Obviously I believe George Calderon’s life is interesting in itself — dramatic, even — but another reason I have written his biography is that many of the issues of the day that he responded to are still with us (e.g. Russian autocracy, the power of trade unions, commercial theatre, public philanthropy), and his take on them was original. Despite his reputation as a Tory (which he wasn’t), George never belonged to an Establishment, political, theatrical, literary, or other. He always strove to think outside the box.
His opposition to votes for women brought out the worst in him. However, since his reasoning, like that of the women anti-suffragists, was essentially based on gender difference (the ‘separate spheres’ argument) and gender differences are still with us, even here he can be relevant, or at least challenging, today.
One of the suffragists’ claims was that enfranchisement would raise women’s wages because it would raise their status (yes, it was italicised as a Latin word and presumably pronounced with a long ‘a’). Correspondence about this erupted on the pages of The Times in April 1909 and George weighed in with a very long letter, which was printed in full presumably because he put ‘Hon. Sec. Men’s League for Opposing Woman Suffrage’ after his name. He treated the wages claim with his malignest sarcasm:
In spite of facts and statistics, the woman suffragists continually do cry that the vote must raise wages; but they can never show any instance where it has. When put to it for the manner how, they take refuge in a meaningless parrot cry of ‘raising woman’s status’. And what is meant by status none of them can tell; it is a word like ‘Mesopotamia’, or the technical terms of metaphysics and theology. If they had to put it into English they could not do it, because there is no meaning in it at all. It is a magical formula, an algebraic symbol of the same order as the square root of minus one. If women workers are to be enriched, out of whose pockets is the money to come?
What George was driving at was that the suffragists could not explain the economic mechanism by which enfranchisement would close the gender pay gap, and in the absence of that it wasn’t going to happen. One of George’s many qualifications was that, unusually for the time, he had studied ‘political economy’, i.e. what today we call ‘economics’. He consequently thought he knew what he was talking about. Indeed, very slyly in his anti-suffrage tract of the previous year he had pointed out that Millicent Fawcett, president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, was a trained economist and could ‘prick the wages bubble in a moment’. He had also ‘searched Mrs Fawcett’s Political Economy for Beginners in vain for any hint that legislation is one of the possible means of raising wages’. He in fact believed, like a French economist who had studied the subject in 1906, that ‘the cause of women’s low wages lies chiefly in the competition of women for whom the wage is a supplement and not a livelihood’. The economic mechanism, then, that would perpetuate the gender pay gap was, in the words of his Times letter of 13 April 1909, ‘the market value of women’s work’.
The title page of George’s anti-suffrage tract
As we know only too well from the recently published statistics, enfranchisement and equal rights won by women since George’s day have not led to equal pay for women. So was he right about the role of invidious market forces? Yes, and no.
The current public debate about the gender pay gap demonstrates how complex the subject is. To take three of the simpler aspects, are we talking of a gender pay gap for doing exactly the same job, or of some kind of aggregate gap, does anyone have ‘equal’ pay given the existence of performance-related increments, and are the figures for gender pay gaps based on gross pay or income net of tax and benefits?
One thing that men in their right mind seem to have agreed on for centuries is that it is inequitable, insupportable, and indeed incomprehensible, that women should be paid less for doing the same job:
I put a question to him [Samuel Johnson] upon a fact in common life, which he could not answer, nor have I found anyone else who could. What is the reason that women servants, though obliged to be at the expense of purchasing their own clothes, have much lower wages than male servants, to whom a great proportion of that article is furnished, and when in fact our female house servants work much harder than the male? (James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson)
So neither Boswell, nor Johnson, nor ‘anyone else’ in that Age of Reason, could explain why the gender pay gap existed! Since they were men of reason, the implication is that they concluded it was the result of a perverse prejudice. And, of course, that is the short answer. But what still escapes us, it seems, is the substance of this prejudice. What specifically is it that men object to in their women colleagues that even drives employers to break the law about equal pay and the minimum wage?
Here George’s defence of ‘market forces’ can perhaps enlighten us. He was right, and the suffragists who expected enfranchisement to raise women’s pay in a market economy were wrong. But what are the forces that determine the ‘market value of women’s work’? Having identified the economic mechanism, George seems to think he has found an irrefutable, perhaps even objective, explanation of the gender pay gap. But we know perfectly well that there are a host of market forces that are purely psychological — and hence open to prejudices. George himself inadvertently identified one such prejudice, when he wrote that for women ‘the wage is a supplement and not a livelihood’.
In Edwardian Britain, as another Times correspondent pointed out, this statement was literally true, because ‘as the law now stands, a man is bound to bear the whole charge of supporting the family’. Quite possibly, therefore, a woman’s wage was regarded by everyone, including the women themselves, as a ‘supplement’, and competition between the women for a limited number of jobs did drive down the ‘market value’ of their work.
It is a long time since a woman’s salary was just a ‘supplement’ to the family income. However, even though more women are financially independent than ever before, and even though it is an official and legislative truth that they are equal to men, I believe the idea that their income is a ‘supplement’ still lurks in the male psyche. I have been self-employed for most of my life, but whenever I worked in large teams or offices I sensed a perception, perhaps even amongst some women, that they were ‘dilettantes’ at work because, as one male expressed it to me, ‘women can have children and men cannot, so of course they put children before everything else, whereas men have only work to put before everything else’. The implication was that women were only working until their maternity leave kicked in, whereupon they would rush off to do what they were really interested in, and meanwhile could not even be expected to work as hard as men.
I hasten totally to dissociate myself from such views, but we are trying to explain something that is widely thought to be almost an enigma in modern liberal society and I feel George has inadvertently identified the chief prejudice beneath it. The ‘supplement’ prejudice is the market force that produces the income differential when men and women are doing the same job (e.g. in the BBC).
The deeper question then is, why do men persist in the ‘supplement’ prejudice? There can be no rational excuse, but I suggest it is simply because our brains are programmed by gender difference, in this case bearing/not bearing children. Gender difference, as George realised when he considered the fact that most women in 1908 did not want the vote, plays havoc with the equality project. I think this is now being increasingly recognised. A correspondent in The Guardian of 2018, for instance, presents it as a fact that ‘many women prefer jobs aimed at looking after individual people, rather than committing their energy to playing the organisation game’, thus excluding themselves from higher-paid jobs open to them. That fine feminist and anti-suffragist Octavia Hill would have understood.
Interlude on a familiar theme
‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’, © Derek Clarke
Clays have pleasantly surprised me by discovering that they have over-printed by not 20 copies, which is the number under/over contractually allowed, but 59 — which they offer me at an extraordinarily good price including free delivery. I have snapped them up. This will enable us to send out more review copies than we had planned. The gnomes of Sam&Sam’s distribution department will therefore work overtime to get these off, with covering letters, before 7 July, the two-month mark before publication…
Meanwhile, Richard Morrison has delivered a Big Bertha salvo about WW1 commemoration in The Times of 22 June 2018 (2 Arts, p. 6) which I feel I simply cannot ignore. It is entitled ‘This national war tribute has descended into overpriced poppycock’. Given that I am supposed to be taking part in presentations about the commemoration around Armistice Day this year, I would be intensely interested to hear what followers of Calderonia think of Morrison’s claims. Unfortunately, the piece is currently available online only behind a pay wall, so I shall have to summarise it.
‘Now that we are approaching the end of 14-18 NOW, the government’s £50 million centenary commemoration of that catastrophic event’, Morrison begins, ‘the same question that was asked in 1918 must be asked again, albeit in a less tragic context. What was the point of it all?’
I was instantly reminded of a similar piece by Morrison in The Times of 22 January 2016 in which he fulminated about the fact that the creators of Blood Swept Lands, Paul Cummins and Tom Piper, were ‘even refused an Arts Council grant and [Cummins] had to sell his house in Derby to develop the project’. As I shall elaborate in a moment, the fact that this powerful and inspired installation had no official funding does not surprise me one jot. But ought not Morrison at least to recognise the creative opportunism of the Arts Council in taking it up and bringing it to a far bigger audience? Was this not a good thing? Similarly, I personally found it hilarious that the 14-18 NOW website co-opted the unveiling of Millicent Fawcett’s superb statue in Parliament Square as though they, 14-18 NOW, had been somehow involved in campaigning for and funding it, but even so I applaud their opportunism in recognising the significance of the moment. Surely one should be grateful to them for contextualising women’s suffrage in the War?
According to Morrison there are two reasons for the ‘minimal impact’ that 14-18 NOW has supposedly had on people:
It seems to me that this overlooks two fundamental things. First, ‘personal connection’ does not depend on people still being alive who lived through a catastrophic event. Personal connection is experienced by those left behind who emotionally connect with the dead and grieve for them. Feeling and thinking like this is what ordinary people do. You only have to have followed Twitter or read local newspapers in the last four years to know that it’s what millions of families in Britain have been doing. Almost every week I hear about projects in villages up and down the country that ‘personally connect’ with those who did not come back to their villages or town streets. The epitome of such personal connection is Andrew Tatham’s history and art project A Group Photograph: Before, Now & In-between, which was also awarded no Arts Council funding and has received precious little official recognition, e.g. from 14-18 NOW, either.
Second, the shenanigans of Brexit negotiations cannot, in my opinion, influence people’s emotions and thinking about the commemoration, rather the reverse: the electorate’s mood about the First World War may have influenced Brexit. Why people grieve and shed tears for soldiers they never knew is that they feel these soldiers’ lives were nihilistically wasted in a war that should not have happened and that we should not have had to fight. They feel that men and women of their families had to go and die because we had to help save Europe from itself. We had to fight and win the war because of our tragic geopolitical position, namely that we are with Europe but not of it. Whether we realise it or not, commemorating the national holocaust of 1914-18 has reminded us every day of our tenuous historical relation to Europe. It has held constantly before us our apartness and the dangers of involvement. The issues of the First World War are therefore white-hot topics. Subliminally, could that have made the difference of 4%?
The remaining three-fifths of Morrison’s article are devoted to taking apart the latest 14-18 NOW event Fly by Night, as well as Rachel Whiteread’s ‘inside-out Nissen hut’ in Dalby Forest, the forthcoming Shrouds of the Somme installation (‘just a remake of Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, only with ghoulishness replacing tragic beauty’), and Danny Boyle’s event advertised for 11 November ‘inviting communities across the UK to come together in marking 100 years since the Armistice’. Morrison has been
This too is wrong-headed. Like it or not, 14-18 NOW is a species of official art. Official art is enacted to recognise, and not much more, what a nation is feeling or in the opinion of the establishment should feel. It is very rarely great art, can be good art, but is usually kitsch and tat. Are Nelson’s Column, the Gold State Coach, or William Orpen’s vast canvas The Treaty of Versailles, 1919, great art? Although we know that Edwin Lutyens’ aesthetic decisions for the design of the Cenotaph were extremely fine, you could still not call the Cenotaph great art. It is disingenuous of Morrison, therefore, to expect ‘extraordinary artistic statements’ from those artists commissioned by 14-18 NOW.
Partly that is because they are doing it for money. It may sound laughably romantic, but I do not think extraordinary artistic statements can be conjured up for money; rather, they are produced by individuals who viscerally HAVE to create them, whether they are paid for it or not. But if they would not create official art for normal inspirational reasons, they have to be more or less, er…well…bribed to do it! That’s one reason why official art has never come cheap. Given the scale of some of 14-18 NOW’s events, the length of time it covers, and the number of administrators it has to employ, I actually don’t think £50 million is off the scale for official art of this national importance.
Moreover, it is taxpayers’ money spent on taxpayers. As far as I know, there have not been howls of protest at what the taxpayer is getting for £50 million. True, there have not been tidal waves of approval and gratitude, either. But that is exactly how it is with official art: if it is fine, if it more or less works for people, then it is accepted and no-one says anything. The original Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red at the Tower of London had five million visitors in four months and even a full-page image and commentary in the German newspaper Die Zeit. I am reliably informed that it was 14-18 NOW’s idea to turn off one’s house lights on the evening of 4 August 2014 and place a lighted candle in one’s window. This was observed by millions, too. It utterly caught the national mood: despair clinging to hope. Similarly, Dr Kenneth Bogle, writing in The Times on 25 June, was affected ‘among many evocative [14-18 NOW] artworks’ by Jeremy Deller’s We Are Here:
There we have it. Two things strike me: the actors were volunteers and the writer’s personal connection with the 14-18 NOW event moved him to tears. From the general lack of grumbling and from the conversations I have had about the subject, I think people feel that the 14-18 NOW commemoration is fitting and proper. In a strange way, I think families are touched that their government has put its money where the people’s heart is. For official art, 14-18 NOW’s success rate has been well above average. It has enabled us to share, in Wilfred Owen’s words, ‘The eternal reciprocity of tears’.