Page 259 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

248 ENGLISH STUDIES

International Feminism—through an Equal Rights Convention of the
League of Nations. 59
Citizenship is clearly not a narrowly political concept but rather one which
embraces a vision of a new world for women. The Utopian belief that full
equality might be granted by a government or the League of Nations should be
understood in part through the Fabian ideology of the neutrality of the state but
also in the context of aspirations for peace after the First World War and
movements such as the Peace Ballot in which women played a considerable part.
In turning now to South Riding we do not intend to suggest that the novel
simply contains or reflects the various historical elements we’ve outlined. Rather,
as we said at the outset, it is situated within and determined by them. One means
of seeing these determinations at work is to start from the author’s biography as
an instance of mediation between text and history. Thus Winifred Holtby’s
career as novelist, journalist, part-time teacher and lecturer occurred in this
context of increasing access to such professions for educated women. The
reception of her work in the thirties and since is an index of the ambiguous
relation of such ‘new women’ to the literary establishment. Holtby’s writing
includes political journalism, poetry, a women’s history, parody and satire, short
stories and two long realist novels, Mandoa, Mandoa! and South Riding. Like
other ‘middlebrow’ novelists of the time (George Orwell, J.B.Priestley, Howard
Spring), she consciously distanced herself from ‘art’:
People who write very rare things like Virginia Woolf have a far higher
standing than professional journalists like myself. I have no illusions about
my work. I am primarily a useful, versatile, sensible and fairly careful
artisan. I have trained myself to write quickly, punctually and readably to
order over a wide range of subjects. That has nothing to do with art. It has
quite a lot to do with politics. 60

The realist narrative of South Riding distances itself both from the self-
consuming uncertainties of the modernist text and from the simple certainties of
the popular romance’s ‘luxurious descriptions of feminine underwear, the
61
conflicts of vice with virtue’. Although it takes the political ideology of
citizenship as its subject, the concluding imperative is one clearly spoken from a
position of feminism:

Don’t let me catch any of you at any time loving anything without asking
questions …. Question the Kingsport slums, and the economies over
feeding schoolchildren, and the rule that makes women have to renounce
their jobs on marriage…. But questioning does not mean the end of loving,
and loving does not mean the abnegation of intelligence. 62