A call to look north
learns about the sexual progressives who broke new ground in late 19th- and early 20th-century Scotland
Tanya Cheadle
Manchester University Press, 2020 233 pages
Hardcover, £70.88; paperback, £25.00 ISBN: 9781526125255
To paraphrase the author in the introduction to this book, it’s about time someone offered the Scottish perspective on a reasonably well-trodden ‘English’ history topic: the role and impact of sexually progressive thinkers in late Victorian society. Throughout this closely researched work, there is a running thread that challenges English historians to look north of the border when writing about British history, and a quiet call-to-arms for Scottish historians to provide their wealth of research to a readership that has been fed English history as British history. It’s not. Stuff also happens north of the border.
Cheadle’s book comprises four biographies of late 19th- and early 20th-century sexual progressives, men and women who wrote and campaigned for sexual equality and sexual freedom in a society governed by respectability, religious righteousness and moral conservatism.The book shows that when it came to the ‘sex question’, reimagining new forms of male and female intimacy was one thing, but living that dream was somewhat more complicated.
Following a scene-setting explanation of the role of the ‘unco guid’ in Scotland in the late 19th century, Cheadle explores marriage and divorce, and sex outside of wedlock. With more than 50 per cent of Scotland’s population affiliated to a church, the influence of the kirk elders pervaded all aspects of life for the working classes and the elites alike. The ‘unco guid’, Scotland’s moral arbiters, were confronted with rampant rural pre-marital sex and illegitimacy, urban working-class immorality, incest and prostitution, and middle-class ‘invisible’ transgressions perpetrated behind closed doors.
Onto the scene walk Bella and Charles Pearce in the first of Cheadle’s biographies.This Glasgow-based couple
The book shows that when it came to the ‘sex question’, reimagining new forms of male and female intimacy was one thing, but living that dream was somewhat more complicated
were advocates of gender equality. Bella was a feminist within the early labour movement, while Charles was a ‘new man’, committed to female emancipation. Bella’s main vehicle for disseminating her ideas was her column ‘Matrons and
Maidens’ in the weekly Labour Leader.
Writing under the pen name of Lily Bell, she argued for women’s suffrage, and commented on the sexual division of labour, female higher education and even women’s dress. Today, these would be debated on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour to both a female and male audience; Bella’s chosen topics met with the obstruction of a grassroots labour movement focused more on proletarian emancipation than the Contagious Diseases Act and how it impacted women’s sexual lives. Bella argued for ‘new life’ socialism, encompassing male and female equality and particularly female suffrage, while in her personal life she and Charles participated in what reads today as a sexual cult.
The Brotherhood of the New Life was the brainchild of elderly Christian mystic Thomas Lake Harris (1823-1906). When visiting the Pearces he declared their breakfast room the ‘central home and service point’ for his ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ (p.81). Since the Pearces’ personal papers on this aspect of their lives have not survived, Cheadle relies on Harris’s archive to explore the Pearces’ participation in this sexual movement. It included ‘absolute continence’, an ambiguous phrase that might have meant sexual abstinence except for procreation with one’s legitimate spouse, or might have permitted non-ejaculatory sex with other ‘spousal’ members of the Brotherhood, a practice to which one member alluded. Naturally, the latter interpretation titillated the press, and protagonists of this unconventional sexual way of living became unhappy bedfellows with other Glaswegian socialists before the Great War. In her personal interpretation of Harris’s teachings, Bella’s declaration that ‘it was the Woman in man that was crucified on that Cross’ was a similarly hard sell (p.103). Thus, it is not surprising that the Pearces have not made it through the historical cheese grater that shreds and forgets the reputation of some, while more mainstream ideas and people create our received history.
Over in Edinburgh, the sex question was approached scientifically by Patrick Geddes in his 1889 Evolution of Sex.
Geddes’s research led him to believe that the fundamental differences between the sexes at an organic, cellular level could not be ‘annulled by Act of Parliament’ (p.129), thus any attempt to legislate for female emancipation was pointless.
Geddes argued that women felt more, while men thought more, and that women sought subtle detail while men had ‘a stronger grasp of generalities’ (p.127). Thus, despite maintaining that men and women were equal, Geddes could argue that the sexual division of labour was attributable to ‘organic difference’ rather than ‘masculine bullying’ (p.130). He believed in monogamy between loving partners, but also expected his wife and family to play second fiddle to his public life. It appears that Geddes viewed his wife Anna as an intellectual inferior, someone to support his work but not necessarily participate in it, which makes his contribution to the work of Scotland’s sexual progressives problematic. Perhaps he was simply a man of his time: an evolutionary scientist with progressive ideas on relations between the sexes, but a patriarch at heart.
It is easier to sympathise with Jane Hume Clapperton, the last member of Cheadle’s progressives’ quartet. Edinburgh spinster on the surface, but arguably the most sexually progressive of all the figures discussed here, Clapperton promoted women’s right to sexual pleasure and birth control. Clapperton’s contribution to sexual debate has been explored by other academics, most notably through discussion of her novel Margaret Dunmore: Or, a Socialist Home (1888), but Cheadle connects Clapperton’s fiction with her important non-fictional work. Clapperton promoted a utopian ideal of solving social problems for all classes. Her comparisons between the smaller family sizes of the middle and upper classes and the sprawling families of the poor were infused with eugenicist principles, and would today raise eyebrows, but she must be taken in the context of her period. For Clapperton, sex was up there with eating and drinking as a basic human requirement, a form of emotional engagement engendering tenderness and sympathy. It is, however, debatable whether Clapperton ever had sex, despite her support for alternatives to monogamy.
Cheadle’s book is an important contribution to the fascinating subject area of gender history. For an academic monograph, it is accessibly written and contributes a much-needed Scottish perspective to turn-of-the-century attitudes towards relationships, feminism and socialism. Further investigation of her
It appears that Geddes viewed his wife Anna as an intellectual inferior, someone to support his work but not necessarily participate in it, which makes his contribution to the work of Scotland’s sexual progressives problematic
protagonists’ influence among the working classes in particular would have been valuable, since an overarching question remains: apart from other middle-class intellectuals, who was listening?
Many popular works have been written concerning the working-class experience in industrial Glasgow.This book not only provides insight into a socialist-feminist aspect of Scottish history, but also a wealth of detail of the lived experience of Scotland’s late Victorian middle classes. It sits comfortably in time and topic between Eleanor Fitzsimmons’s The Life and Loves of E Nesbit (2019) and Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting (2020), titles both focused on London.
As Cheadle concludes, the Pearces, the Geddes and Clapperton were Scotland’s own brand of socio-sexual progressive ‘cranks’ (p.197); this was not a species confined to London. The book diligently teases out the life stories and influences of Clapperton et al, but could go further in connecting its cast to key figures operating, and thinking, south of the border. Let’s hope that may be Cheadle’s next work.