(From this unparalleled document emerges a woman whose shr...)
From this unparalleled document emerges a woman whose shrewd judgement, skilled portraiture, and refreshingly ironic tone establish her as one of the greatest diarists of her time.
Martha Beatrice Webb was a British sociologist, economist, socialist, reformer and writer. She coined the term "collective bargaining".
Background
Martha Beatrice Potter, also known as Beatrice Webb and Baroness Passfield, was born on January 22, 1858, at Standish House near Gloucestershire, United Kingdom. She was next-to-last of nine daughters in an affluent Victorian household. The family had become established in the gentry of the Cotswold region approximately a century earlier. Her father Richard Potter, a businessman, expanded the Potter fortune; he was also, in Beatrice’s view, the only man she had known who genuinely believed in the intellectual equality—perhaps even superiority—of women.
Education
Webb was educated at home, as was customary for upper-middle-class English girls at the time, and was trained for a traditional life, presumably as wife of some prominent man. She rebelled, however, in her teens by studying history, political economy, and philosophy.
Career
Feeling the need for useful work, Webb found it in charity work among the poor. Startled by the contrast between her own background and that of her clients, she began studying the root causes of poverty as a prelude to effective reform. She soon became a recognized London authority on the subject, and while investigating materials for a first book, she was steered by a member of the Fabian Society toward scholar and civil servant Sidney Webb.
Webb's involvement with social problems began in 1883 when she became a rent collector in London. This work, in turn, led to her participation in Charles Booth's survey published as Life and Labour of the People in London. In 1887 the results of her inquiries into dock life in the East End of London were published in the Nineteenth Century, soon followed by other articles and studies of sweated labor. Increased confidence and deeper study culminated in Webb's The Cooperative Movement in Great Britain (1891). Together with her husband Sidney Webb, she produced a veritable torrent of books, pamphlets, essays, and memoranda amounting to over a hundred items.
Until 1906 Webb's role in the partnership was primarily that of researcher, writer, and hostess for gatherings of Cabinet ministers and members of Parliament who came to hear the Webb opinion on social legislation. At the end of 1905, Beatrice was appointed a member of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, which sat from 1906 to 1909. The minority report, drafted by the Webbs, played an important role in the dismantling of the old Poor Law and in its replacement by the new systems of social insurance. In the period after 1910, the Webbs abandoned their nonpartisan stance and became an important force in building the Labour party.
During Sidney Webb’s belated ten-year service as a member of Parliament—a goal he had long held, then gradually abandoned, and finally accepted when pressed into service as their representative by a population of coal miners in the north of England—the couple was not able to collaborate on many writings between 1922 and 1932. This meant, however, that Beatrice was able to pursue individual literary projects with more ardor than ever. A highly capable prose stylist, she might, many critics feel, have become a first-rate novelist if she had pursued such an ambition. As it stood, she was a notable diarist, letter-writer, and memoirist.
Webb’s first autobiographical volume, My Apprenticeship, appeared in 1926. The book was based on the diaries which Webb had kept between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four, the age at which she first met Sidney Webb. The prevailing response of reviewers was not only respectful but enthusiastic.
Webb immediately began working on a second memoir, Our Partnership, which was to have been the first of a number of succeeding volumes if she had lived. Our Partnership is primarily concerned with the years 1892 to 1911, with additional narrative sections and diary entries added for later years; Webb expanded the book at intervals but never finally revised it.
Another cornerstone of her earlier philosophy was abandoned with the publication of the Soviet Communism: A New Society? (1935). She, who had always held that social change cannot come about by the violent destruction of existing institutions, endorsed the Russian Revolution in spite of its totalitarianism.
Since the 1950s, it is as a diarist that Webb has become best-remembered. A selection from her diaries was published during the years 1952 to 1956 in three volumes; the material was edited by Margaret I. Cole. Although critics occasionally complained of excessive density of detail in the selections, the general tenor of their response was respectful and admiring; the book was welcomed as a source for future historians, economists, and biographers, as well as for readers who wished to encounter an admirable personage.
A specialized diary, that of Webb’s 1898 trip to the United States with her husband, was published in 1968 as Beatrice Webb's American Diary 1898. Several reviewers, including Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic, commented on Webb’s asperity toward characters she disliked; in contrast, her interviews with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, both of whom were relatively obscure at the time, were noted for their powers of approving observation.
Webb’s diaries were published in fuller, four-volume form during the years 1982 to 1985, edited by Norman and Jean MacKenzie from some three million words of manuscript. The publications attracted a good deal of serious comment from reviewers in the most prestigious mainstream intellectual journals. Many reviewers, including Himmelfarb and Howard, used the opportunity to assess the Webbs’ lives and careers as a whole—indeed to re-introduce the Webbs to the reading public—and to attempt to analyze the personality traits, including discontents, that may have contributed to Webb’s remarkable Iifework. Typical reactions expressed a mixture of admiration, respect, and modern uneasiness at Beatrice Webb’s Victorian seriousness, high-mindedness, and sheer energy of output.
The Webbs became members of the Labour Party in late 1914.
Views
Quotations:
"Religion is love; in no case is it logic."
"Renunciation - that is the great fact we all, individuals and classes, have to learn. In trying to avoid it we bring misery to ourselves and others."
"All along the line, physically, mentally, morally, alcohol is a weakening and deadening force..."
"Work is the best of narcotics, providing the patient be strong enough to take it. I dread idleness as if it were Hell."
"Beneath the surface of our daily life, in the personal history of many of us, there runs a continuous controversy between an Ego that affirms and an Ego that denies."
Membership
Webb was a member of the Fabian Society.
British Academy
,
United Kingdom
1932
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
“It is the lack of human warmth expressed in [her Victorian] attitudes that has led to Beatrice Webb’s becoming a slightly unfashionable figure among British socialists today.” - Anthony Howard
“Courage, old woman, courage: be game to the end. According to her own lights and on the evidence of this admirably edited book, Beatrice Webb managed to be just that.” - Anthony Howard
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Herbert Spencer
Connections
In 1890 Beatrice Potter was introduced to Sidney Webb, whose help she sought with her research. They married in 1892, and until her death 51 years later shared political and professional activities. The marriage was not based on romance, according to Gertrude Himmelfarb in a 1984 New Republic review of Beatrice Webb’s diaries and memoirs, but was in part a reaction to Beatrice’s previous infatuation with a charismatic politician, Joseph Chamberlain. Beatrice made it clear beforehand in letters to Sidney that she was not physically attracted to him; and the couple delayed their marriage till after the death of her father, who objected to Sidney on grounds of social class. Wrote Himmelfarb, “The ‘Webb firm,’ as Beatrice called it, was itself a ‘collectivist’ society in miniature”. Anthony Howard, in a 1986 New York Times Book Review essay on the fourth volume of Webb’s diaries, reported that the couple’s wedding rings were inscribed with the motto “Pro Bono Publico” (For the Public Good). By the terms of a forward-thinking prenuptial agreement, the Webbs lived on Beatrice’s inherited income of one thousand pounds a year while Sidney pursued a political career and both pursued their literary careers.