How Capitalism Feels in the Head
http://www.counterpunch.org/briggs03062009.html
March 6-8 , 2009
By TRACEY BRIGGS
In January, Sheila Rowbotham presented her latest work, Edward
Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love (2008), at a conference at
UCLA, which was cosponsored by the Center for the Study of Women and
the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History. Her most recent
study is of an Englishman living a century ago who advocated for and
anticipated the struggle of a wide array of social justice issues:
women's rights, anti-vivisection, socialism, gay rights,
anti-imperialism, prison reform, free love, and a general freedom of thought.
I first was introduced to Sheila Rowbotham's work when Promise of a
Dream: Remembering the Sixties (2002) was published. My graduate
advisor at the time had told me to read it to gain a better
perspective of the anti-nuclear campaign in Britain. This aspect of
the work was intriguing but what held my undivided attention was
Rowbotham's socialist feminism. Her strong, unfaltering voice of
woman's freedom came through clear and unmistakable. A few years
later, when writing my dissertation on a radical social settlement in
Greenwich Village, I stumbled across a personal narrative that needed
such illumination that she could provide.
In 1905, Crystal Eastman, sister of radical journalist Max Eastman,
was living in the Village while studying law at NYU. Before
bohemianism had really set in, tales of a local hotspot circulated
through the neighborhood. The young Eastman, looking to make friends,
wanted to be there. Luckily, her occasional beau, Paul Kellogg, was a
member. She later told her brother: "The settlement where Mr. Kellogg
takes his meals and where he has taken me twice for dinner, Greenwich
House is the place of all places where I want to get next year. . .
. The reason I like it is because they are all cranks and reformers,
and sooner or later every really interesting up and doing radical who
comes to this country gets down to Greenwich House for a meal." She
was certain that "if I can get in there and make them like me, I
shall consider my future made as far as real living goes."
Crystal was warm and personable, making it easy to like her. Within a
year, she found herself exactly where she wished to be at Greenwich
House. The fiery Eastman's initial impression of its director, Mary
Simkhovitch, must have been chilling, but her husband was a different
story. In stark contrast, the handsome Vladimir, a professor of
economics at Columbia University, was secretly attracted to Eastman.
Within a short period of time, she found herself included not only in
the midst of the activity of the settlement but also within the
closest circles of Vladimir Simkhovitch, receiving invitations to
exclusive and intimidating groups such as the Philosophical Society
where she dined and conversed with those in the upper echelons of New
York intelligentsia.
In the fall of 1906, Vladimir and Crystal began a love affair. As
Vladimir recalled, the affair began one evening when Eastman called
him outside to stand on Jones Street with her. There they listened to
Shubert's Serenade that was playing from one of the tenements. This
"most wonderful of all God's miracles," as Vladimir remembered it,
led to "a beautiful, wonderful sacred year."
The following March, Mary Simkhovitch invited Crystal to stay with
their children at Mount Kisco located just north of the city where
the family occasionally went for retreat. Simkhovitch and her husband
were to arrive a couple days later. Whatever transpired during her
stay with them, shortly thereafter Vladimir reluctantly, but
definitively, ended the affair. To comfort Eastman, Vladimir
resolved, in his usual poetic way, that "these memories will fade and
wilt and evaporate and nothing will be left, except what has become a
part of me. Thank God, a great deal of you has become a part of
myself." Within a couple months, and after much fraudulent gossip and
whispering, Eastman was forced to leave Greenwich House through the
guise of an invitation by Paul Kellogg to join him in his research in
Pittsburgh.
After leaving, Eastman confided to her brother: "I have been feeling
lately, somewhat lost and stranded, as if I couldn't tell where or
with what people I belonged." It seems she was suffering from
paradise lost, despite taking with her all that which she had
learned. In Gerald McFarland's Inside Greenwich Village (2001),
attention is given to this affair, suggesting that the socio-economic
principles that had been instilled in the young Eastman at Greenwich
House was merely a side thought to their personal lives. Yet, those
ideals were precisely what had attracted her to Vladimir. McFarland
overlooked the fact that passion, in whatever form it is realized,
can propel one, as it did Eastman, to take interest in a deeper
understanding of the work she already had divested herself in and can
generate some of the most articulate and insightful accomplishments.
Love was the bait that had hooked her into the struggle for workers'
and women's justice. The affair between the two was not merely an
entertaining anecdote. It was the point in time that Crystal Eastman
found her voice and expressed it the best she could.
As it turned out, the research project that she joined gave her
opportunity to meet with other heavy hitters of the labor movement
and to investigate working conditions. Crystal herself worked
tirelessly to uncover case after case of infuriating evidence of
negligence: "Helper flooring factory age 18 clothing caught by
set-screws in shafting; both arms and legs torn off; death ensued in
five hours." Nor was this the end of such savage disregard. Left
behind were the families who had lost their means of subsistence.
While families fought for some sort of meager compensation, the
children stayed at home with no food to eat. Alternatively, they were
robbed by unscrupulous ambulance chasers who claimed false promises.
Eastman made it clear that it was not insurance and compensation that
she wanted. Rather, after having revealed such a dismissal of the
value of human life, she sought a revolution. Pragmatically, however,
she put her mind towards the immediate passage of workmen's
compensation legislation. Such legislation, she believed, forcibly
altered capitalism's indifference towards the loss of life. Those
deaths, with such legislation enforced, would prove costly to the employers.
Eastman's contribution to the survey, published as Work Accidents and
the Law (1910), directly resulted in the passage of the first
workmen's compensation laws in the United States. No small feat for a
twenty-nine year old woman uncertain of her future. This led her to
work as an investigative attorney for the United States Commission on
Industrial Relations and honored with the title of "the most
dangerous woman in America."
In addition to labor rights, Eastman directed her attention in the
coming years towards mobilizing opinion against imperialism and war.
She helped establish the Woman's Peace Party and acted as president
of the New York branch. Seeing the need for more forceful efforts
against imperial terror and violence, she co-created the American
Union Against Militarism. This organization was to produce a response
to war-mongering hysterics and sought to end such crude aspects of
World War One as the profiteering from contemporary Haliburtons of
her day. Perhaps her most successful anti-war protest came in 1917
when she and Roger Baldwin, who had come to New York the previous
year to assist her with the AUAM, organized the American Civil
Liberties Union. In so doing, she sought to defend wartime dissenters
and conscientious objectors given little representation and branded
as inside enemies of democracy and freedom. Or, as she might say, to
have something left to come home to after the war.
In addition to workers and pacifists, Eastman focused on the
liberation of women. Drawing from her own experiences, the time at
Greenwich House played a pivotal role in forming her perspective.
Agency existed within its community. There was, however, a lack of
feminist mindfulness. As she later suggested, the feminist "knows
that the whole of woman's slavery is not summed up in the profit
system, nor her complete emancipation assured by the downfall of
capitalism." Elsie Clews Parsons, another feminist who Eastman knew
from Greenwich House, supported this hypothesis when she proposed,
"long after the problem of economic monopoly will have been solved
the question of human monopoly will continue to harry us." Parsons,
an acclaimed anthropologist, proudly found herself on the "Who's Who
in Pacifism and Radicalism" list created by military intelligence in
1919. Randolph Bourne once said of Parsons: "If you are interested in
rare persons, there she is." Yet, she was as perplexed as Eastman by
women's inability to express their free will within socialist circles.
Fifty years later, Rowbotham took up this issue once more. In an
article appearing in the January 1969 issue of Black Dwarf, she
discussed the link between Marxism and sexual humiliation. Shortly
after its publication, she resigned from the editorial board as her
contribution caused internal controversy. Her parting words to the
other members of the board was to suggest that "they sit around
imagining they had cunts for two minutes in silence so they could
understand why it was hard for me to discuss what I had written on
women." This farewell, while imaginative and cutting, also speaks to
the heart of what it was she was saying. Rowbotham found difficulty
in writing about the causation between Marxism and sexual
degradation. As she later reflected, this was not the least because
Marxist indoctrination often leaves out for women "how it feels in the head."
Through writing the article, she combated "a hopeless bitter rage,"
and worse, feeling like "a completely neurotic freak." This was
because, despite the liberation that Marxists offer the worker,
capitalism still exists in the head when the same notions are applied
to women. While often a subtle and even undetectable exclusion, it
can be exasperating to the women who find themselves engaged in such
groups that speak of freedom of the body while still restricting the
freedom of the mind. This anger comes not simply from those
inflicting such restrictions, but also from not being able to
identify clearly for women themselves what is the root of the
problem. In the head, it does not feel good.
Eastman and Rowbotham both understood this feeling. Eastman supported
the notion when she stated: "all feminists are familiar with the
revolutionary leader who can't see." These must have been the
thoughts that manifested after she was unceremoniously forced out of
Greenwich House. To be sure, these thoughts did not come until later,
confessing to her brother at the time of her departure from the
settlement that she felt lost. Nor did she defend herself from the
gossip and accusations that ensued. In response to this antagonism,
Rowbotham offers up an explanation to young Eastman's graceless
exodus. Rowbotham states that "for people who have no name, who have
not been recognized, who have not known themselves," communication is
difficult. When they cannot speak, they feel a bitter, hopeless rage
and those who hold themselves to be superior mistake this silence as
a sign of stupidity. Then comes the gossip, the accusations, the
attacks, ostracism, and demonizing. What is worse, Rowbotham points
out that the gossip in particular often is generated by the older,
more established women who yield it as a powerful tool against
liberation for the younger. It is Rowbotham's conclusion, of which
Eastman would agree, that "the so-called women's question is thus a
whole people question not only because our liberation is inextricably
bound up with the revolt of all those who are oppressed, but because
their liberation is not realizable fully unless our subordination is ended."
Eastman did return to Greenwich House. She and Kellogg were invited
back, along with other members of the Pittsburgh investigation team,
to discuss their work. Even having achieved national recognition, it
still was an awkward occasion to be back in the company of her
estranged mentor for an evening. Regardless, she had the support of
her brother, who had also joined Greenwich House and had a hand in
arranging her visit. Learning of the affair only after Crystal left,
he had become her confidant. In so doing, Max did not judge his
sister harshly. Rather, he encouraged her to go forward in her
ideals. Despite promoting his sister's independence, however, he must
have understood the softer side of love and politics. Throughout the
years to come, he kept her informed of Vladimir, responding to such
inquiries as "How does he seem? You know what I want to know."
As for Sheila Rowbotham, there is not an exodus planned for the near
future. A professor at the University of Manchester since 1995, the
university administration attempted to force her into retirement last
year. Students there, who must also have learned from her unfaltering
voice, successfully protested the decision. Rowbotham was extended a
three-year contract.
--
Tracey Briggs lives in Chicago and can be reached at: traceyabriggs@yahoo.com
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