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Motherhood and Its Enemies: Social and Economic Threats to Motherhood

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Motherhood and Its Enemies: Social and Economic Threats to Motherhood University of Huddersfield Repository Hartley, Allegra MOTHERS IN A MAN’S WORLD: MASCULINITY, MATERNITY, AND SCIENCE IN CHARLOTTE HALDANE’S INTERWAR FICTION Original Citation Hartley, Allegra (2018) MOTHERS IN A MAN’S WORLD: MASCULINITY, MATERNITY, AND SCIENCE IN CHARLOTTE HALDANE’S INTERWAR FICTION. Doctoral thesis, University of Huddersfield. This version is available at http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/34724/ The University Repository is a digital collection of the research output of the University, available on Open Access. Copyright and Moral Rights for the items on this site are retained by the individual author and/or other copyright owners. Users may access full items free of charge; copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided: • The authors, title and full bibliographic details is credited in any copy; • A hyperlink and/or URL is included for the original metadata page; and • The content is not changed in any way. For more information, including our policy and submission procedure, please contact the Repository Team at: [email protected]. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/ MOTHERS IN A MAN’S WORLD: MASCULINITY, MATERNITY, AND SCIENCE IN CHARLOTTE HALDANE’S INTERWAR FICTION ALLEGRA HARTLEY A thesis submitted to the University of Huddersfield in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy January 2018 Copyright Statement i. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/ or schedules to this thesis) owns any copyright in it (the “Copyright”) and s/he has given The University of Huddersfield the right to use such Copyright for any administrative, promotional, educational and/or teaching purposes. ii. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts, may be made only in accordance with the regulations of the University Library. Details of these regulations may be obtained from the Librarian. Details of these regulations may be obtained from the Librarian. This page must form part of any such copies made. iii. The ownership of any patents, designs, trademarks and any and all other intellectual property rights except for the Copyright (the “Intellectual Property Rights”) and any reproductions of copyright works, for example graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property Rights and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property Rights and/or Reproductions. 1 ABSTRACT Charlotte Haldane’s first novel, Man’s World, is the only one of her novels to have received any significant academic interest though it has still been overwhelmingly overlooked in favour of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, published five years later. As has been argued by Susan Squier, there is significant value in reclaiming the female literary voice on science because it is through a literary engagement with the sciences that women have penned their experience and involvement in the discursively and institutionally modern. This thesis argues the importance of reading Haldane’s work as part of an interwar corpus that, when understood as a collection, reveals a pattern of gendered relationships that negotiate masculine and feminine identities in relation to science, institutional power, and patriarchal control. Haldane’s interwar fiction undermines hegemonic masculinity by placing two powerful styles of masculinity – the artist and the scientist – in competition in order to destabilise binary gender roles, therefore allowing the creation of a vocational form of motherhood without masculinizing it. In the power vacuum that Haldane’s destabalised gender narratives create, the figure of the ‘ideal’ mother, the vocational mother, is presented not just as a eugenic instrument but a genetic gatekeeper. She is an active and independent agent, an architect for the modern world. 2 Acknowledgements With thanks to John and Louie Burghes for allowing me permission to access the University of Reading’s archival documentation relating to Charlotte Haldane; to Merrick Burrow and Sarah Falcus for their academic and professional guidance; to Rachel Balen for her proofreading of this thesis, and to Tom Hardcastle, Katherine Brabbins, Bill Hartley, and Bob Hallworth for their immeasurable support. 3 Contents Preface....................................................................................................................... 5 Introduction .............................................................................................................. 10 Part One Chapter One: Masculinity Between the Material and the Ideal................................. 39 Chapter Two: Embodied Masculinity ........................................................................ 68 Chapter Three: Masculinity and Control ................................................................... 93 Chapter Four: Criminality, Sexuality and Morality .................................................. 113 Part Two Chapter One: “Bad blood on Mamma’s side”: Defining Maternity and its Social Significance. ........................................................................................................... 141 Chapter Two: Motherhood and its Enemies: Social and Economic Threats to Motherhood ............................................................................................................ 181 Chapter Three: Interwar Motherhood: The Sacrificing Madonna ........................... 203 Chapter Four: ‘The Home of the Future’: Maternalism, Science, and the Working Mother .................................................................................................................... 233 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 256 Bibliography ........................................................................................................... 262 4 Preface Charlotte Haldane’s life is particularly well documented, both through her own writings, Music, My Love, and Truth Will Out, and through her biography, Charlotte Haldane: Woman Writer in a Man’s World, published in 1998 by Judith Adamson. These texts reveal the life of a fascinating woman. Born Charlotte Franken to German-Jewish parents in 1894 in an East London suburb, Haldane experienced a European upbringing, moving to Belgium with her father’s business. Upon returning she began work in a theatre office where she met the Russian Prima, Anna Pavlova and was briefly employed by her before she moved on to become one of the few female journalists working on Fleet Street. It was during this time – in the mid twenties -that Haldane met her second husband, the famous populariser of science, J. B. S. Haldane. In Truth Will Out she recounts their meeting in romantic terms, typical of Haldane’s fiction. She tells the reader how the then married Charlotte Burghes orchestrated an interview with the famous biochemist, J. B. S. Haldane, in order to ply from him information for her new science fiction, Man’s World. She describes a whirlwind romance in which she, cast as heroine of her own story, becomes caught in a thirst for knowledge which can only be quenched by the commanding Cambridge scientist. After a scandalous divorce, the two married and Haldane and her son from her previous marriage, Ronald, moved with J. B. S. to Roebuck House, Cambridge. Truth Will Out describes evenings spent reading Marx or attending parties amongst the scientific elite, and whilst J. B. S.’s knowledge of biochemistry helped her in conceiving Man’s World, it also encouraged her to take up botany. It was from this time, until the breakdown of the marriage and divorce in 1945, that there is a marked interest in the sciences, from genetics to psychology to sexology, in Haldane’s writing. 5 Of course, it is Haldane’s first novel – a science fiction based on a paradigm of prenatal sex control – that is the most inventive use of the sciences within her fiction. All of the limited scholarly research on her fiction has been largely focused on Man’s World and the subject of femininity and reproduction. This is found in books such as Susan Squire’s Babies in Bottles, which focuses on technological intervention in pregnancy, and papers such as Sarah Gamble’s ‘Gender and Science in Charlotte Haldane’s Man’s World’, which considers the oscillation between resistance and compliance with male dominated science within the novel. Man’s World, however, has fallen out of the popular consciousness, replaced by a text published six years later. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, published in 1932, shares much in common with Haldane’s Man’s World. Haldane’s text is set in a future society run by a male scientific elite, in which the sex of a foetus can be determined and controlled, allowing for ‘orders’ to be placed for male or female children depending on the current needs of the state. Women, as a result, have been divided into classes – ‘neuters’ and ‘mothers’. ‘Mothers’ are chosen for their physical and psychical suitability for the vocational role of producing children whereas ‘neuters’ are considered inappropriate ‘types’ for motherhood and are sterilised at a young age. Similarly, Brave New World creates a society in which reproduction has become ectogenetic
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