8 - Beatrice Hastings, Rebecca West and women's rights at the turn of the century

Summary

The parallel lives of Beatrice Hastings (1879–1943) and Rebecca West (1892– 1983) illustrate two new directions in women's public moralism at the turn of the century. Each writer belonged to the tradition of British women moralists since they attempted to promote the progress of the nation, and because they both argued that the intellectual emancipation of women and men was only possible if cultural conditions permitted it. But their attempts to improve British society and culture also illustrate new intellectual currents in the tradition of women moralists to which they belonged. Unlike their predecessors, who looked to a future of harmonious gender complementarity and tended to retain certain gendered differences between the sexes’ public and private duties, the social and cultural ideals of Hastings and West represented a new vision of individuals’ intellectual and economic empowerment, which rendered gender ultimately obsolete to social progress. Although Hastings situated herself in the tradition of women moralists, her criticism avoided the self-consciously feminine register and personae used by her predecessors, and she dismissed gender as a needless restriction on the intellectual independence of women and men. She described it as a social construct which led women to deny their selves, and men to warp their own. West, meanwhile, refused to situate herself in the same tradition of women moralists, arguing that they had been invariably limited by the shackles of class and patriarchy, and instead she placed herself in a line of gender-neutral cultural prophets who recognised culture as the source of social cohesion.

The feminist politics of Hastings's and West's literary moralism were informed by the late nineteenth-century argument over whether women's independence should be understood in terms of the vote or whether it should signify intellectual independence, and if in terms of the latter, what precisely that meant. Eliza Lynn Linton had rejected definitions of women's emancipation which left the sex completely intellectually and socially independent of men, and used her cultural criticism to promote the familiar picture of women whose intellectual life or public employment strengthened the traditional bonds of family and society. Beatrice Hastings, like other modernist women moralists, discarded this understanding of women's intellectual emancipation because it retained the idea of gendered difference.