The Webbs, Fabianism and Feminism

Fabianism and the Political Economy of Everyday Life

Peter Beilharz, Chris Nyland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351880459
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book seeks to explore the understanding of Fabianism of both the Webbs and the Fabian Women's Group and how this understanding shaped their views regarding such gender-centred issues as the family wage; protective labour law; and women's place in the welfare state, the home and the labour market.

1 Fabianism and Feminism: The Political Economy of Everyday Life

Peter Beilharz

Fabianism has long been viewed as unfashionable, ordinary, reformist. The essays collected together in this volume do not seek to deny these kinds of characterisations so much as to revalue them.

Fashion in politics and in scholarship alike is often dangerous. Modernity continues to throw up particular fields of social problems ranging from deprivation to the lack of meaning in everyday life; these perennials need to be viewed as central, not marginal. Fashion is arguably a major issue within the social sciences today; given the connection between publishing and commodification, more and more books and papers appear confirming dominant interpretations as they are thrown off, with the attendant marginalisation of alternative views. The increasing implication of scholarship and media produces a kind of hip mainstream for which all other arguments are old hat. But there is, or ought be, more at risk in committed scholarship than this. Call us old-fashioned, but our intention in these essays is to return to older paths where style was connected to clarity, and complexity was no immediate excuse for obscurity.

The charge that Fabianism is ordinary is perhaps more interesting, though it is also clearly connected to the prominence of fads and fashions within contemporary scholarship. To say that something is 'ordinary', rather than avant-garde or exotic is obviously to denigrate, to devalue. For our part, in these essays, we seek to revalue the place of the ordinary rituals and practices of everyday life and to reappraise their significance for the social sciences. The oldest dismissive tease against Fabianism, that it is nothing more than 'gas and water socialism', too easily belittles the extraordinary significance of these basic provisions to everyday life. While fashionable arguments across the liberal arts thus arc in and around such veritable conceptual monsters as Eurocentrism, few stop to wonder at our incredible good fortune that the taps do indeed function in Melbourne or in Chicago, while various peoples in other cities and towns go without. Apparently it is all too tedious, this older insistence that human suffering is a central problem which does have some ordinary, material and remediable aspects such as those to do with housing, labour conditions or domestic technology arrangements. And then reformism is made to seem too trivial, lack lustre, too pathetically immersed in the ordinary details of everyday life to warrant the intellectual enthusiasm or political concern of the self-styled avant-garde which claims to lead scholarship forward.

It is for reasons such as these that we focus here upon the political economy of everyday life. After a remarkable revival into the 1970s, political economy lapsed again, partly because of its over-reliance on Marxism and a relative indifference towards culture, which in the meantime has been remobilised via cultural studies and has itself become a major concern in management and organization studies. Of course economy itself can be conceived as a culture, and it certainly is inconceivable outside of culture. At the same time, the further progress of global capitalist development into the nineties makes even more apparent the ongoing problems of the production and distribution of wealth. Deprivation and suffering persist in the most horrible of forms. Some of the older marxist or social democratic approaches to economics may have presumed that the goal of equality or the principled opposition to inequality were core socialist concerns, from which all else in terms of human elevation would follow. The Fabian sensibility was less inclined towards the end of inequality than towards the removal of socially constructed impediments to human development, whether social or individual. Issues such as health, education and sanitation thus became both politically urgent and, yet, preconditional rather than strictly necessary causes of possible progress. But it remains easy to sneer at Chadwick while reading Derrida.

Fabianism thus rests, still, upon premises which are unfashionably humanist. Again, this may indicate its location outside the intellectual avant-garde, which for some thirty years has become enmeshed with the trend called theoretical anti-humanism. Some of the early structuralist critique of humanism found its target in those more simplistic views that men, or men and women, were capable of anything, that men could be as gods. In some other regards, however, antihumanism has been one of those hallmark trends indicating that interest has turned away from the lives of ordinary people (like us) and become lost within textual or formalistic pretensions of the trendsetters. At the same time, most postmodern theories rest on plainly liberal or reformist premises when it comes to debates over justice, rights or cruelty. Universalism has been vastly criticized and is nevertheless still practised; for we are all still humanists, or inhabitants of a humanist culture, for which improvement remains possible if less imperative than it may earlier have seemed.

Inasmuch as feminism, too, has been caught up with philosophy and identified with poststructuralism, ordinary feminism of the kind historically tied to humanism and reformism has also been devalued. On occasion, indeed, its existence has been denied, as though feminism were or could be a monolithic tradition or form of identity politics which only the vanguard could define or defend. The consequences of these definitional slides sometimes seem uncomfortably reminiscent of those around Marxism in the seventies. In that phase, it was dogmatically asserted by scientific Marxists, not least the followers of Louis Althusser, that the only kind of real socialism was Marxism and that, by further reduction, there was only one proper Marxism, that of Althusser. Into the nineties we have been witness to apparently similar kinds of disputes in feminism about who the 'real' feminists are. Semantically speaking, it is self-evident that feminists put women first upon their political agendas and on their lists of theoretical curiosities and research projects. At the same time, varieties of feminism abound. Yet the politics of certainty has led to the denial that Fabians such as Beatrice Webb were indeed feminists. By what criteria? That they were somehow less radical than us, today? The enormous condescension of posterity has also meant the diminution of contributions like Webb's, and the consequent narrowing of the sense of feminism's richness and diversity.

Just as we seek the reaffirmation of Fabianism's value, so here do we argue for something like an ordinary feminism. Ordinary in the sense of practical, concerned with the issues which earlier reformist women and later materialist feminists were concerned, about the organisation and regulation of everyday life, domestic labour, the life of the household and of working life. Now these latter concerns are all in one sense or another sociological, or caught up with the sphere of political economy. As Naomi Black and others have argued, they are concerns which in an earlier period were central to feminism as social feminism and sociology as a social movement (Black, 1989). Now sociology has become part of the state, in effect, and the women's movements have taken up different positions in distinct parts of its terrain, from the academy to policy units within the bureaucracies. Australian feminisms have flourished in both regards, in particular as philosophy and as femocracy. Femocracy itself is arguably a variation of the ordinary reforming feminism which held up extraordinary earlier local movements like the Women's Co-operative Guild or the Fabian Women's Research Group. Only somehow the legitimacy conferred upon more recent femocracy is less often granted to ordinary feminism, the 'gas and water' feminism which we associate with activists and writers such as Beatrice Webb or Virginia Woolf. This was to open a different issue - a middle class feminism based upon the methods of social investigation, journalist muckraking and publicity, advocacy, and sociological explanation.

This different issue - the issue of class - is both important and interesting, yet again has been marginalised from discussion. Critics and participants in these processes historically seem to have a great deal of difficulty even acknowledging the middle class impetus of the reform process, of feminism, and even of socialism. Socialists have sometimes been imagined, falsely, as uniformly proletarian in origin. After various intersections with Marxism, some feminisms seem simply to have avoided the issue of class difference or antagonism. The symmetries across the history of Marxism and feminism are sobering. Where one postulated a unitary working class actor, the other implied some kind of magical harmony among women regardless of place, time or interest. Postcolonial feminism punctured this sense of harmonism when it came to the question of the relations between women in first world and third. But if the third world is in the first, then class relations also exist at home. This is not to suggest that middle class feminism or socialism is ridiculous; to the contrary. These matters become problematical only in denial, as when middle class actors deny their origins or interests in the process of social ventriloquism. Historically speaking, both socialism and feminism have class sources in both the working and middle classes, and it is this double coincidence which has led to some great historic alliances, those which for example steered the reform process in Britain after 1945 or in Australia after 1972. Alliances, however are based on common interests, on association not on identity, and their success depends on the recognition of difference.

The residual notion that women compose something like a class against the class of men, serves to obscure the fact that women themselves belong to different classes. Again, this is not to posit insuperable antagonism between women as a fixed principle, so much as it is to indicate that alliances need to be forged across these differences. What this opens is the possibility that some middle class women (and men) might be prepared to acknowledge that their own needs are not the most pressing. This, we suggest, is the logic of the practice in cases such as Beatrice Webb's. Recognising the limits of her own kind of life, even painfully, Beatrice Webb nevertheless behaved as though there was a constituency of working class women and their families whose marginalisation in the social system was more urgent.

These matters have become more difficult to discern because of the tendency to turn Beatrice Webb into either a heroine or else a virago. The contrast between Webb's reception and that of the leading American Fabian feminist, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is an interesting one. Gilman has become a major reference point, alongside du Bois, in sociology. Webb has been more difficult. Webb's private life, in particular, seems sometimes to be elevated over her choice to become a public actor and advocate of these urgencies. Sometimes it seems that the big question today is whether Beatrice and Sidney Webb did indeed copulate, and if so how often and with what degree of ecstasy. The idea that Beatrice might have chosen a companionate marriage with Sidney Webb, in a context of other disappointments, seems hardly to surface. Thus Carole Seymour-Jones, in her otherwise extraordinary work Beatrice Webb - Woman of Conflict, presents Beatrice Potter's 'choice' between Joseph Chamberlain and Sidney Webb as a split between desire and duty. In Faust Goethe drops that famous literary line, that perhaps we have two souls, running ever in tension with each other. Seymour-Jones seems to build an argument upon this kind of dualism, as though the patterns of human motivation were not more mixed and complicated (Seymour-Jones, 1992). Beatrice of course played with that same duality in her autobiography, apparently as a means to deal with the self that flourished and the other which remained potential. Nevertheless, we need to confront the sense that she also chose a public life, and a life of advocacy, of self development through public life rather than the pursuit of desire in the contemporary, often sexualised sense.

Why, indeed, should we have just two souls or characters? Beatrice uses the device to express her complexities, it is true. But only two? Robert Musil put it more suggestively, when in passing, in The Man Without Qualities he observes that 'the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters: a professional, a national, a civic, a class, a geographic, a sexual, a conscious, an unconscious, and possibly even a private character to boot ... which is why every inhabitant of the earth also has a tenth character that is nothing else than the passive fantasy of spaces yet unfilled' (Musil, 1995: 30). Musil's early anticipation is of something more like the picture of multiplicity of identities or social roles in which we now more readily recognise ourselves. To modify the older phrase, we are homo complex, not homo duplex; the older image of split personality, body versus soul, sexuality versus spirit simply cannot capture what we are, or what a figure like Beatrice Webb was. So why should Beatrice's private expression of amorous disappointment be foregrounded to, and what does this contemporary curiosity say not about Beatrice, but about us? Why ought we refuse her choice to do good works with Sidney Webb as somehow less than honest, or authentic?

Beatrice Webb and her peers took a risk, which they may not fully have understood. They were prepared to risk the arrogance of their class, that arrogance which would claim to represent those who cannot represent themselves. Nowadays it is fashionable to rubbish representation, on the grounds that each has the right to voice. This would be charming if it were so, but the assertion confuses the conditions of the world as it 'is' and as it 'ought' to be. To assert that the marginals and outsiders must represent themselves is practically to silence them. To claim to represent others is to open processes fraught with difficulty, but for the moment we know no other way. For in the meantime it is surely more reprehensible to marginalise others by refusing to seek to represent their needs than it is to seek their own recognition, even from the outside. The issue for Fabian women like Beatrice Webb, then, was to sort out what it meant to seek reform for women - which women? and in this regard, as the logic implies, feminism cannot simply or definitionally be a matter of 'placing women first', for this would be again to elevate an abstract universal over so many differing realities. So does a politics which places poor or working class women and their families first, make for a politics which is not feminist? We do not think so, and our hope is that these essays show how Fabianism and feminism interconnect.

For the Fabians, too, knew about feminism, just as they knew about Marxism. Beatrice Webb's infamous gaffe on women's suffrage even indicates as much. Plainly her early opposition to the vote for women was a strategic and symbolic blunder. But it was not simply the manifestation of the virago's poison. Beatrice Webb also opposed 'politicalism', or the pursuit of women's suffrage as the first priority above all others. She did, by contrast, support local political activity over parliamentarism. 'Mere feminism', in her setting, was taken to be particularistic, or middle-class, a matter of privileged women seeking to extend their own privilege. In Beatrice's eyes, for better or worse, middle class women should be seeking to defend not their own interests but those of working class women. The pattern of logic may be too unilinear for us, today, but it is at the very least suggestive of a line of preference, indicating a political choice. If Beatrice Webb was slow to recognise the extraordinary significance of electoral democracy, this is also because she shared the Western period indifference towards liberal democracy and the peculiarly English caution towards modernism. After all, liberal democracy had various major opponents left and right until the period of the post-war boom. The strength, but also the weakness of the Webbs' position was to connect democracy to industrial democracy, however rendered. On this point Beatrice Webb is inconsistent; for if, as she believed, the 'democratic revolution' was central to the prospect of progress, then suffrage is also central. But Beatrice remained the product of her time, sceptical concerning parliamentary forms and liberal democracy.

Our advocacy of these other advocates is not simple minded or absolutist. We are not arguing for a simple return to Fabianism; to the contrary, its political moment has passed. But this is also part of the problem we seek to address, that those perennial social problems persist, and that a wealth of earlier responses to them has been lost in the rush after fashion. If we still remain committed to the minimization of the material sources of human suffering, then Fabianism remains one tradition at our call. This to argue for an ordinary feminism, for renewed attention to the political economy of everyday life.

This volume brings together essays written and published separately by us over the last ten years. These essays result from the pursuit of parallel paths rather than from direct collaboration between us. The authors came together accidentally, having discovered at a distance that the other was also working on Fabianism. Our disciplinary paths began, in common, in Politics, taking us through the different routes of Management and Industrial Relations, and Sociology. What we share across these disciplinary boundaries is that particular land of revisionism which values past struggles, examples and projects as ways to help address the present. Nyland's major contribution in this field has been to recover the work of reformist women and their political agendas. His papers make up the backbone of this collection. Beilharz's work has attended, in comparison, to the symbolic and theoretical aspects of rethinking socialist horizons, evaluating reformisms against the haughtier claims of the revolutionary traditions.

The volume commences with Beilharz's survey of Fabianisms from the Webbs to Shaw, Wells and Cole. Nyland and Gaby Ramia then analyse the W ebbs in particular, with especial reference to the rights of women. Nyland next offers an extended analysis of Webb's feminism, after which Nyland and Mark Rix discuss the extraordinary and overlooked phenomenon of the Fabian Women's Group and Beatrice's activity within and alongside it. Nyland and Di Kelly survey Beatrice Webb and the issue of the National Standard of Manual Handling, for it is female manual labour which is so frequently occluded in other, related arguments about feminism and its interests. A coda from Beilharz closes the volume, turning full circle, perhaps, in assessing Fabianism's own claims to be taken seriously as a sociology and not only as a politics. Read together, these essays are less an attempt to stake out territory than part of a project of recovery and renewal; for our shared sense is that Fabianism remains useful, and that ordinary feminism is one of its attributes.

2 Fabianism

Peter Beilharz

Fabianism, of all socialisms, is most consistently painted grey on grey. The Fabians, and especially the Webbs played up to this; they seemed almost happy to be ridiculed as they went about their business, doing committee work, scribbling endlessly, making acquaintances and influencing people. Ironically enough, this has helped to produce the situation where Fabianism has been incredibly influential, and yet rarely taken seriously; where Fabianism has been mocked, caricatured to death, syncretised and homogenised, Fabians turned into the boy-scouts of European socialism. All Fabian cats have become apparently grey; and Beatrice and Sidney Webb, as has been remarked, have become a kind of composite personality in the history of British socialism (Britain, 1980). The Webbs could just as well be 'the Webb', for all the tendency to identify their thought. As is so often the case in the analysis of the history of ideas, however, the interest lies in differences as well as in similarities or identities. The Webbs were in some ways more alike than is often thought, in other ways more different. Their common views require analysis, but so do their differences. A similar challenge confronts us in locating and characterising the arguments of other Fabians; for just as Beatrice was not Sidney, so are there real and substantial differences between them and their rebellious nephews such as G.D.H. Cole and H.G. Wells, and avuncular Fabian figures like Bernard Shaw. Cole at different times took up the radically democratic persona of guild socialist, and then became more orthodox and party-minded with the passing of the years. Wells, for his part, became the most explicitly Utopian of Fabians, whether rampaging over the achievements of the elders as a petulant young man or writing the baffling panoply of social science f...