'Guilty Women', Foreign Policy, and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain

Julie V. Gottlieb

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137316608
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

British women were deeply invested in foreign policy between the wars. This study casts new light on the turn to international affairs in feminist politics, the gendered representation and experience of the Munich Crisis, and the profound impression made by female public opinion on PM Neville Chamberlain in his negotiations with the dictators.

1

British Women and the Three Encounters: International, European, and Fascist

Women’s political status and the political relationships between the sexes were transformed between the two world wars. Not only did women become British citizens with the vote if they were over 30 in 1918 and on equal terms with men in 1928, but the politically motivated among them seized every opportunity for women to exercise influence in international affairs and through international bodies. Much hope was invested in women to heal a world profoundly wounded by a war of annihilation, to reform the culture of international relations, to democratize diplomacy, to educate the next generation to abhor war, and to remake the world in their own feminine image and as an alternative to male aggression. The tone was set during the war. In April 1915 radical women from 12 countries, belligerent and neutral, met at The Hague for a congress that is widely regarded as the inauguration of feminist pacifist internationalism. Its British Committee held its first congress in London that October at which it ratified its manifesto. The document articulated the maternalist anti-militarist principles that were to underpin women’s aspirations in international politics post-war: “Since women are in a special sense the custodians of life, we are determined that we will no longer consent to political social conditions involving the reckless destruction of life either in peace or in war.” Supposedly biologically pre-destined to be the world’s natural pacifists, women now demanded for themselves that they “be given a share in deciding the conditions which influence and determine war and peace, in the home, the school, the church, the industrial order, and the State.”¹ Emerging from The Hague congress, the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom (WILPF)² and its national Women’s International League (WIL) branches sought to “create a habit of international thinking as one of the surest preventatives of war,” while its educational work was geared towards “emphasizing the international significance of the problems with which women are most concerned, and encouraging their sense of comradeship with women in other nations.”³ The deceptively simple equation was that men had made the war, and it should be women who make—and keep—the peace. The feminist movement took an ‘international turn,’ both in institutional terms by organizing itself on international and transnational bases, and in ideological terms with its increasing preoccupation with foreign affairs and the status and plight of women in other lands.⁴ While at home a pared down feminist movement continued to campaign for franchise reform up until 1928, much of the personnel, spirit, and energy of the suffrage and suffragette movements were already being channelled into international networks and a fresh philosophy and collective identity of feminist internationalism and/or pacifism. But the idealism of the 1920s was to give way under the strain of the ascendency of Nazism. During the 1930s we can observe the crystallization of a feminist anti-fascist mind-set, even if a cohesive and cooperative women’s anti-fascist movement never quite materialized.

I propose that we see the phenomenon of feminist anti-fascism as a process rather than a fixed ideological position, and as the outcome of a series of encounters. As a conceptual framework, over the course of approximately four decades, from the late 19th century to the end of the 1930s, we can discern three stages that British women passed through as they defined their sphere of interests and interacted with their female counterparts in foreign lands. These stages are the ‘colonial encounter,’ the interlinked ‘International’ and ‘European encounter,’ and, finally, to coin a phrase, the ‘Fascist encounter.’ Prior to the First World War, post-colonial historians have conceptualized women’s perceptual and missionary interaction with imperial subjects as the colonial encounter, a power paradigm in which white middle-class women regarded colonized women as the recipients and beneficiaries of their missionary zeal.⁵ In their encounter with the colonial ‘other,’ British women positioned themselves at the apex of a hierarchy of sexual emancipation. With the coming of the First World War and in the immediate decade thereafter, I would propose that the colonial encounter relocated or returned to the European setting, and much of the rhetoric of empire was retuned as a discourse on internationalism. Of course, it is also true that the British feminist gaze was not withdrawn from the imperial stage—there was overlap between the colonial and European encounter. While many of these women were increasingly critical and self-critical about Britain’s imperial role, the perseverance of ‘feminist orientalism’ and ‘feminist imperialism’ is easily demonstrated by the leadership of the international women’s movement by white, middle-class, metropolitans. Bolt avers that the attention of British feminists was directed to three interlinked areas: female emancipation in the various parts of the empire; the activities of the Geneva-centred League of Nations; and, in due course, the relative merits of pacifism and anti-Fascism.⁶ For our purposes, the focus will be on the last two of these tendencies.

Public women in the public eye

This chapter plots women’s journeys through the political quagmire of the inter-war years. It tracks two consecutive generations of politicized women, the first born in the 1870s and 1880s, thus having come of age during the suffrage movement and reaching their political prime in the aftermath of war, and the generation born in the 1890s and 1900s who came of age in and through the war and who enjoyed political rights on paper as soon as they reached adulthood. It focuses on those women who were active in single-sex organizations, in the newly-reconstituted women’s sections of the Liberal and Labour parties, in single-issue campaigns and humanitarian missions, in the administration and advocacy of the League of Nations, and that part of a new generation of women journalists, travel writers, and academics who became ‘experts’ and authorities on European affairs. Together these women served as the missionaries of internationalism. To be sure, most of the women with whom we will come into contact qualify for inclusion into more than one of these categories. The common denominator of their purpose was to make tangible women’s political emancipation by taking advantage of the new spirit and the innovative institutions of post-war internationalism. This is not to suggest the homogeneity of political views, and women devoted to international work, as Rupp has demonstrated, could be nationalist, non-nationalist or antinationalist “but all agreed that women could—and ought to—come together across national borders and work to make the world a better place, and that agreement is what bound them together.”⁷ The press remarked on the way “conference follows conference in the world of women,”⁸ and the energy and ingenuity of an internationalized feminism goes a long way towards contesting an earlier downbeat narrative of post-enfranchisement feminist decline.⁹ By their personal examples and through the dissemination of their ideas, these women set the parameters for, and expressed the aspirations of, inter-war British women’s citizenship.

What accounts then for this lack of cohesion among politically-engaged women? Predictably, some of the explanations can be found in national, class-based, and party politics, and it is through these prisms that historians have tended to look.¹⁰ But these valuable studies have failed to highlight the international dimension of these divisions, and it is by redirecting the line of enquiry that we gain a deeper appreciation of the impact of international problems and controversies on the women’s movement in Britain. Why did freshly enfranchised and politicized women throw themselves into internationalist activism in the post-war years? As educated, enfranchised, often well-travelled, well-heeled and multi-lingual people, how did these women’s privileges inform their interpretations of the status of women at home and abroad? How did their mutating relationships with internationalist, pacifist, and socialist politics determine how they positioned themselves during the bitter appeasement debate later in the 1930s? How can we reconcile the imaginative power and courage of feminist anti-fascism with the relative failure of the feminist movement in the same timeframe? Confronting these questions will help us to discern the deeply gendered and contested nature of fundamental concerns in post-war Britain, from the requirements of political engagement in a mass democracy to the nature and responsibilities of citizenship, and to the most pressing dilemma of all by the late 1930s, whether to strive for peace at almost any price or to arm, morally and materially, for an anti-fascist war. An acute feminist internationalist consciousness conditioned the conceptual and psychological outlook of British women as they contemplated a second world war and its alternatives at the end of the 1930s.

Indeed, the scholarship on the inter-war women’s movement has taken the same international turn, and in the process recalibrated the political effectiveness and cultural impact between the waves of feminism. Whereas Harrison had argued that “once women had the vote, many feminists moved off into pacifist and internationalist work and partly for this reason domestic feminism went into gradual decline,”¹¹ the more recent trend has been to reinterpret the international orientation of the women’s movement as indicative of its success in adapting to the new world order.¹² There has been some disciplinary cross-fertilization of ideas between theorists of Feminist IR (FIR) emerging in the 1980s, and Gender and IR (GIR),following suit in the 1990s, and practitioners of women’s history.¹³ The FIR and GIR enterprises are not divorced from contemporary activism, and Peterson has proposed that “by retrieving histories of gender that shaped our international past(s), we improve the quality and likelihood of feminist futures.”¹⁴ Much of the historical literature too has been inevitably nostalgic, and many accounts have been written by those with personal histories as activists in the milieu of feminist peace activism.¹⁵ Taylor and Rupp emphasize that “coming together to create the first wave of an international women’s movement was no mean feat in a world rent by war, depression, revolution, and the rise of fascism.”¹⁶ Bolt has been somewhat more sceptical of their achievements, arguing that Anglo–American “activists defending internationalism failed to advance on the justification for female involvement devised at the end of the 19th century: namely that women’s roles as mothers and educators empowered them to protest against militarism.”¹⁷ Pugh acknowledges that between the wars “the cause of peace gave women a platform and a degree of authority within what would have conventionally been regarded as male territory.”¹⁸ Van Seters has focused instead on the many ways in which engaged women, feminists and non-feminists, sought to penetrate the male world of foreign policy debate in Britain, and concludes that despite the impressive range of their activities during the 1930s, “it was likely the government was influenced by this activism more in the nature of its efforts to present policy to the public (and to women voters in particular) than in the actual policy decisions made.”¹⁹ As measured against their pre-suffrage achievements, women’s political mobilization was very impressive, but it does not necessarily follow that they made such great strides within malestream political institutions and political cultures. It is to the leading spokeswomen of this vision, women in the public eye, that we must first turn.

The study of women’s inter-war internationalism has been especially buoyant for the last 20 years, and the trend has been to examine women’s organizations in their own institutional contexts, and sometimes in a vacuum. This has been complemented by biographical studies that have offered many insights into the changing relationship between women and foreign affairs.²⁰ Building on the rich existing scholarship, here we are concerned with how highly politicized British women related to the international, and a number of brief biographical case studies will inevitably be illuminating. However, in this book I am equally interested to investigate the relationship between the female electorate—the women of the masses as constructed by the media and internalized by many women themselves—and international issues and crises. By taking this multi-dimensional approach, we will see how both the discourses of internationalism and anti-fascism were distinctively gendered and their practices sex-segregated.

Indeed, recognizing the gulf between the sexes in both international and anti-fascist activism is vital to understanding the sense of alienation between the sexes as Britain prepared to fight another world war. Rose has persuasively asserted that during the Second World War itself the People’s War mythology of home-front consensus belies the Manichean media constructions of male and female sexual morality, commitment to wartime national service, and citizenship.²¹ This was entirely consistent with the real and discursive gender bifurcation in international affairs and foreign policy in the anxious build up to the war, when it was honour, courage, levels of political engagement, and emotional expression that were each gender bi-polarized. When war broke out again only 21 years after the end of the last world war (in the same year as women were marking the 21st anniversary of their enfranchisement, and, with even further symbolic charge, as women born in 1918 reached voting age), women and men sensed the defeat of their hopes in different ways and identified war aims along sex lines. There were parallels too in the ambivalent ways in which another 21st birthday was celebrated in the summer of 1939, that of the League of Nations. Emboldened by women’s modest but nonetheless path-breaking incursions into international politics, and motivated by feminist critiques of fascism, in some important respects women were fighting their own war against the Axis powers.

There will be more about the construction of ‘mass woman’ in later chapters, but for now the approach is by necessity a women’s history from above. As members of the political, cosmopolitan, educated, and often also the social elite, the women who were civically engaged were not always as finely attuned to the interests and opinions of the mass female electorate as they might have thought. Much of their work was prescriptive and aspirational. Undeniably, there was a significant gap between their extraordinary activism and their opportunities for engagement, supported by a refined political literacy, and the perceived general apathy and political semiliteracy or illiteracy of the population at large. As women eagerly prepared to vote for the first time in December 1918, former suffragette and author Evelyn Sharpe entreated them to cast their minds beyond the private sphere: “I think far too few of us have r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction—Guilty Women? Gendering Appeasement
• Chapter: 1 British Women and the Three Encounters: International, European, and Fascist
• Chapter: 2 Women’s War on Fascism
• Chapter: 3 ‘Guilty Women:’ Conspiracy and Collusion
• Chapter: 4 ‘Guilty Women:’ Powers behind Thrones
• Chapter: 5 ‘To Speak a Few Words of Comfort to Them:’ Conservative Women’s Support for Chamberlain and Appeasement
• Chapter: 6 ‘Women Are the Best Friends of Mr Chamberlain’s Policy:’ Gendered Representations of Public Opinion
• Chapter: 7 ‘Anyway Let’s Have Peace:’ Women’s Expressions of Opinion on Appeasement
• Chapter: 8 ‘Don’t Believe in Foreigners:’ The Female Franchise Factor and the Munich By-elections
• Chapter: 9 The Women Churchillians and the Politics of Shame
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index