I’m moved and encouraged by their passion for and dedication to their work. I love the way they just kept going through all the discouragements and disappointments. I’m fascinated by their lives between the wars. I’m infuriated by the attitudes they faced – which still ring oh-too-true today. I eagerly devour these stories of women who were not just seeking but creating their own space.
Of course, space here doesn’t just mean their
physical space, but how and where they chose to live is a huge part of it. Hence
the book’s brilliant focus on place, on a place: Mecklenburgh Square in London.
The book gives a vivid sense of how they lived, in their public and also their
private spaces. As I read, one aspect struck me: that not one of the women
assumed responsibility for cleaning or maintaining that space. They all relied
on other women to do it for them.
Most of them had been brought up in homes
where they had servants. If they went to university to study or work all
cleaning, care and maintenance was done for them. So was the cooking, though
some of the women did cook occasionally, but only because, like Virginia Woolf,
they enjoyed doing it – and there was someone else to do the washing up. When
they set up private homes for themselves, they employed housekeepers, cleaners
and cooks. If there were children, they had others to help with the child care
– HD had her friend Bryher and paid nannies; Dorothy L Sayers sent her child to
live with a cousin in Oxford.
I don’t think it would have occurred to them that
any other arrangement was possible. Dorothy L Sayers rented just one room in
Mecklenburgh Square – but she employed a cleaner. Virginia Woolf, who had
always lived with servants, did begin to question the system, but I had the
impression that she was more interested in how it affected her than the people
she employed. She hated the lack of privacy, and she felt uncomfortable about
being a socialist and feminist who relied on working class women to do the
dirty work. Her solution? Move the servants out. And that’s what the Woolfs did
when they lived at Monk’s House in Sussex: they bought a couple of cottages in
the village for their gardener and cook-housekeeper. Peace at last – with all
the housework done and meals prepared!
I’m not criticising these women for employing
cleaners. In fact, I think it’s great that the women they employed were paid to
do work that countless other women have been conned into doing for nothing for
centuries. I can’t help thinking, though, how much easier it was for them to
leave the cleaning to someone else when they’d never been brought up to do it. But
then neither had their brothers or fathers or uncles. I’ve yet to read a biography
of Charles Dickens or D H Lawrence which even mentions that they didn’t do the
dusting.
 |
| The world turned upside down? |
Drearily, it’s an issue that is still with us. Only
a month ago Caitlin Moran had to defend her decision to employ a cleaner. As
she pointed out, “Martin
Amis has never been asked if he loads his own dishwasher.” It is not, Moran
insists, a woman’s issue, or a feminist issue: “Housework is the concern of
all.”
The
rest of the world, though, hasn’t caught up with that now (for more on this see
the links below), and it hadn’t caught up with it then, when the women in this
group biography were living and working in Mecklenburgh Square. Unlike Moran, I
think housework is a feminist issue while women and domesticity remain linked. Consequently,
these five women’s rejection or subversion of domesticity is closely connected
with their feminism and freedom.
I
wonder if one of those women ever picked up a book to dust it and paused with
it in her hand, flicking over the pages, longing to be able to make all the
wonders it contained her own. I wonder if when she approached one of those
cluttered desks she ever dreamed of herself sitting in the chair, every now and
again gazing out of the Georgian window across the Square, with the pen in her
own hand poised over sheets of paper covered with her thoughts, her ideas. I
wonder if she ever put down her dustpan and brush for a moment when she was
outside a study door and listened to the buzz of conversation inside, feeling
its energy, its excitement, its fellowship. I wonder if when she went in to
collect the used cups and glasses her heart turned over with longing to be one
of those wonderful, trailblazing women talking, laughing, smoking, drinking,
reading.
She’s Judy the Obscure – and perhaps one day I’ll write her story…
Caitlin
Moran, ‘Yes I’ve got a cleaner, what’s your problem?’, published on line by The
Times, 19 June 2020
‘Working mothers interrupted more often than fathersin lockdown – study’, The Guardian, 27 May 2020
‘Women’s domestic burden just got heavier with the coronavirus’, The Guardian, 16 March 2020
‘Women almost twice as likely as men to do the bulk ofhousehold budgetting’, Fawcett Society, 25 June 2020
