Billie Melman

Borderlines : genders and identities in war and peace, 1870-1930

Borderlines weaves together the study of gender with that of the evolution of nationalism and colonialism. Its broad, comparative perspective will rechart the war experiences and identities of women and men during this period of transformation from peace to war, and again to peace. Drawing on a wide range of materials, from government policy and propaganda to subversive trench journalism and performance, from fiction, drama and film to the record of activists in various movements and in various countries, Borderlines weaves together the study of gender with that of the evolution of nationalism and colonialism. Its broad, comparative perspective will rechart the war experiences and identities of women and men during this period of transformation from peace to war, and again to peace.

The Superfluous Woman, the Flapper, the Disfranchised Female and the Rothermere Press

‘The idiom that the general public of the twentieth century possesses is not merely crude and puerile; it is made up of phrases and cliches that imply fixed, or rather stereotyped, habits of thinking and feeling, at second-hand taken from the journalist’.1 The voice is, unmistakably, that of Mrs Leavis. The words are not characteristically hers. The story of the British reading public after Lord Northcliffe’s revolution is told as one of unarrested decline. The narrative, which conventionally begins in 1896, the year the Daily Mail was launched, chronicles a process of cultural Gleichschaltung. The audience was semi-literate; its life became impoverished, its idiom vulgar and its ideas about life second-hand — received, manna-like, from the sinisterly powerful new press.2 There is no doubt that the new press had a levelling-down effect on the audience, in that by putting in circulation catchwords and images it dangerously standardised habits of thought. The rhetoric of the debate on the flapper clearly illustrates all this. Yet this rhetoric was not, or not merely, the fabrication of Fleet Street hacks. It reflected certain anxieties and uncertainties, largely connected with the demographic imbalance after the First World War. Certainly the mass media dramatised common prejudices and inflated the fears aroused by the discovery of the new feminine sexuality. But by no means were the fears inauthentic (‘second-hand’ would be the Leavises’ term). And any description of the press and the public as two separate mechanisms, the one manipulating, the other passive and receptive, obfuscates the topic of communications.3 In what follows I treat the dailies of the twenties and the dailies’ audience as — what Raymond Williams calls — two reciprocating, communicating systems, the one feeding on the other, mutually shaping common attitudes.

1919–28: ‘The Sheik of Araby’ — Freedom in Captivity in the Desert Romance

Until about 1919 English-speaking people had used the Arab term ‘sheikh’ to describe a venerable Mohammedan, a chief of a Bedouin clan, tribe or village, or a desert potentate. Then, in the early twenties, the word acquired a new significance. ‘Sheik’ (as it was now spelt in popular writings) still retained its older meanings and associations with the Orient, but in popular Western imagination it came to stand primarily for a new image of masculinity. In the idiom of the period ‘sheik’ signified a virile, sensual male, a priapic, violent lover who masters females by sexual prowess and physical force. Significantly, the epithet was applied to oriental and occidental men alike. The new idiom became current at exactly the same time as the ‘flapper’ entered popular myth, and a causal relation between the two developments may therefore be assumed. The image of the desert lover was a reaction against the twin stereotypes of the modern young woman and her male counterpart. Alongside the image of the youth as a sexless androgyne, there emerged that of the male and the female as antipodal yet magnetic poles, drawn together solely by the power of sex. And, alongside the stereotype of the emasculated man, there developed the myth of the male possessed with extraordinary physical powers and a talismanic potency, a myth that was a response to the new type of woman: politically emancipated, economically independent and sexually uninhibited.

‘A Lass of Lancashire’: The Mill Girl as Emblem of Working-Class Virtues

The mill-girl story had emerged in the 1890s. Its heyday overlapped the decade between the end of the First World War and the Wall Street Crash; its decline and fall coincided with the Great Depression. The Girls’ Friend (1899–1931), the first paper to have catered specially for women workers in the industrial centres, was emulated by a throng of weeklies whose titles exploited the appeal of the noun ‘girl’: the Girls’ Reader (1908–15), Girls’ Home (1910–15), Girls’ Weekly (1912–22), Girls’ Mirror (1915–33), and so on. Their reading public drew massively on the working-class and on a variety of occupations: the wool and cotton industries, domestic service, the clerical profession. And, to judge from the proportion of boarding-school yarns before the war, these publications could boast of large numbers of schoolgirls among their readers. Despite their heterogeneous audience, the weeklies published by the Amalgamated Press, D. C. Thompson and Pearson were popularly known as ‘mill-girls’ papers’, a name that endured till the 1940s. Nor were the stories these papers printed confined to the world of the mill or to Lancashire. They covered the whole range of topical romance, from the Ruritanian melodrama to the domestic romance. But the type of story that lent the papers their nickname, that embodied their style and epitomised the values they advocated was the romance set in a Lancashire mill.

Class and Gender: The ‘Girls’ Weeklies’

The impression one carries away from old issues of story papers such as Peg’s Paper is quite different from that recorded by Orwell in his famous essay. One does not have the sense of ‘frightful overwhelming refinement’, of blissful domesticity, of an exclusion from real life and the real world. The papers do have a certain coarseness which is sincere. Their idiom is the idiom of a class, not the parroted jargon of an elite. In their form and subject matter they are examples of what Eliot would probably call the ‘expressive art of the people’.1 And of a sex.2 The remainder of this book is about class and gender. The combination of large audiences and a massively capitalised press has usually been regarded as a primary cause for the rise of a mass rather than class press. In post-war Britain that particular combination brought about the emergence of a different kind of commodity: the down-market, consumer-oriented periodical which was, none the less, a class paper. It will be useful, then, to look at the story papers in the context of structural changes in both the market for periodicals and the periodical-reading public, before concentrating on the aesthetics of pulp fiction.

‘Sex Novels’: A New Kind of Best-seller

The brief fame of the word ‘flapper’ coincided with the emergence of the term ‘best-seller’, or, in the currency of the period, ‘big seller’ or ‘super-seller’. These three synonymous epithets were at the centre of a discourse on the nature and trajectory of mass-market fiction, a discourse which overlapped and often intermingled with that on the contemporary woman. For the new motions on womanhood and sexuality to reach a large, disintegrated reading public the apparatus of best-sellerdom was needed. On the other hand, this apparatus, which in Britain began to develop after the First World War, would not have emerged at this particular moment had there not been a public aware of, even obsessed with, the phenomenon of modern feminine sexuality.

1924: The Green Hat

The Green Hat vexed the critics. Ralph Wright, reviewing it for the New Statesman, found Michael Arlen ‘an irritating writer’. Wright was particularly irritated by the ‘smart and thin style’ of Arlen’s prose, the boastful parade of knowledge about modern literature, and, last but not least, by the self-assurance of the man-about-town on matters related to women and sex: There is a sort of epigrammatic cocksureness on all the details of love-making that I find particularly unpleasant: an assumption that love has something to do with silk underclothing at one moment and at the next a rhetoric outburst on almost Wellsian lines of optimism. I do wish he [Arlen] would be a little more modest and show a little better taste when dealing with the subject.1

1924, Annus Mirabilis: The Constant Nymph

In the annals of modern British publishing 1924 is probably recorded as an annus mirabilis. In October, less than four months after the appearance of Arlen’s big seller, John Murray published the first of the novels of C. P. Wren, following the adventures of the Geste family. That same month Heinemann brought out a second novel by an unknown Oxford graduate which was to become one of the very greatest successes of the decade. It is difficult to imagine two lives entirely different as those of Arlen and Margaret Kennedy. He was an exotic foreigner; an emblem of ‘modernity’; a master in the arts of publicity and best-sellerdom; a wit and a connoisseur of books, on a superficial, social level. She was solidly English; ‘the best of Victorian’ (the Express’s description); a real cognoscente of the classics and of literature generally.

The Emigrant: Romance and the Empire

Alongside the tendencies towards insularity, entrenchment and regionalism there emerged another. Its brand-mark was nationalism. Its symbol was the Empire. Its main characteristic was the blurring of social differences and the effacement of class consciousness. The literary form in which this tendency manifested itself was the magazine romance set in the Commonwealth, or in a British colony of dependency. Where the world of Lancashire was narrow and claustrophobic, that of the Empire romance was broad and free. Where the former was intimate, close and familiar, the latter offered a new, adventurous way of life in remote, exotic places. The broadening of the horizons of magazine fiction was, of course, related to the impact of the First World War. Michael Joseph, quick to detect changes in attitudes among publishers and editors, noted the significant disappearance of the pre-war taboo on stories set in foreign countries.1 The exotic romantic serial was gradually supplanting the traditional domestic or industrial melodrama. Some publishers still had a bias towards an English scene and English characters. F. J. Lamburn instructed new contributors to Pearsons Weekly, Keep the scenes of a story mainly to England. The average reader of Pearson’s Weekly doesn’t know enough about countries abroad and the people who live there to want to read solely about them. Let the characters go abroad and have experiences abroad, but let them come back to England before the story ends, otherwise the story loses a lot of its appeal for readers. All the characters should be English unless their nationality has a definite dealing with the story, such as Dr Fu Manchu has with stories. Introduce, if you like, a French Count or a Russian Bolshevik, but keep the main characters British.2

Introduction: 1918–28, Contexts and Texts

A decade, to repeat a truism, is not a fact. It is an arbitrary measurement of time, retrospectively imposed upon events in the past by the tidy-minded student of history. It is at the peril of being accused of tidy-mindedness, as well as of a distorting reading of the past, that I use the terms ‘decade’ and the ‘twenties’. They are interchangeably applied in this book to the continuum between two spots in time, 6 February 1918 and 29 March 1928.1 On the first date the last of the four Reform Bills became law and 13,671,480 electors, the biggest increase ever in Britain’s electorate, were added to the Parliamentary Register.2 The new Representation of the People Act extended the franchise to males over 21 years and to females over 30 years who (except when they qualified in their own right) were the wives of local-government electors. The ‘matrons’ vote’ — as it was appropriately labelled — was, essentially, a household suffrage. A residue of some 5.5 million females remained voteless until, about ten years later, an almost undivided House of Commons passed the Representation of the People Equal Franchise Bill. During the interim the disfranchised female haunted the popular imagination. She was distinguished from the rest of her sex, marked out and labelled ‘flapper’, a curious epithet that, after three centuries of near obscurity, suddenly acquired life and meaning. And universal female suffrage, which met no serious political opposition, popularly became known as the ‘flapper vote’.