Beatrice Webb 1858 – 1943
(née Potter)
Social reformer, writer.
22 January 1858 – 30 April 1943
‘At last I am a socialist!’ by Florence Heath
Beatrice Webb (nee Potter) was born in 1858 and died in 1943. Beatrice was many things – an upper-middle class socialist, a labour historian, a ‘wire puller’, and a social reformer. She was an avid writer; not only did she and her husband Sidney Webb produce copious sociological books, but she also kept a diary for around 70 years. She used this diary extensively in creating her autobiography My Apprenticeship (1926), which covers the years up until her marriage.
In a 1926 review of My Apprenticeship Evans Clark writes that ‘Beatrice Webb is unquestionably one the most important women of her time. She stands astride of two worlds, the Victorian and the post-war age, a dramatic symbol of the greatest cultural revolution in all recorded history.’[1] Beatrice rejected the prescribed Society life of a Victorian lady, instead seeking out a career. Her autobiography traces her search for a ‘creed and craft’, the beginning of her professional life coming at a time when social science was blossoming and, in her eyes, filling the gap that religion had left for many people.
Beatrice was home educated, and My Apprenticeship implies that that education was very limited and unstructured. She did, however, benefit from her parents’ varied connections, creating an atmosphere of learning and debate in the Potter household. Lawrencina and Richard Potter’s friendship with the “eminent Victorian” Herbert Spencer was particularly impactful on Beatrice’s life, as he took her in as a kind of pupil and remained a friend until his death in 1903.
Rejecting Society and the London Season, Beatrice followed in her sister Kate’s footsteps, working under Octavia Hill in the East End as a rent collector. In the 1880s she was also introduced by her cousin Margaret Harkness to ‘British Museum life’; in the British Museum Reading Room she was able to continue her self-education and join a network of women in Bloomsbury which included Olive Schreiner, Eleanor Marx, and Annie Besant.[2] Though Beatrice had a tendency to set herself apart from other women, seeing others forge ahead in the developing field of sociology or other forms of work encouraged Beatrice in her early career when she was full of doubt about her own abilities.
Whilst doing her rent collecting and seeing how the Charity Organisation Society dealt with poverty, Beatrice became interested in social investigation and gradually became more radical in her politics. In 1886 she was part of the team of researchers who contributed to Charles Booth’s Survey of London. Men such as Charles Booth and Professor Alfred Marshall encouraged Beatrice to focus her social investigations on women’s work. She, however, was interested in the Labour movement more broadly and was reluctant to let her gender define her work. She decided instead to begin on what would be her first book, The Co-Operative Movement in Great Britain (1891).
In 1888 Beatrice met Sidney Webb, a leading member of the Fabian Socialists. Their working partnership, which would last until Beatrice’s death in 1943, soon began. Their joint ventures were varied; in 1895 they co-founded the London School of Economics (alongside George Bernard Shaw and Graham Wallas), they regularly published throughout their lives, and they turned their London home, Grosvenor Road, into a kind of informal political salon where they influenced politicians from all parties. In 1905 Beatrice was appointed to the Commission on the Poor Law which led to her creating a minority report in 1909.
Beatrice was quite ambivalent about women’s suffrage, going so far as to sign an anti-suffrage petition in 1889. She, her sisters, and many of their female friends, lived privileged lives and were able to influence politics through their relationships with men. To Beatrice, who believed that ‘representative democracy was an inadequate expression of man’s complex role as producer, consumer, and citizen’, winning the vote for women seemed somewhat unimportant.[3] She did, however, publicly state in 1906 that her stance on Women’s Suffrage had changed and she was supportive of women’s involvement in the Labour party in the early-twentieth century.
Connection to Bloomsbury:
The British Museum Reading Room.
Female networks
Amy Levy, Clementina and Constance Black, Eleanor Marx, Margaret Harkness, Octavia Hill, Susan Lawrence, Virginia Woolf etc
Publications include
As sole author:
- The Co-Operative Movement in Great Britain (1891)
- Women and the Factory Acts (1896)
- The Abolition of the Poor Law (1918)
- Wages of Men and Women: Should they be Equal? (1919)
- My Apprenticeship (1926)
As co-author with Sidney Webb:
- History of Trade Unionism (1894)
- Industrial Democracy (1897)
- English Local Government Vol. I-X (1906-1929)
- The Break-Up of the Poor Law (1909)
- Decay of Capitalist Civilisation (1923)
- Methods of Social Study (1932)
- Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? (1935)
Florence Heath from the Victorian Studies Centre, University of Leicester
Bibliography
Beatrice Webb | University of London
References:
Beatrice Webb typescript diary, LSE digital archive
[1] E. C. (1926, Mar 28). ‘Beatrice Webb’s log-book of a mental voyage: She helped apply scientific principles to the moral problems of industrialism.’, New York Times p. 6.
[2] Beatrice Webb typescript diary, LSE digital archive
[3] https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-36799?rskey=uLi8NK&result=1