Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (review)

Biography continues to play a significant role in constructing popular understandings of the past. Yet, from determinist Marxists impressed by the influence of the economic structure to reactionaries enamoured with the power of tradition, professional historians have long questioned its merits. It is surprising therefore that someone of Susan Pedersen's standing has produced - despite its various strengths - such a conventional study of the life of Eleanor Rathbone. Pedersen's methodological conservatism is especially disappointing as the title of the book suggests she will analyse 'the politics of conscience' within which her subject played a leading part.

Most accounts of British politics during the first half of the twentieth century normally cast Rathbone as a marginal figure. An Independent M.P. for the Combined Universities from 1929 until her death in 1946, she had already been active in Liverpool politics and most significantly had taken a prominent role within British feminism, invariably exerting a moderating influence. Rathbone's modus operandi was to apply insistent pressure on decision-makers to whom (thanks to her privileged background) she had access. Rathbone was, in fact, one of the left-liberal 'great and the good' whose assumptions helped underpin the post-war welfare state, her main contribution being to ensure that wives not husbands were paid the new family allowance. As Pedersen complains, despite her achievements Rathbone is now a forgotten figure. Even contemporary feminists appear ignorant of her, their attentions having been grabbed by the more dramatically self-publicising - but less effective - Pankhursts. Yet, whether Rathbone merits such a lengthy and meticulously researched biography might be questioned. What is clear however is that while - if only due to her gender - she was an unusual political figure, in other respects Rathbone was fairly representative of the radical-liberal moral 'conscience'. It is a pity therefore that the author focuses so much - and perhaps too sympathetically - on Rathbone herself rather the milieu of which she was a member.

The Rathbones had for generations played a prominent role in Liverpool economic and political life, their favoured position being looked upon by family members as a 'sacred trust': their lives were meant therefore to be ones of 'service' and 'selflessness'. Unusually it was Eleanor rather than one of her brothers who took up this mantle and Pedersen paints an intriguing picture of how she came to take this path. The author explores the 'psychic cost' of her background on someone apparently de-sexed, de-personalized, and self-effacing to the point of mania such that she appeared to want to eviscerate her private self through activity within the public realm.

Pedersen is less inclined to use Rathbone as a means of understanding the wider 'politics of conscience' as it had developed by the start of the twentieth century. On her death Sir Arthur Salter described Rathbone as 'the most selfless humanitarian I have ever known'. Yet, like sex and the Victorians, but in reverse, for Rathbone and her ilk 'selflessness' was everywhere and yet (this sceptic suggests) nowhere. Just to take one minor and obvious instance, at the height of the interwar depression, when the National government felt it necessary to cut unemployment relief, Rathbone allowed her friends to raise £200 to commission a portrait. The implicit - and presumably much-repressed - self-regard (both of the subject and her acquaintances) was surely worth subjecting to some form of critique.

Ostensibly, Rathbone dedicated herself to the public realm, to enable women especially to gain political rights and then exercise them 'responsibly'. She did not however appreciate her assumptions about those rights and responsibilities being questioned. Thus, as Pedersen points out, Rathbone was disappointed with women's failure to act appropriately after fully gaining the vote in time for the 1929 general election. It was possibly this domestic disenchantment - along with the changing international situation - that saw Rathbone become interested in mobilizing help for refugees from fascism. However, it is the alacrity with which she defended her anachronistic position as...