Chapter 2 - “Out and Out from the Family to the Community”

Summary

Chapter Two centers on Laurence and Clemence Housman, siblings who spent their entire lives living and working together in a collaborative relationship that more closely resembled a marriage. The two cooperated in the production of suffrage posters and engraved book illustrations, and their early acts of collaboration informed Laurence’s later activism work as he contested war and British imperialism. Laurence and Clemence’s radical mode of familial affiliation became the locus for larger forms of political dissidence. Laurence believed that radical politics might emerge from a radical kinship practice that fostered an ethics of service and care. With this in mind, I tie his early feminist work in collaboration with his sister to his later anticolonial work in the Indian independence movement. I also consider Laurence’s handling of his brother A. E. Housman’s posthumous papers, which revealed Alfred’s unrequited love for his friend Moses Jackson. His role as executor of Alfred’s estate placed Laurence in the practical position of weighing his kinship ties against broader political commitments. The carefulness with which he carried out his responsibilities to his brother and to the greater political good reveal how skilled Laurence was at braiding together kinship ties and wider modes of affiliation.