Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England

Chapter 7. A New Age for Women: Suffrage and the Sacred

177 Chapter Seven A New Age for Women Suffrage and the Sacred Clara Codd was the eldest of ten girls, the daughter of an inspector of schools. After her father died, she worked as a teacher and governess to help her mother support the family. While teaching in Bath, where she was a member of the local lodge of the Theosophical Society, she joined the Social Democratic Federation, although she was disillusioned by its hostility to the “spiritual side” of socialism. When Annie Kenney and Christabel Pankhurst of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) came to Bath on a speaking tour, Codd was asked to help steward the meeting. After the meeting she resigned her post as a governess to work as an unofficial WSPU organizer. A dedicated militant , Codd lectured for the WSPU and spent a month in Holloway women’s prison for her suffrage activities. After her release from prison, she was offered a full-time post as an organizer for the WSPU. An inner voice, however, warned her that this was not the path she should take, and she resigned from the WSPU to devote herself to the Theosophical Society.1 As a result, Codd has disappeared from histories of the suffrage movement. But she herself did not see her decision to resign from the WSPU as an abandonment of feminism; her work as national lecturer to the TS, no less than her work for the WSPU, was work in the “sacred cause” of “service to humanity.”2 The goals she had pursued within the WSPU continued to inform her theosophical writing and lecturing. As she put it in a lecture to the American Theosophical Society, “there is no subject in the world which Theosophy does not illuminate, and we all know very well that the subject of the sexes is one on which the world stands in crying need of illumination.” Sexual difference was a reflection of the great truths “right at the root of the universe.” Both the feminine and the masculine principles had a role to play—a notion she believed had been preserved in the Hindu belief in the “Shakti,” or feminine power of the deity. She continued to rehearse the arguments about women’s spirituality that had echoed through her suffrage propaganda : the importance of women’s intuition, women’s function as the 178 political alchemies Septimus E. Scott, “The Dawn,” Bibby’s Annual, 1917. (Author’s collection) “channel of the Divine mercy and understanding,” women’s “service and silent self-sacrifice.”3 In 1918 she linked women’s struggle for freedom with the emergence of the New Age: “The advance of the new era is showing in as equally marked a fashion in the outer world of men’s obligations and relationships to each other as in the inner world of the religious consciousness. The one is indeed the outcome of the other, for to draw nearer to reality within is also to perceive it more clearly without.”4 Codd’s withdrawal from feminist politics narrowly defined was not a withdrawal from the feminist community. The Bath Lodge was one of the most actively feminist of TS lodges; Codd also maintained close links with the WSPU leadership, and especially with Annie Kenney. In a new age for women 179 1912 Kenney joined Codd in the Theosophical Society. A year later Flora Drummond of the WSPU also joined the TS. Kenney resigned from the TS in 1914—as she told Codd while the suffrage struggle was at its height, she had “no time for the Masters now”5 —but she rejoined the society in 1920. A few months later Kenney and Codd jointly sponsored Grace Roe (one of the chief organizers of the WSPU, along with Kenney and Drummond) and Kenney’s sister Jessie as members of the TS.6 The secular and spiritual modes of Codd’s feminism overlapped in significant ways. Even to draw the distinction between secular and spiritual here may be anachronistic. For women like Codd, feminism was not a primarily secular activity. There were, of course, many women for whom feminism was a secularizing project, and for whom the rejection of religion was a part of their own personal and political transformation . And there were others whose religious faith was nominal or was understood as a personal and private matter rather than as a political resource. But for...