Re-reading Beatrice Webb's Diary

Abstract

Beatrice Webb's Diary has traditionally been used as a commentary on the politics and personalities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But, as Barbara Caine's recent article in History Workshop Journal showed, a sensitive re-reading of the famous Diary can illuminate many of the tensions experienced by middle class Victorian women. I find the Diary a hugely rewarding and moving source and would like to suggest that its uses for feminist historians have by no means been exhausted. This is particularly true of the early volumes now available in published form. Barbara drew largely on these in her exploration of Beatrice Webb's ambivalence towards the 'woman question'7I would like to suggest that the Diary might be used as a way of investigating how young middle class women viewed the choices and constraints they faced in the latq Victorian period. For the surprising thing about the Diary is the way in which Beatrice Webb's experience seems to have been so similar to that of other nineteenth century women, both feminists and anti-feminists, who decided to try and enter the public sphere. The overwhelming sense of the early volumes of the Diary is that of struggle, carried on for the most part internally and in physical isolation. It is during the 1870s and 80s, before her marriage to Sidney, that Beatrice constantly questions what she is and what she ought to become. After her marriage her course is set and the self-examination and criticism is largely absent from the Diary. Thereafter her class position makes her an assured hostess and, as her early passions harden into rather rigid convictions, she becomes, by the 1900s, an increasingly unattractive figure, even to her Fabian contemporaries.' Like many intelligent, middle class girls, Beatrice conducted her earnest search for 'right action' within a family circle which provided little sympathy or understanding. When, in 1870, at the age of 22, Beatrice returned from a trip to Germany, she wrote of the strain imposed by 'the quiet and perfectly lonely life' and the 'want of employment which makes life almost torture', linking this explicitly with the ill-health that was a feature of her youth.2 The apparent invalidity of the Florence Nightingales and the Octavia Hills intelligent, middle class women, who remained single must be considered in relation to the tensions and anxieties