Eamonn McCann: Patriarchy in the UK

Edith Lanchester was widely known as a terrible woman altogether. That’s what George Bernard Shaw is said to have said about her, anyway. She was the daughter of a prosperous London architect and poised for a high life in grand society before 1890, when she discovered socialism and went mad. Edith’s lunacy was detected when she announced that she proposed to live with her boyfriend Jimmy Sullivan without getting married. Unmarried cohabitees were by no means unknown in the London of the period. What made Edith different was that there was no impediment to her marrying Jimmy: she had no excuse. Nor was she merely a blithe spirit defying convention. She explained to anyone who’d listen that she rejected marriage as a social construct designed not only to keep women subservient and under scrutiny at home, but to shut them away from public affairs, thereby preventing their discontent from finding a political expression.

Edith was a leading member of the Battersea branch of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation, where she had met Jimmy. She left her job as a teacher to become secretary to Eleanor Marx. At meetings of the SDF, she spoke often of the function of patriarchy within capitalist society. In the memory of one SDF member, her passion was “frightening” when she talked of the wedding requirement that women vow to obey their husbands for the rest of their lives.

Eventually, her father, Henry, had had enough. Not only was Sullivan without a penny to his name, he was a socialist and, worse, Irish. More than flesh and the Lanchester bloodline could stand. So Henry and two of Edith’s brothers barged into her house accompanied by leading London psychiatrist George Fielding-Blandford. Father and brothers held her down in a chair while Blandford circled, barking questions.

He was later to explain that Edith “had always been eccentric, and had lately taken up with Socialists of the most advanced order. She seemed quite unable to see that the step she was about to take meant utter ruin. If she had said that she had contemplated suicide a certificate might have been signed without question. I considered I was equally justified in signing one when she expressed her determination to commit this social suicide. She is a monomaniac on the subject of marriage, and I believe her brain had been turned by Socialist meetings and writings, and that she was quite unfit to take care of herself.”

Fielding-Blandford signed an order committing her to the Priory Mental Hospital in south London. The same evening a protest meeting called by the Battersea SDF, under the auspices of the Legitimation League – which campaigned for equal rights for children born outside marriage and an end to the designation “bastard” – drew “hundreds” to a church hall in Battersea. (Well before its time, the Legitimation League.)

The meeting passed a resolution denouncing Fielding-Blandford as a quack, calling on the landlady of one of the Lanchester brothers to throw him out – she was a SDF supporter – and promising “strong action” if Edith wasn’t freed forthwith.

As protest spread and a rally was announced for the following weekend at Parliament Square, the Commissioners of Lunacy were summoned into urgent session and, without examining or even meeting Edith, decided that Fielding-Blandford had gotten it wrong, that while Edith may have been “foolish” and “misled”, she didn’t meet the criteria for madness. She was released.

This may have been the first – certainly one of very few – occasions when the link between diagnoses of mental illness and political repression was publicly acknowledged and became the subject of political action.

Edith’s release wasn’t the end of the matter. Unmanageable women continued to be locked up as deluded about their natural station, as were ravaged women whose implicit indictment of male violence discommoded the guardians of society’s good name.

Not many years ago, a young woman who had been subjected to foul and savage sexual assault by upstanding men from her locality, none of whom was ever to serve a day in jail, and who had been persuaded by doctors to sign herself into a mental hospital, called out to me as I left her ward, “You realise I am the only person in an institution as a result of all this.”

We shouldn’t assume that the medical professionals in the case were ignorant or cruel. What else were they supposed to do? The woman’s problem wasn’t medical at all, any more than Edith’s had been.

This wasn’t the 1890s in Victorian Britain but in the 1990s in Ireland. Things have changed, of course, and continue to change. But there are thousands of women in Ireland today still in acute pain from deep wounds inflicted upon them by assumptions which haven’t quite gone away. Every blow against the patriarchy generated by capitalism should be seen as a blow on their behalf, too. Repealing the 8th will be a contribution towards fashioning a better future for all of us – and towards taking revenge on history.

Incidentally, one of the reasons Edith’s case didn’t become an instant cause celebre is that some of the most prominent “official” leaders of the emerging Labour movement feared that embrace of her actions might stymie their advance. The leader of the Independent Labour Party, Keir Hardy, described her attitude to sex and marriage as “a disgrace to socialism.”

There’s still a bit of that around, too.