‘Life for you would be a song’: The Political Poetry of Helen Crawfurd

Abstract

This article examines poetry by the Glaswegian suffragette Helen Crawfurd. Despite her role as an important figure in the period now known as Red Clydeside, Crawfurd’s political activism as a socialist and suffragette has been neglected by labour historians. While scholarship on Crawfurd has begun to gather momentum in recent years, extant studies of her life and work neglect to mention her small but important literary output. The research presented argues that Crawfurd’s poetry offers an illuminating feminist perspective on a period of Scottish political history largely dominated by male voices. Crawfurd’s poems explore familiar socialist issues through a feminist lens, addressing themes such as peace, suffrage, childcare, and employment.

Helen Crawfurd is often described as a suffragette, a councillor, and a feminist, but rarely is she conceived of as a writer. Born in the Gorbals in 1877 to devoutly religious parents, Crawfurd was attuned to political and societal injustices from a young age. Her father (a master baker) was an avid trade unionist, while her mother would regularly read Crawfurd and her siblings stories of poverty and racial injustices. As Helen Corr observes, Crawfurd’s introduction to politics was ‘fostered by the involvement of her parents within the Conservative Party’, but her own personal politics would lead her to the International Labour Party and eventually the Communist Party of Great Britain.¹ A key figure in the period now referred to as Red Clydeside, Crawfurd would go on to become a founding member of the Women’s Peace Crusade (WPC) and later Dunoon’s first woman councillor. As Lesley Orr explains, over the course of her life Crawfurd was ‘an evangelical Christian, a minister’s wife, a militant suffragette, a socialist orator, and – following a visit to Soviet Russia in 1920 when she met Lenin – a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain’.²

This essay argues that while scholarship on Crawfurd’s political activity has begun to gather momentum in recent years, her literary output should also be considered by researchers. Crawfurd’s extant written output is small and remains hidden away in political archives, but as this essay will demonstrate, it provides an invaluable feminist perspective from a period of history which has long been dominated by male voices. Gemma Elliott has noted that ‘the items and literature of the Scottish suffrage campaigners are scattered around universities, museums and libraries, and not necessarily in Scotland’, a statement which is true of Crawfurd.³ London’s Marx Memorial Library holds the original copy of her autobiography, which has been digitised in-house but never officially published. Additionally, a handful of poems are collected in the Willie Gallacher Memorial Library, a vast collection of materials currently undergoing cataloguing at the National Library of Scotland. One of Crawfurd’s most rousing poems was recently included in The People’s Voice, a digital anthology of Scottish political poetry from 1832 to 1918. Aside from these few examples, there is little evidence of further writing by Crawfurd.

While Crawfurd was not a writer by profession, she certainly did write, and her texts are illuminating for scholars of both the Scottish suffrage movement and the Scottish labour movement. As Orr notes, for Crawfurd, ‘literature and theatre […] offered potent stimulus for imagining different worlds and possibilities’.⁴ In her autobiography, Crawfurd mentions repeatedly the importance of literature in her childhood and the effect this had upon the formation of her political opinions, noting that novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin ‘made a deep impression on our youthful minds’.⁵ Poetry and song were important mediums throughout the Red Clydeside period, during which time direct action and socialist politics spread through Glasgow and surrounding areas with fervour. While much of this poetry has been carefully preserved in political archives across the UK, it remains difficult to locate women’s voices within these collections.

Despite this absence, the role of women during the Red Clydeside era cannot be overstated. Crawfurd and her comrades such as Mary Barbour, Agnes Dollan, and Mary Burns Laird led women during Glasgow’s rent strikes of 1915, and numerous women’s groups such as the WPC and the Women’s Labour League worked to mobilise women in various socialist matters across the city. Yet as Kay Blackwell points out, many modern accounts of Red Clydeside focus entirely on the industrial action of the period, meaning that ‘women are simply not a part of these histories. If mentioned at all, women appear fleetingly in the guise of […] “other workers” ’.⁶ Similarly, as June Hannam and Karen Hunt argue, the majority of memoirs about events on the Clyde are written by men, who ‘praise the action of working-class women like Mrs Barbour of Govan but nevertheless reinforce the sense of silent “otherness” of the women strikers’.⁷ Accounts of Red Clydeside have therefore been dominated by male voices, both in their authorship and their focus, a pattern which is also reflected in Clydeside poetry: despite their important presence in the movement, women’s voices are not adequately represented in the poetry of the period.

Crawfurd’s known poems are therefore invaluable texts as they offer us a rare example of a female literary voice from the epicentre of the Red Clydeside struggle. Sean Murphy has identified a clear trend of anti-suffragette poetry within the Scottish press, in which popular poetry was utilised by both journalists and readers to ‘pour scorn on the movement’.⁸ Crawfurd’s poems, in contrast, demonstrate the ways in which poetry could be used to unite rather than divide, encouraging solidarity across the community in pursuit of women’s rights. Unlike much Clydeside poetry, which focuses on work-place labour and exploitative relations between proletariat and bourgeoisie, Crawfurd’s distinct voice provides nuance as she explores the socialist cause from a feminist perspective.

The Willie Gallacher Memorial Library (WGML) at the National Library of Scotland holds the largest collection of archive material relating to Crawfurd and her life. Tucked away inside these boxes are five poems; three signed, and two unsigned. The poems share clear similarities in tone, language, and form, and are all typewritten in a similar style; as such, we can be confident that all five poems are indeed written by Crawfurd herself. The quality of Crawfurd’s writing in comparison to her oratory ability has been alluded to during a contentious dispute which unfolded in the early 1970s regarding the publication of her autobiography. The text was rejected multiple times by publishers, despite the protestations of many of Crawfurd’s contemporaries and political admirers. The manuscript remained in the care of the Marx Memorial Library, and many urged Phyllis Bell – then librarian – to push for its publication. Bell repeatedly resisted, causing Harry McShane, in a letter of 29 August 1973, to eventually remark of the affair: ‘the Helen Crawfurd thing is disgraceful’.⁹ While McShane allegedly suspected that ‘a deliberate policy of suppression [was] being followed because it contains information which the Communist party would rather not become know [sic]’, Bell appears to have felt that the manuscript simply was not of a quality required for publication.¹⁰

The second rejection letter, addressed to Bell from Maurice Conforth of the publishing house Lawrence and Wishart (dated 12 July 1972) reads as follows:

The first sixty or so pages, which are about Helen Crawfurd’s early development into a militant Suffragette and a political woman, are very fascinating – and make a ‘period piece’ which would still be interesting. But after that it tails off rather sadly, becoming much less a vital autobiography and more a sort of long pamphlet. We don’t believe there is any possibility at all of this creating interest or indeed serving any useful purpose today, and it wouldn’t be possible to sell it commercially.¹¹

Conforth is not highly critical of Crawfurd’s writing; rather, he praises her depictions of her early life but is displeased with what he seems to view as unoriginal political polemicising in its later pages. In reply to a letter from the Marxist historian Raymond Challinor in which he advocates for publication of the autobiography, Bell stressed that ‘politically the MS could not be considered as a contribution to the history of Communism in Britain, nor does it add materially to the well-known image of Helen Crawfurd as an eloquent orator, capable organiser, and loveable woman’ (13 September 1973).¹² Bell echoes Conforth’s earlier assurance that the manuscript is not ‘useful’ as a political history, but it is her suggestion that the text fails to reinforce the image of Crawfurd as a powerful orator which is striking. This is a departure from an earlier comment a month prior in which Bell remarks that ‘it was simply as a keepsake to a personal friend that her surviving sister gave me the script after Helen’s death’ (dated 20 August 1973), through which she implies that the manuscript was never intended for wider publication.¹³ Rather, Bell seems to suggest that Crawfurd’s writing is weak in comparison to her powerful oration, and that to publish the manuscript might be to Crawfurd’s detriment and in fact damaging to her political legacy.

While Crawfurd’s writing is difficult to uncover, it is clear from available texts that poetry provided her with not only an outlet for political rumination and creativity, but was also a useful political tool. Two poems written by Crawfurd are overtly feminist in their subject matter and were likely to have played a role at suffragette functions. ‘Women Shall be Free’ (1918), a poem urging the importance of the female vote, was included in a pamphlet accompanying a suffragette function in Manchester.¹⁴ ‘Song of the Women’ (undated) celebrates unity amongst women across the world in pursuit of women’s liberation; Orr notes that the text is a WPC song, an organisation in which Crawfurd played a central role (launched in Glasgow in 1916, the WPC united women across the UK in their demand for a peaceful end to the First World War).¹⁵ Both texts employ regular form and are similar in length: ‘Women Shall be Free’ consists of three twelve-line stanzas, while ‘Song of the Women’ is slightly shorter, comprised of three eight-line stanzas.

‘Song of the Women’ adheres to a rigid form which would indeed lend itself well to oral performance. While Crawfurd uses trochaic trimeter, every other line is cataletic, allowing for a stressed line ending. The first stanza is as follows:

Through our land the women gather,Overcoming trial and stress,Great the task we gladly further,On to peace we proudly press.Courage springs from facing danger,Strong in ‘love of life’s’ delight:In our midst no-one’s a stranger,In our hands the future’s bright.¹⁶

The rigid repetition of two-syllable feet instils the poem’s rhythm with a feeling of marching forward, suggestive of not only the forward progression of women’s rights but also the militant organisation of the suffragettes themselves. In addition to its sound, this pattern of stressed and unstressed line endings is also striking in its technical composition. Crawfurd alternates between masculine and feminine line endings within trochaic trimeter; as the poem urges men and women to work together to achieve a common goal, the prosody of the text reflects this same sentiment. Cataletic lines achieve the same effect in ‘Women Shall Be Free’, as Crawfurd briefly deviates from a strict ballad metre in the following four lines:

What now of pledges freely madeFor service freely given?Now they who prospered by our aidTo action must be driven.¹⁷

The speaker urges ‘they who prospered by our aid’ to join women in their fight for suffrage, suggesting that the fight for women’s liberation must be fought by men and women alongside one another; beneficiaries of patriarchy must support those who suffer beneath it. As the poem calls for men to join the fight, the text alternates between masculine and feminine lines; once again the text’s prosody reinforces the meaning conveyed through its language as Crawfurd urges for a collaborative effort between men and women.

The meaning of this ‘service’ mentioned by the speaker is ambiguous; in the context of the poem’s publication (1918) we might infer that the speaker refers to the help provided by women during the war effort. While some women took up employment as munitionettes or nurses, much of women’s contribution to the war effort was provided through voluntary activity. As Sarah Pedersen has observed, voluntary work ‘for the needy had always been seen as part of women’s traditional domestic sphere’, but it became increasingly important during the First World War.¹⁸ More broadly, however, we might infer that this ‘service freely given’ refers to the entirety of women’s unacknowledged labour performed within the home, or domestic sphere; the word ‘service’ itself evokes not only military connotations but also a network of household servants. In recognising that ‘women’s work’ goes unwaged, Crawfurd suggests that the domestic work undertaken by women counts as ‘labour’ just as much as the work undertaken by men in workplaces outside the home. The question posed by Crawfurd regarding this unwaged work is not rhetorical. While the primary intended audience of the text is most likely other suffragette women, Crawfurd also encourages men to consider the ways in which they themselves have benefitted from the concept of ‘women’s work’, and urges them to support women in pursuit of their liberation. In asking ‘what now of service freely given?’, Crawfurd reminds us that after benefitting (even inadvertently) from gender-based oppression, it is the socialist man’s responsibility to join the fight against it.

There are brief moments in ‘Song of the Women’, however, where we might be inclined to view Crawfurd as inadvertently reinforcing gender roles – specifically the idea of women as inherent caregivers – through her references to children. In the text’s second stanza, Crawfurd writes:

Every street shall hear our message,Every child deserve our care,Guild and union, town and villageRing with songs of hope we bear.¹⁹

Similarly, the poem’s final lines are as follows:

Visions of the life we long for –Full of joy as children’s play –Urge us on and make us strong, forOur invincible fight today.²⁰

Both instances centre children in the lives of women. First, children are described as deserving of ‘our’ care; Crawfurd’s frequent use of ‘our’ throughout the text certainly suggests that the poem’s intended audience (or at least primary audience) is other socialist women – by specifying that children are deserving of ‘our’ care, the speaker therefore suggests that children’s caregiving is a woman’s responsibility. In the final stanza, Crawfurd seems to use imagery of joyful, playful children to describe the future which motivates suffragette women in their struggle against patriarchy, again suggesting that women are innately motivated to secure the happiness of children.

Such readings are potentially reductive, however, and fail to identify the wider political significance of children and childhood for all socialists during this period. For many older socialists, both men and women, children represented their hopes for a socialist future. As Jessica Gerrard writes in her work on Socialist Sunday Schools in the early twentieth century, children ‘offered an important opportunity to extend the political salience of socialism beyond the factory gates. Culturally and politically, children were emblematic of the youthful and hopeful future of socialism’.²¹ While the adult generation recognised that the successful implementation of socialism in their own lifetime was unlikely, they remained hopeful that the open, uncynical minds of children could realise their own hopes for a fairer future. Gerrard observes that children were indeed ‘emblematic of the rejuvenating capacity of socialism, and thus of the possibility for political regeneration’.²² The simile ‘full of joy as children’s play’ suggests a jubilant future unmarred by selfishness and cynicism: like a childhood as yet untainted by the difficulties and struggles of adulthood, the socialist future envisioned by the speaker is unmarred by the evils of capitalism. More than this, however, Crawfurd’s simile also speaks to the crucial importance of children within the socialist movement itself and their important role in achieving a socialist future. Furthermore, the speaker’s assertion that ‘every child deserve[s] our care’ also speaks to all socialists, regardless of gender. As Gerrard observes in the context of socialist education, many teachers were ‘driven by their own experiences of a lost childhood, given to poverty and work’ and therefore desired ‘to give a “childhood” to the next working-class generation’.²³ The ‘our’ of this line can therefore be read as resonating beyond basic ‘maternal’ instincts and instead addresses all working-class socialists in their commitment to improving the childhoods of future generations.

As part of her interrogation of so-called women’s work, Crawfurd also challenges notions of gendered work outside the home. In her autobiography, she reflects as follows: ‘I thought that if other women felt as I did […] then they would, if organised, and given the right to participate in politics, raise their voices’.²⁴ ‘Song of the Women’ stresses this need for women’s participation in organisational spaces, clear as the speaker asserts that ‘guild and union, town and village / [r]ing with songs of hope we bear’, through which Crawfurd deliberately inserts women into traditionally male spaces. Scepticism around women’s fitness to work was pervasive within trade unions, including on the Clyde; male workers were often displeased with women entering into their workplaces, and the consequent effect upon their own wages. As Eleanor Gordon notes in her work on women’s involvement in Scottish trade unions of the period, while ‘trade-unionists did not always set their face like flint against organizing women […] their support was conditional and contingent’.²⁵ Suspicion towards female workers was particularly pervasive following the introduction of the government’s dilution policy in 1915. As Joseph Melling explains, the purpose of the policy was ‘to import into industry untrained male and female workers, enabling the munition firms to upgrade skilled and semi-skilled workers’.²⁶ Groups such as the Amalgamated Society of Engineers reacted with hostility, fearing that ‘employers would use dilution to pioneer a new division of labour’, which would see the wages of skilled workers permanently undercut by dilutee labour.²⁷ Many tradesmen therefore attempted to ‘defend their autonomy in the face of female dilution’.²⁸ As Gordon observes, women were therefore ‘very much regarded as the weak link in the chain of labour organization, because they allowed themselves to be used as cheap labour’.²⁹ Women workers were consequently viewed as a source of competition, rather than comrades. Crawfurd therefore uses the poem to give women a voice in these historically exclusionary spaces. The speaker asserts that guilds and unions will ‘ring with songs’, reflecting Crawfurd’s own belief that if women were organised effectively, they would surely ‘raise their voices’.³⁰

Crawfurd not only argues that women have a right to all spaces, but also that women’s liberation is a much-needed cause regardless of location. Both ‘Song of the Women’ and ‘Women Shall be Free’ possess an international-ist outlook, reflecting Crawfurd’s own belief in the importance of an inter-nationalist approach to activism. Paul Griffin has highlighted the importance of internationalism for Crawfurd, drawing attention to her presence at the second Congress of the Communist International in Moscow in 1920, and her activity in ‘relief efforts for the Volga provinces, disputes in Ireland and the 1926 General Strike in Britain, where she documented support from Russia, Germany and other countries amounting to thousands of pounds’.³¹ Similarly, Corr notes that Crawfurd’s

international reputation as a political organizer grew as she visited countries such as Ireland, where she supported the quest for home rule, and Germany, where in 1924 she addressed an audience of ten thousand people on behalf of the German Communist Party.³²

It is therefore unsurprising that Crawfurd’s focus on internationalism is reflected in her poetry. She employs inclusive language in both texts, suggesting that the implied audience is not only Scottish or even British women, but is in fact women the world over. This is clearest in the final stanza of ‘Song of the Women’, which begins with the following lines: ‘[w]omen of the world: we greet you, / Sisters all in heartfelt aim’. The binary created by the speaker’s use of ‘we’ and ‘you’ does not work to create a feeling of division – rather, as the former ‘greets’ the latter, Crawfurd establishes a connection between all women ‘of the world’. The speaker’s gender-specific use of ‘sisters’ (as opposed to the seemingly gender-neutral ‘comrades’ typically adopted by Clydeside socialists) does, however, work to exclude men. Crawfurd therefore reminds us that the oppression of women under capitalism is a specific issue and one which differentiates women’s struggle from that of their male comrades. Similarly, Crawfurd divides men and women in her construction of an us/them dichotomy, established through the speaker’s repeated use of the pronouns ‘they’ and ‘our’. Uplifting phrases such as ‘our purpose’ and ‘our cause’ are used often, whilst any mention of the unspecified (though clearly implied to be male) ‘they’ is frequently negative: ‘they scorn our just demand’, ‘they who prospered by our aid’, and ‘have they fixed the when and where / And what is women’s place?’.

In addition to these political songs, the WGML holds three christening poems by Helen Crawfurd: ‘Evelyn Robertson Jack Christened’ (1937), ‘To Doreen Robertson Jack’ (1940), from which the title of this essay is taken, and ‘To Wee Helen Crawfurd Jack’ (1945). These are short, personal poems dedicated respectively to three of Crawfurd’s nieces, likely intended to be read aloud at the christening ceremony itself. While these texts would not have reached the large suffragette audiences of Crawfurd’s ‘Song of the Women’ and ‘Women Shall Be Free’, the feminist and socialist threads observed thus far in her public, political poetry continue to permeate throughout these deeply personal texts. These christening poems are written later, after the Red Clydeside period is generally understood to have ended, but Crawfurd’s political sentiments linger on as she expresses love and hope for three young girls forced to navigate a world that remains hostile to women – particularly working-class women.

Across these three texts, Crawfurd returns to a contrast between superficial, material riches and the intangible, spiritual riches which are deemed truly important in life. In ‘To Doreen Robertson Jack’, the speaker (who we can, in this instance, assume to be Crawfurd herself) wishes they could bring ‘priceless treasures’ to the newborn baby, but these treasures are immaterial: ‘I would not bring a fortune, or a palace, big or grand / Nor diamonds from far Kimberley, or gold from Africa’s land’.³³ Instead of monetary wealth, the speaker emphasises that the things in life which hold true value cannot simply be gifted:

I’d bring you love, yes, heaps of it,I’d bring you health and joy,I’d bring you friends who always true, would never you annoy³⁴

In disregarding the importance of material wealth, the poem reflects deeply established Christian beliefs which prioritise ‘higher’, spiritual riches over ‘base’ or material goods which can be amassed in life. Crawfurd’s religious tone throughout these poems combines her political sentiments with Christian agape, reflecting the importance of her own religious faith. As she writes in her autobiography, Crawfurd’s religious beliefs were deeply connected to the class-based injustices she perceived in society:

My early religious upbringing made me familiar with Biblical stories, upon which I put my own interpretation. The Lamb dumb before her shearers, represented the uncritical exploited working class. The wonderful imagery of the Book of Revelation […] conveyed to me a picture of the wrath of an indignant wronged working class against their exploiters, rising in revolutionary masses to deal with them.³⁵

While these christening poems were likely intended for an intimate audience at a religious occasion, Crawfurd imbues them with the same feminist spirit present in her public-facing oratory and activism, and in the political poems we have seen already. As Orr observes, Crawfurd’s ‘evangelical fervour would soon be channelled into women’s rights and class struggle’.³⁶

In addition to identifying the truly important aspects of life, Crawfurd also muses on the important facets of womanhood. Across all three christening poems, she suggests that the qualities women should work to foster in themselves are not those qualities deemed important by patriarchy, such as beauty, sophistication and obedience, but characteristics such as kindness and open-mindedness. This is clearest in ‘To Wee Helen Crawfurd Jack’, as the speaker warns against shallow self-indulgence:

Fame and Beauty, Wealth untold,These gifts my dear would be small indeedTo equip you for all that in life you will need³⁷

In capitalising the nouns ‘fame’, ‘beauty’ and ‘wealth’, Crawfurd imbues them with great significance and even a feeling of reverence. A convention of eighteenth-century literature, capitonym forms of words are typically used to differentiate their everyday meanings from conceptual versions, or to indicate respect. While we are accustomed to finding ‘beauty’ capitalised in poetry, throughout the course of the poem Crawfurd uses capitonym forms of a variety of more unusual words, such as luxury, comforts, freedom, culture, and grace. As a result, all of these concepts take on a mythical quality; just as beauty and truth (to borrow from Keats) are something ethereal and intangible when written in capitonym form, in Crawfurd’s text, luxury, comfort and even freedom are equally abstract. Crawfurd therefore hints at the restrictions forced upon women’s lives, and particularly the confines endured by working-class women. The concepts of ‘comfort’ and ‘freedom’, for example, remain just that – concepts to be marvelled at, but never truly grasped or experienced.

The expectations placed upon working-class women are also interrogated elsewhere in Crawfurd’s christening poems. In ‘To Wee Helen Crawfurd Jack’, the speaker remarks that:

Bondage, traditions and false alarmsRob life of adventure and most of its charmsThere is nothing of worth beneath the sunBut has to be worked for before it is won.³⁸

The ‘traditions’ which ‘rob life of adventure’ are those long-held ideas regarding a woman’s position in society. Crawfurd’s specific use of ‘rob’ is suggestive of the sheer injustice experienced by women; outdated traditions mean that women are confined to pre-determined roles, while the exciting moments in life – its ‘adventure[s]’ – are reserved only for men.

It is important to consider the speaker’s use of ‘bondage’, through which Crawfurd likens the condition of women to slavery, trapped in an exploitative environment against their will. This comparison is not new – the language of slavery was commonly utilised by socialists and suffragettes alike. The little-known Scottish suffragette Jessie Stephen entitled her memoir Submission is for Slaves, while her better-known contemporary Emmeline Pankhurst asserted in The Suffragette: ‘I would rather be a rebel than a slave. I would rather die than submit’.³⁹ Similarly, Lenin himself described women as ‘domestic slaves’,⁴⁰ while James Connolly (a political contemporary of Crawfurd’s in Dublin) wrote that ‘the worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave’.⁴¹

While many therefore viewed themselves as ‘slaves’ to capitalism and patriarchy, using the term in this way neglects to acknowledge the specific racial violence endured by black people under slavery, and under capitalism itself, particularly in an environment in which racial tensions were already high. In January 1919, at the height of the Red Clydeside period, a bloody race riot unfolded in which more than thirty black sailors were violently attacked by white sailors who viewed the former group as stealing their labour. As Jacqueline Jenkinson argues in perhaps the most detailed description of the race riot, this racial violence has been consistently ignored in accounts of Red Clydeside, likely because ‘the riot and organized trade union opposition to the employment of black sailors does not sit well against the politically radical image of industrial relations on the Clyde’.⁴² After all, even celebrated Clydesiders Manny Shinwell and Willie Gallacher have been recorded as inciting racial tensions between workers in order to recruit white sailors to a general strike in the same month.⁴³ While many Clydeside socialists (including Crawfurd) did advocate for the acceptance of all races and cultures, it is nonetheless necessary to distinguish between the oppression described by Crawfurd and the oppression endured by black slaves.

Markedly different from the texts discussed thus far is Crawfurd’s ‘A Lothians Lass’ (also held in the WGML). Unlike the other poems, ‘A Lothians Lass’ can be described as a nature poem; while we encounter familiar themes of political inequality, these are set against the backdrop of the coastal Lothian landscape. By the end of the poem, Crawfurd employs a familiar dichotomy between a peaceful, rural idyll and a wearying urban setting in the style of Georgic or pastoral modes, using this contrast to comment on the inequality in contemporary society. This is set up through the pastoral, organic language used in the poem’s opening stanza: words such as ‘terrain’, ‘gorse’, ‘thyme’, ‘orchids’, and ‘roots’ work to suggest a natural, earthy landscape free of the industrial qualities associated with urban environments.

In stanza two, the setting shifts from a rural coastal idyll to a hospital environment. Instead of the earthy language used in stanza one to express the beauty of nature, Crawfurd employs clinical language: terminology such as ‘diagnosis’ and ‘probing’ creates an unsettling contrast against the bucolic imagery of the previous stanza, whilst sensory, bodily language such as ‘painfully’ and ‘bled’ effects an ominous tone. Crawfurd uses this medical language to establish a metaphor for societal inequality:

Here diagnosis, probing deep,Treated effect, while causes bled …And painfully suspicions creepThrough my heart and head.⁴⁴

Poverty remains a major contributing factor to human health and life expectancy even now, but during the Red Clydeside period this was particularly true. Malnutrition and overcrowded living conditions contributed to poor health, while pollution and dampness sped up the spread of infectious diseases.⁴⁵ Crawfurd’s use of a medical metaphor is therefore apt: society is rendered as a human body suffering from an unnamed illness, but as doctors treat only the ‘effects’ and not the ‘causes’ of the malady, the illness persists. Crawfurd uses this metaphor to depict the poisoning effects of capitalism: while governments may attempt to treat the symptoms of inequality with various policies, these are nothing more than sticking plasters. Until the true cause of society’s problems is eliminated, or rather, until capitalism is superseded by socialism, class inequality will continue to poison society.

Crawfurd addresses not only class-based inequality in this stanza, but also gender-based oppression. The stanza begins as follows:

When I was twenty, hospitalHad cast its age-encrusted net, And pride in tenderness and skillStruggled with outworn etiquette.⁴⁶

Echoes of the ocean as described in stanza one linger here, as Crawfurd uses a thalassic metaphor to describe the trapping effects of patriarchy. A hospital is described as casting an ‘age-encrusted net’; while these lines are certainly highly ambiguous, they are suggestive of the long-endured ‘traditional’ view of a woman’s place. Just as a net is used to trap fish and reduce them from wild creatures to human food, patriarchy curtails women’s freedom and ensures they are forced to behave in a way that is deemed beneficial to society. The speaker’s suggestion that the ‘hospital’ has cast such a net over her implies that she herself is a nurse, one of the few professions deemed acceptable for women to hold in this period. As the speaker remarks that ‘pride in tenderness and skill’ struggle with ‘outworn etiquette’, Crawfurd suggests that the speaker is racked by internal tension over their role; while they take pride in their ability to care and provide for their patients, the speaker is uncomfortable with the idea that these qualities are only natural to them, and in fact expected of them, as a result of their gender.

In the poem’s final stanza, we are returned to the memory of the gorgeous bay of stanza one. Up until this moment, the poem retains a strict form: Crawfurd uses eight-line stanzas comprised of seven lines of iambic tetrameter, followed by a final cataletic line of trochaic trimeter. As the speaker returns to the memory of these ‘chuckling waves’ (a phrase borrowed directly from stanza one), the form shifts:

These bairns from tenement and slumSpoke in a tongue I understand,Like the chuckling waves of that childhood bay,Whispering that life should be sweet and fine,Washing the tears of toil awayIn the Lothians brine⁴⁷

The lines become longer and less regular, effecting a moment of disorientation in which the speaker appears to drift into a recollection of a time gone by: namely, a memory of their own childhood by the sea. The natural world of the speaker’s past is presented as having the potential to negate the ill effects of modern capitalist exploitation: the ‘Lothians brine’ is able to ‘wash the tears of toil away’. Crawfurd echoes the opening lines of Thomas Campbell’s ‘Lines on Revisiting a Scottish River’ in which the speaker gazes upon the Clyde, polluted by the effects of the Industrial Revolution, and asks: ‘and they call this Improvement?’.⁴⁸ Like Campbell, Crawfurd’s speaker appears to prefer an untainted landscape at the cost of technological advance – not only because natural beauty is preserved, but because technological advance also signals the inevitable exploitation of the poor as new industries recruit impoverished workers.

Crawfurd also establishes a connection between the untarnished beauty of nature and the innocence of youth. She likens the speech of poor children to the ‘chuckling waves’ of the bay described in the poem’s first stanza, thus personifying the ocean. By merging her descriptions of children and the sea, Crawfurd suggests that these children are as pure and innocent as the natural world; while the picturesque coast described in stanza one remains undirtied by urban industry, these young children are as yet unmarred by the corruption of the adult world. Crawfurd also connects ocean imagery with childhood in her autobiography, remarking upon her first encounter with a newborn baby: ‘it was like a ship launched upon a rough sea. What lay before it? What chart and compass would it be given?’⁴⁹ The great, mysterious expanse of the ocean therefore represents endless possibility for Crawfurd; just as the sea remains a wild environment largely unknown by humans, childhood is a period of innocence in which children remain as yet untainted by the entrapment of capitalism.

The speaker does not only look to the past in this final stanza, however. Crawfurd begins each of the poem’s three stanzas with ‘when’: in stanzas one and two, the speaker reflects on events from different stages of their life thus far (‘when I was wee’, ‘when I was twenty’), but in the final stanza ‘when’ is used to anticipate a future moment yet to arrive.⁵⁰ Crawfurd writes: ‘when does the time for choosing come? / Why do we have to take a stand?’⁵¹ These questions are largely ambiguous, with the choice itself perhaps referring to the speaker’s earlier uncertainty over whether they should accept or reject the path society has seemingly predetermined for them as a result of their gender. The force which the speaker must stand against (and the reader too, implicated through Crawfurd’s use of ‘we’) can therefore be read as patriarchal capitalism. Yet while the speaker laments the unfairness of modern society, the tone is not wholly pessimistic. In looking forward to the future, Crawfurd also reminds us of the hopeful optimism offered by future generations that we have encountered already in her political poems. In a fairer, socialist society these questions should no longer apply: women will be free to choose their own path, and the injustices that require standing against will be quashed.

As this essay has demonstrated, Helen Crawfurd is a unique poetic voice, deserving of both a wider audience and further study. While Crawfurd’s known literary output is small, it is also invaluable; her poetry offers a compelling woman’s perspective from a political period largely remembered, and celebrated, for the actions of its most prominent male organisers. Crawfurd’s poetry offers us a new way into events on the Clyde, drawing attention to the specific injustices experienced by women which have been disregarded or diminished by historical accounts. Crawfurd’s political songs stress the importance for men and women to unite together under socialism in the pursuit of women’s liberation, while also demonstrating her commitment to an internationalist approach within her activism. Crawfurd’s deeply personal christening poems provide insight into the importance of her religious beliefs upon her socialist principles, while retaining the same feminist spirit evident throughout her political work. Finally, her engagement with nature poetry offers a complex reflection on the shifting role of women in a period of social change, set against a Scottish coastal landscape.

In reading Crawfurd’s work we not only learn about the significance of poetry amongst workers and organisers on the Clyde, but we also encounter an invaluable literary exploration of the relationship between socialist women and their male comrades within their fight against capitalism. As greater and deeper attention is given to the actions of women on the Clyde, we should continue to search for further women’s writing; while a bold voice, we may find that Helen Crawfurd was one of many steadfast Glaswegian women putting pen to paper at this time.