Pull as archer, in lbs

Mary Beard

Cambridge Women: Twelve Portraits edited by Edward Shils and Carmen Blacker
Cambridge, 292 pp, £30.00, February 1996, ISBN 0 521 48344 1
A Woman in History: Eileen Power 1889-1940 by Maxine Berg
Cambridge, 292 pp, £45.00, April 1996, ISBN 0 521 40278 6

You educate your women at the expense of their reserve fund; and after all you find they marry, and make very unsatisfactory and physically inefficient mothers ... You may think you have done no harm to her health by your training; and that may be true enough while she remains single; but have you done it positive good? Have you let it lay up that reserve fund of strength without which child-bearing is dangerous and (what is far worse for the community) inefficient? You can never tell till the time comes, and then many of your seemingly healthy Girton and Newnham Girls break down utterly.

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Vol. 18 No. 17 · 5 September 1996 » Mary Beard » Pull as archer, in lbs (print version)
pages 23-24 | 3517 words

Letters

From Maxine Berg

Mary Beard (LRB, 5 September) rightly denounces too cosy and introverted a reading of Cambridge women’s lives. It is a pity, then, that by confining her interests to Cambridge she fails to make more of the career of one who got away. Eileen Power left Cambridge for good in 1920 (not the Thirties) for the more mixed and cosmopolitan environment of the LSE. But even here, in a university where women were accepted in large numbers and made academic careers alongside the men from the time it opened in 1895, they were undermined. They were paid less than the men and their careers were held back, as attested to by Lilian Knowles’s trenchant disputes with the administration, and by Power’s treatment at the hands of Jessy Mair, the secretary and companion to the LSE’s director, William Beveridge.

Beard seeks to disentangle myth from reality in Cambridge women’s lives. Had she read more about Power, she might have found positive evidence to the point. Power’s life as recounted after her death was that of the exemplary female scholar in whom personal qualities and gender took priority over scholarship and vision of a discipline. She became the ‘learned lady’. But the myth was not simply perpetrated by male academics. There was a sense in which Power conspired in it. She assumed a personal style which would express the aesthetics she admired in a certain type of historical writing. Her glamour and political integrity also made her an attractive role model to a generation of female students and academics, and she used these qualities to further her aims of making economic and social history central to the historical disciplines. She paid the price for this, for she was afterwards remembered as the female scholar rather than for the history she wrote and the discipline she helped to found.

Power’s life also provides the counter to Hugh Lloyd-Jones’s claims, endorsed by Beard, that the lives of scholars are irrelevant to their work. Power’s feminism and her internationalism, as well as her decision to leave Cambridge to teach medieval history among the social sciences at the LSE, did change the content of her writing, the subjects she wrote about and the zeal with which she promoted her discipline – economic history.

Maxine Berg
University of Warwick

From Norman Cantor

If Mary Beard had bothered to discuss the second of the two books she was ostensibly reviewing – Maxine’s Berg’s intriguing biography of Eileen Power – she would have provided Power’s answer to the question attributed to Beard’s article on your front cover: ‘Should Blue-Stockings Breed?’ Power’s view, according to Berg, was definitely in the affirmative.

Power spent much time in the late Twenties and early Thirties overseas at British colonial outposts looking for a husband and was for a time engaged to a prominent British imperial activist in China (played by Peter O’Toole in the film The Last Emperor). Finally she had to settle for her former graduate student, Michael Postan, ten years her junior, who (according to Berg) was said by Power’s housekeeper to ‘know how to get to her’. Relative to the breeding question, Power wrote to Postan just before their marriage expressing her regret that she was too old to give Postan a child.

Power’s father was a convicted white-collar criminal: this certainly depreciated her prospects in the middle-class marriage market and forced her and her sister to become career women. Whenever Power got a good fee for an article, she would immediately head for the airport, fly to Paris and buy a new dress.

Norman Cantor
New York University