The Children's Book

work.

It is always so, said Miss Dace. So far, and no further. Your movement would be going against any such employment before it was tried, and now, like King Canute with the tide, you cry, so far, and no further. But the tide will flow in, it will rise, you will see.

The next speaker was not Herbert, but Phoebe Methley.

Elsie took a good long look at Herbert Methley’s wife. She had been an attractive woman, Elsie thought, using the past tense a little harshly. She wore a plain dark skirt and a white shirt with a black and green bow at its collar. Her hat was black trimmed with a green ribbon. She looked mild and competent. Her subject was “A Woman’s Place.” She began by saying that she was grateful to the last speaker for having raised the subject of the sacred values of the Home, for it was of the Home she wished to speak. When it was mentioned in this way, she thought, everyone had a pleasant image of a woman in a sunlit house with a garden, and a warm fire in winter, surrounded by plump and smiling children, a baby perhaps in her arms, her mind full of little comforts for her husband on his return from an arduous day in the office or the club. Such a woman’s head would be full of delicious new receipts for cakes and jellies, delightful new covers for cushions and original decorations for hat-brims and corsages. Women in this happy state were in fact few. Rich women did not mind their children, might go days or weeks without seeing them, delegated the care of their health to nursemaids and the care of their minds to governesses, and sent them away, as soon as they could, to schools where they might well be homesick or bullied. And then, such women suffered from boredom. Women could not use minds which had been fed on nothing but sugar flowers and cream soup and hatpins. And the vast majority of working women—and there were thousands and thousands of working women who not only earned the household bread but did what sweeping they could and spread the bread with what grease they could scavenge—they did indeed value the Home and keeping it together, however many adults and children slept in one room—for one step beyond such homes was the Workhouse, which was a mockery both of home and work. The “values of the Home” was an abstract paper phantom.

And let women not think that their sense of duty, their influence in their proper sphere, in the Home, counted for anything in the face of the law. A woman who shielded her children from an unreasonable or violent father had no chance of taking them with her if she fled from unhappiness. Such a man could claim that outside his Home she was unfit, not only to care for, but even to see or to visit, her children, who had been her life, though her heart might be breaking. Under the sweet sentiments about the domestic sphere of happiness, lip service paid to the wisdom of motherhood, lay cruelty. It was true that a young woman, seduced by a plausible man—an employer, an employer’s son, maybe—if unmarried, was alone responsible in law for the welfare of her unhappy child. But a married mother, separated for whatever reason from her husband, ceased at that moment to have any rights as a mother.

•  •  •

Elsie’s spirit drew back as Mrs. Methley grew more passionate. She was right, of course, but she cared too much, Elsie wanted to stop watching her caring. The Methleys surely had no children.

Elsie thought of her own mother. She had worked. She had been good at her craft and the air of the kilns had made her ill. She had tried to make a home for them. They had had a geranium in a pot on a window sill. They had had a Minton plate—it was a second—hung on a nail on the wall. They all knew what these things meant. They meant they were respectable. Just respectable. She tried to think she wouldn’t so much mind being trapped in a gilded cage of a comfortable Home—she had done a fair amount of substitute Home-making at Purchase House, not so much out of a desire for homeliness as out of a powerful dislike for mess, and shoddiness, and discomfort, which was unshared by the Purchase women. All this talk about what women did, or should, or might want was unsettling to her. She had wanted shoes and a belt and she had them. She wanted—she wanted—she wanted—to live. But it was beginning to irritate her that she had thought so little. If she had sat up all night reading, who would she be now? She raised her face under her gallant hat, to look at the women on the platform, who got so much out of both thinking and being dissatisfied. She saw that Herbert Methley’s dark look was turned in her direction. A very discreet smile lurked under the fronds of his moustache, and in the corners of his intelligent eyes. Elsie’s face went hot. She looked down, although she would have liked not to. She touched the arrow of the red belt. He could not see her hands from where he sat.

The third speaker was Mrs. Henrietta Skinner, representing the Fabian Society, and speaking bravely and directly about Women for Sale. She spoke in praise of Josephine Butler, whose courage had brought about the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, and of W. T. Stead, whose—perhaps sensational but efficacious—exposure of the Maiden Tribute had exposed the trade in virgin female children, and caused Parliament to raise the age of consent to sixteen. Elsie thought Mrs. Skinner looked like a pie with a frill— her round head, under a plain, “rural” straw hat, was perched on the mound of her Liberty clothing, which hung in bronze-green folds like a tent. Her hands, too, were little, pale, and plump. She used them to make very precise stabbing gestures to illustrate her uncomfortable points. She made no apology, she said, for using words that polite society was more accustomed to conceal behind euphemisms and hints, which were themselves part of the oppression and harm they avoided. She would speak of prostitution, she would speak of venereal diseases, she would speak of the damage done to women’s bodies by unfeeling and unnecessary medical examinations to which they were subjected. She hoped no one would feel they should leave the room when she spoke of such things. Ignorance killed. Men—husbands and fathers—with what they thought of as “natural” urges and needs—went out and contracted diseases from sick women, and passed these diseases on, not only to other so-called “fallen” women and girls—or children—who had been bought, certified as virgins, and sold—but to their own innocent and ignorant wives, and to the generations to come, the infant son in his cradle, the daughter singing to her doll in the nursery. No one had suggested subjecting these men to medical examinations. It was unthinkable that they would submit.

And who were the “fallen women” who the popular imagination believed led these men, with their natural urges, astray, painting themselves with rouge and henna, showing pretty ankles and covering themselves with exotic perfumes? They were working girls and mothers as often as not, who could not feed their children on what the sweat-shop paid them, whose husbands had had accidents that left them unable to bear burdens or wield picks and shovels. They were young servant-girls, seduced by the master of the house, or his son, and turned out without a character when they were found to be with child. Men must regulate their urges, or be made responsible for the consequences.

Pomona’s hands were clasped defensively in her lap. She was trembling a little, although her facial expression was one of detached attentiveness, like the child in the schoolroom who is really thinking about something other than the lesson. Elsie stopped listening to her own body and considered Pomona. What had been done to Pomona, what did Pomona know, whose white thighs were curled and spread in modelled china forms? Did she model for them, or did he guess? Elsie didn’t want to know. She didn’t think he guessed. She imagined, briefly, his fingers at work. She remembered families in Burslem where someone’s little brother or sister was generally thought to be really her child by her brother or father. They slept so close there, flesh to flesh. Here she had her own bed, and tossed in it, consumed by undirected desire. Did Elsie care about Pomona? She didn’t want to. She wanted. She wanted. She did not think anyone could ever really have desired Etta Skinner, so what did Etta Skinner know of all this from the inside? She looked at Professor Skinner, handsome in profile in the dusty light, and thought—does he have these urges, does he do anything about it? Does he clasp all that hummock of flesh in his arms? She smoothed her skirt over her hips.

The members of Miss Dace’s club had prepared a salad luncheon for speakers and audience. Elsie was hungry. She advanced on the table with the plates and teacups, followed by Pomona, who clung to her as though they were connected by magnets, so close that she kept almost falling over Elsie’s feet. Frank Mallett noticed them, and said he was pleased to see them. He asked if they had found the morning helpful, and Pomona said breathlessly “Oh yes, very.” “And you?” said Frank to Elsie. Elsie repeated the word “Helpful,” trying to work out what exactly the speeches