Women and Social Action

ELT 36:2 1993 destroying human lives. When worked upon, they offer the prospect for more hopeful constructions. "God's Fifth Column," the philosophical conceit that makes this interpretation cohesive, is the strain in life which reveals, often gently, the existence of these contradictions. It penetrates the "fraud of piety, of prestige values, [and of] worldly self-confidence." On a personal level it deflates the pomposity of an unjustly persecuted man like Oscar Wilde. On a national scale it enables human beings to redeem themselves in history, which for Gerhardie is a collective process of will. The very existence of a "fifth column," with its comic interludes, makes clear that life is an incalculable muddle. Gerhardie's book is likely to have three different levels of appeal: as literary work, philosophical treatise, and disquisition on history. In each category the verdict is likely to be mixed. The historical element, which I am best able to judge, adds little overall to our knowledge of the period. It reworks familiar themes, though in ways that are frequently eloquent. It is also less than authoritative in its treatment of facts. Yet its provocative insights and imaginative renderings should not be underestimated . The schematic nature of the work illustrates what Gerhardie was trying to convey: that the world is similar to a "garish fun fair." Try as we may, it is difficult to escape this conclusion. We should be grateful to God's Fifth Column for helping us to reach it. Joel H. Wiener City College of New York & ______________ CUNY Graduate Center Women and Social Action Jane Lewis. Women and Social Action in Victorian and Edwardian England. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. vii + 338 pp. $39.50 IN HER THOROUGHLY DOCUMENTED and informative book about five late-Victorian and Edwardian social activists, Jane Lewis is not only bent on portraying her subjects as women more or less bound by traditional views of the role they ought to play in British society but she also wants to show how the careers of these restless middle-class women shed light on the evolution of the post-World War II welfare state. Lewis, a Reader in the Department of Social Science and Administration at the London School of Economics, believes that the historical road from individualism to collectivism was hardly as smooth as it has been made out to be and that the welfare state might well have taken a different 230 BOOK REVIEWS shape if the ideals and goals of women like these had been given more weight. This is not, however, a thesis-ridden book. Quite the contrary. Lewis describes, in nuanced detail, the background, the mind-set, and the professional life of each of her subjects—from Octavia Hill, born in 1838 and dead before the first world war, to Violet Markham, who lived until 1959. In between are Beatrice Webb, Helen Bosanquet, and Mary Ward (better known as Mrs. Humphry Ward). One of the fascinating aspects of Lewis's portraits is the way in which, despite the expected differences in personality and operating style, not to mention the different cultural climate experienced by each of them, certain assumptions about gender and sex roles are shared by all five women. All were convinced—and the strength of their belief testifies to the power of convention, even over exceptional women—that marriage was a "must" and motherhood a sacred obligation; that women needed men for protection and had to be careful not to seem "unwomanly" (lest men lose the sense of their obligation); and that there were fundamental differences between the sexes, with men superior in most respects. Paradoxically, while all five gave education for women the highest priority, Mary Ward sent her son but not her daughters to the university. Nor, unlike Webb and Markham, did she ever change her mind about suffrage, opposing the vote for women to the very end. Public life, moreover, they all regarded as the undisputed realm of the male, into which females ventured with trepidation and embarrassment. Even the passionately opinionated and ambitious Beatrice Webb had her problems speaking in public, her famous diary, of course, being another matter. For Webb and Mary Ward, Lewis's materials...