Abstract
In her 1936 novel, Honourable Estate, Vera Brittain tells the story of Ruth Allendeyne, an intelligent, soulful young woman born into a wealthy, Midlands manufacturing family, and her search for a purpose in life. After the war claims her beloved brother, best friend, and the dashing American officer with whom she enters into a passionate love affair, Ruth eventually finds this purpose with the intellectual Denis Rutherford, a young man schooled in the values of mutually respectful, companionate marriage by the unhappiness of his own mother, the victim of a possessive and patriarchal husband. The story ends with Ruth’s victory as a Labour candidate at the election of 1929 and her early career as a pioneering woman MP, work she combines with motherhood, a status happily and voluntarily entered into, thanks to her knowledge of birth control and to Denis’s spousal cooperation.
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Notes
Vera Brittain, Honourable Estate (London: Virago, 2000, first published 1936), p. 442.
Ibid.
See, for example, Martin Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists: the British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854–1945 (Oxford, 2000); Cecilia Lynch, Beyond Appeasement: Interpreting Interwar Peace Movements in World Politics (London, 1999); Donald Birn, The League of Nations Union 1918–1945 (Oxford, 1981); David Long and Peter Wilson, eds, Thinkers of the Twenty Years’ Crisis: Inter-war Idealism Reassessed (Oxford, 1995); Jeanne Morefield, Covenants Without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire (Princeton, 2005).
For women’s involvement in the interwar peace movement, see Johanna Alberti, Beyond Suffrage: Feminists in War and Peace, 1914–1928 (Basingstoke, 1989), and Martin Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, 1914–1999 (Basingstoke, 2000, 2nd edn), pp. 103–7.
Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: the Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford, 2008), and see also ‘Inter-war agnotology: empire, democracy and the production of ignorance’ in Laura Beers and Geraint Thomas, eds, Brave New World: Imperial and Democratic Nation-Building in Britain Between the Wars (London, 2012), pp. 209–25.
For a classic account of the tradition of ‘dissent’ over foreign policy-making, see A.J.P. Taylor, The Troublemakers: Dissent Over Foreign Policy 1792–1939 (London, 1957).
E.D. Morel, Ten Years of Secret Diplomacy: An Unheeded Warning (London, 1915), p. xix.
M. Swartz, The Union of Democratic Control in British Politics During the First World War (Oxford, 1971).
Arthur Ponsonby, Democracy and Diplomacy: A Plea for Popular Control of Foreign Policy (London, 1915), p. 114.
Helena Swanwick, Women and War (London, UDC pamphlet No.11, 1915), pp. 4,12.
Cited in Margaret Kamester and Jo Vellacott, eds, Militarism Versus Feminism: Writings on Women and War (London: Virago, 1987), p. 40.
Final Report of the Committee on the League of Nations, 18 July 1918, MSS Zimmern 82, 7, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Many radicals associated with the UDC were, by contrast, sceptical of the League due to its origins in the Treaty of Versailles, which they viewed as a capitalist— imperialist document designed to shore up the global power of the ‘Big Three’: Britain, France and the USA. This position was not, however, universally held on the left; the LNU recruited many allies from the Labour and Trade Union movement. See Helen McCarthy, The British People and the League ofNations: Democracy, Citizenship and Internationalism, c.1918–1945 (Manchester, 2011).
Cecil to Baldwin, 31 March 1926, British Library, London (BL): Papers of Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, Add. MSS 51080, fol. 172.
‘Heart and Head’, Headway, May 1929, 91. See also ‘Heart and Head’, Headway, December 1930, 231.
S.H.Bailey, International Studies in Modern Education (Oxford, 1938), 16.
Ibid., and see also S.HBailey, International Studies in Great Britain (London, 1933), and John Toye and Richard Toye, ‘One World, Two Cultures? Alfred Zimmern, Julian Huxley and the Ideological Origins of UNESCO’, History (95) 2010, pp. 308–31. For a detailed survey of League-related educational work, see McCarthy, The British People, ch. 4.
Martin Ceadel, ‘The first British referendum: the Peace Ballot, 1934–5’ English Historical Review, 95 (1980), pp. 810–39.
Helen McCarthy, ‘Democratizing Foreign Policy: Rethinking the Peace Ballot, 1934–5’, Journal of British Studies 49 (2010), pp. 358–87.
For a detailed account of this story, see Helen McCarthy, ‘Petticoat Diplomacy: The Admission of Women to the British Foreign Service, c.1919–1946’, Twentieth Century British History, 20 (2009), pp. 285–321.
Cited in Hebe Spaull, Women Peace-Makers (London: George G Harrap & Company, 1924), p. 121.
Barbara Metzger, ‘Towards an International Human Rights Regime during the Inter-War Years: The League of Nations’ Combat of Traffic in Women and Children’ in Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine and Frank Trentmann (eds), Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c.1880–1950 (Basingstoke, 2007), 54–79; Daniel Gorman, ‘Empire, Internationalism, and the Campaign against the Traffic in Women and Children in the 1920s’, Twentieth Century British History, 19 (2008), 186–216.
Helena Swanwick, I Have Been Young (London, 1935), p. 385.
A tension which has been characterised in terms of old and ‘new’ feminism, although the distinction should not be overplayed. For a useful discussion, see Susan Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (London, 2004), chapter 10.
‘Can the Women of the World Stop War?’ from Modern Woman, Feb 1934, pp216–220 in Paul Berry and Alan Bishop, eds., Testament of a Generation: The Journalism of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby (London, Virago, 1985), p. 218.
Ibid.
Robert T. Nightingale, The Personnel of the British Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service, 1851–1929 (London, 1930).
A point made by Susan Pedersen in her review of Ross McKibbin’s Parties and People in Twentieth Century British History, 21(4), 2010, pp. 561–4. McKibbin suggests — erroneously — that foreign affairs were electorally marginal in interwar politics. Ross McKibbin, Parties and People: England, 1914–51 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
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McCarthy, H. (2013). ‘Shut Against the Woman and Workman Alike’: Democratising Foreign Policy Between the Wars. In: Gottlieb, J.V., Toye, R. (eds) The Aftermath of Suffrage. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137333001_9
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