fight for freedom, but not in their way and not at their bidding.”⁷³ The Tree of Heaven thus dramatizes Sinclair’s problematic of whether political commitment to women’s suffrage is compatible with the pursuit of a working, writing, feminist life.

The novel’s conundrum is indebted to Sinclair’s earlier essay “A Defence of Men,” which confirmed Sinclair’s heightened awareness of the patriarchal superstructure as extending beyond the restrictions of a mind/body distinction. In this respect, Diane Gillespie’s otherwise convincing analysis falls short. Her summary of Sinclair’s argument in “A Defence of Men” as “Men can learn from women to exercise sexual morality, and women can learn from men to exercise their intellects,” is too simplistic, as it enforces a gendered division between the mind and the body.⁷⁴ The essay instead presents a progression from Feminism, which foregrounded economic emancipation as the catalyst for lasting political change. By contrast, in “A Defence of Men,” Sinclair states, “I confess I do not see how economic independence is going to carry us [women] very far.”⁷⁵ This is not a sudden recapitulation of her previous argument, nor a disagreement with the aims of suffrage and feminism. It is, in fact, an admission of Sinclair’s anxiety that women’s economic independence alone is not a radical enough transformation to effect lasting social and political change. It goes without saying that she believes this is desirable, but Sinclair’s perspective is more wide-ranging than this. Lasting change, she believes, will be achieved through economic independence in combination with “that spiritual change in woman” which has enabled her to recognize her inner power.⁷⁶ Sinclair’s feminist essays thus require rigorous, careful reading to fully reveal the polemical force behind their subtle complexity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by UK Research and Innovation: [Grant Number AH/L503848/1].

Notes on contributors

Milena Schwab-Graham

Milena Schwab-Graham received her UKRI-funded doctorate, on walking as feminist intellectual praxis in George Eliot, May Sinclair, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, from the University of Leeds in 2022. She is currently working on her first monograph.

Notes

1 Martindale, “The Genius of Enfranchised Womanhood: Suffrage and The Three Brontës,” 180–81.

2 Raitt, A Modern Victorian, 111–12.

3 Sinclair, “How It Strikes a Mere Novelist,” 211; Sinclair, “A Defence of Men,” 556–66; Sinclair, Feminism.

4 Gillespie, “Miss May Sinclair, Writer, versus Sir Almroth Wright, MD, FRS,” 197–220; Gough, “May Sinclair, Idealism-Feminism and the Suffragist Movement,” 1–17.

5 Raitt tells us that “Evelyn Sharp was a writer and member of the Women’s Suffrage and Political Union, who introduced herself to Sinclair in May 1906.” See Sinclair to Sharp, 15 May 1906, in Raitt, A Modern Victorian, 109.

6 Boll, Miss May Sinclair, 88. Raitt, A Modern Victorian, 110.

7 Raitt includes an account from Violet Hunt, one of the women collecting donations alongside Sinclair, who makes a case for their shared embarrassment. Raitt directs her readers to Violet Hunt, The Flurried Years, 42. See Raitt, A Modern Victorian, 18–19.

8 Sinclair, “I Have Been Asked to Send a ‘Message’ to the National Women’s Social and Political Union,” 79.

9 Brasme, “May Sinclair’s Aporetic War Chronicle,” 64.

10 Raitt, A Modern Victorian, 155. Sinclair was age fifty-one when she travelled to Belgium.

11 Sinclair, “How It Strikes,” 211.

12 Martindale, “The Genius of Enfranchised Womanhood,” 181.

13 Raitt, A Modern Victorian, 112. Raitt’s footnote cites a letter to Evelyn Sharp, 14 December 1908, Oxford, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, MS Eng. lett. d. 277, fos. 67r–68v. Raitt does not elaborate on the context of the whipping incident, which took place on 5 December 1908–a few weeks before Sinclair’s piece was published. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, was due to speak at a meeting organized by the Women’s Liberal Federation on the topic of women’s enfranchisement. The suffragette in question, Helen Ogston, attended the meeting with a dog whip concealed in her clothes, because violence and sexual assault towards demonstrating suffragettes by male Liberal party members (not to mention male police officers and members of the general public) was widely known. When it became clear that Lloyd George was not going to offer his support to the suffragettes, the event erupted into shouts of protest by Ogston and others. In typically lurid detail, the Illustrated London News ran a story about “The Woman with a Whip,” furthering the suggestion that Ogston had launched into an unprovoked attack on the men in attendance. However, Ogston recalled afterwards that “in the course of the melee I struck with my whip at one of the men who was behaving brutally.” “‘The Woman with the Whip’: Helen Ogston Causes an International Stir.” Accessed February 25, 2020. https://www.royalalberthall.com/about-the-hall/news/2015/march/the-woman-with-the-whip-suffragette-helen-ogston-causes-an-international-stir/.

14 Sinclair, “How It Strikes,” 211. Frustratingly, Raitt does not quote from the unpublished letter which promises to shed more light on Sinclair’s private response to the whipping incident. To make matters more confusing, Raitt also states that the letter is to Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, but goes on to reference a letter to Evelyn Sharp in the footnote.

15 Raitt, A Modern Victorian, 112.

16 Sinclair, “How It Strikes,” 211.

17 Raitt, A Modern Victorian, 111–12. Raitt and others use this quotation to further the argument that Sinclair privileged the seclusion necessary to the pursuit of a writing life over a more public or active role in the suffrage campaign.

18 Ibid., 113.

19 Raitt, A Modern Victorian, 96–97. Quoted in Bowler, “Biography: May Sinclair, 1863–1946,” The May Sinclair Society Website. Accessed May 29, 2023. https://maysinclairsociety.com/biography/.

20 Sinclair, “How It Strikes,” 211.

21 Ibid. Italics mine.

22 Boll, Miss May Sinclair, 89.

23 Sunday Times article, 19 June 1910, quoted in Tickner, The Spectacle of Women, 112. Tickner’s study provides a comprehensive overview of the Suffrage campaign.

24 Tickner, The Spectacle of Women, 114.

25 Ibid. Diane Gillespie provides many salient insights into Sinclair’s writings on feminism in “‘The Muddle of the Middle’: May Sinclair on Women Author(s,)” 235–51.

26 Boll, Miss May Sinclair, 89.

27 Raitt, A Modern Victorian, 110.

28 Wright, “Suffrage Fallacies: Sir Almroth Wright on Militant Hysteria,” The Times, 28 March 1912, 7–8, reprinted in The Argus, Saturday 4 May 1912, 7. Sinclair, ‘Sir Almroth Wright on Woman’s Suffrage: Miss May Sinclair’s Reply,” The Times, 4 April 1912, 7. Diane F. Gillespie–whose illuminating account of the exchange enhances previous scholarship by Sinclair’s biographers, Theophilus Boll, Hrisey D. Zegger, and Suzanne Raitt–emphasizes how Sinclair’s reputation as a “well-known public figure” rendered her a noteworthy opponent to Wright’s reactionary conservatism. See Gillespie, “Miss May Sinclair versus Sir Almroth Wright,” 200.

29 Wright, “Suffrage Fallacies,” 7.

30 Sinclair, Feminism, 8.

31 Ibid., 7.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid., 13.

34 Sinclair, Feminism, 13. Sinclair’s emphases in bold. Wright’s hypotheses were not original, as Sinclair presumably knew. Pseudoscientific menstruation myths had been proliferating since at least the mid-nineteenth century, bolstered by antifeminists including the physician James McGrigor Allan and the psychiatrist Henry Maudsley. For further reference, see Elaine and English Showalter, “Victorian Women and Menstruation,” 83–89.

35 Sinclair, Feminism, 14.

36 Ibid., 17. Sinclair’s emphasis in italics.

37 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 87–97. Sinclair, “Clinical Lecture on Symbolism and Sublimation I,” 118–22. Sinclair, “Clinical Lecture on Symbolism and Sublimation II,” 142–45.

38 Sinclair, “The Way of Sublimation,” unpublished typescript, Ms. Coll. 184, Box 23, Folder 436–38, 23. Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania. I am very grateful to Rebecca Bowler for providing access to photographs of this typescript. Quoted in Battersby, “Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics and Ethics: Mapping Influences and Congruities with Feminist Philosophers,” 419. For further insight into Sinclair’s engagement with Schopenhauer’s philosophy and the psychoanalysis of Freud and Jung, see Battersby, 416–20.

39 Ibid., 33. Sinclair’s emphasis in bold.

40 Ibid., 36. Sinclair’s emphasis in italics.

41 Ibid., 43.

42 Ibid., 44.

43 Ibid., 46.

44 Ibid., 43. Sinclair’s emphasis.

45 “A Defence of Men” initially appears to employ a less polemical rhetoric than Feminism. This is unsurprising when one considers that The English Review was a literary publication which did not expressly align itself with political causes, and predominantly published male writers such as Thomas Hardy, Ezra Pound, and H.G. Wells. Its readership was therefore less likely to be as unequivocally supportive of the Suffrage movement as readers of work published by the Women Writers’ Suffrage League, the organisation for whom Sinclair wrote Feminism.

46 Sinclair, “A Defence of Men,” 556.

47 Ibid., 562.

48 Ibid., 558.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid., 557.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid., 559.

55 Ibid., 560.

56 Ibid.

57 Ibid., 562.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid., 564.

63 Ibid., 565.

64 Truran, “Feminism, Freedom and the Hierarchy of Happiness,” 93.

65 Sinclair, “A Defence of Men,” 565.

66 Raitt, A Modern Victorian, 111.

67 Sinclair, “Women’s Suffrage,” 12. Incomplete published typescript, 1913. Box 43, fo. 452, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania. I am very grateful to Rebecca Bowler for providing access to photographs of this typescript. Cited in Martindale, “‘The Genius of Enfranchised Womanhood,’” 181.

68 Sinclair is especially appreciative of those in the Women’s Emergency Corps engaged in myriad employment on the home front as “trained horsewomen for remount camps: motorists, chauffeurs who can do running repairs, dispensers, doctors, typists, and secretaries; business women [sic] who have taken over the catering of large stores; sporting women who can take postmen’s work, or act as conductors, elevator men, commissionaires, special constables.” See Sinclair, “Women’s Sacrifices for the War,” 13.

69 Sinclair, “Women’s Sacrifices for the War,” 13.

70 Ibid., 25.

71 Sinclair, Tree of Heaven, 124.

72 Ibid., 125–26. Dorothea’s conviction echoes the attitude towards women’s work which Sinclair expressed in “Women’s Sacrifices for the War.”

73 Ibid., p. 124.

74 Gillespie, “‘The Muddle of the Middle,’” 237–38.

75 Sinclair, “A Defence of Men,” 566.

76 Ibid.