Behind the Scenes Minis: Busy Emily

Tracy and Holly talk about aspects of Emily Hobhouse's work that make them feel conflicted, as well as the most moving parts of her life story. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We spent both our episodes
this week talking about Emily Hobhouse, something I did not
expect to take two episodes when I started. She was

(00:25):
very busy. It makes sense we need she was so busy. Um.
I I had no idea about how like white nationalists
had kind of gloamed onto her work after her death
and made it into a talking point in a way
that reminds me a whole lot of the way irish

(00:46):
and dentured servitude is used to like dismiss discussions of
slavery of black people here in the United States. Like,
I felt like there was a lot of commonality between
those two arguments, and I did not know that was
going to be part of the episode. I did know

(01:07):
part of the episode was going to be the fact
that she was a white woman whose work was focused
on the welfare of other white women, excluding the black
women and children, and also men. There were a lot
more men in the concentration camps for black people that
her work did not really include them at all, and
I just I have many feelings about this that contradict

(01:30):
with each other. Yes, I think that's pretty natural, right,
There are a lot of things to both admire and
abhor in this one person's life story. So yeah, I
think it's almost it would be more troubling if you
had nothing conflicting. Yeah. Sure. Well, And some of the
ways that things like museum interpretation, stuff that's really brief

(01:53):
describes her sometimes kind of makes it sound like that
she just didn't care, or that like she didn't bother
And I don't think that was really it. I think that,
for some reason that I don't fully understand, she either
didn't think she could do that work or didn't think
that it was her work to do. She also wasn't

(02:16):
like just sitting around doing nothing in all of that time. Like,
it's absolutely the case that she knew about these other
camps and did not help the way she helped other
white people, but she does seem to have tried to
like get someone to help. Yeah, I mean the fact
that she was flagging it and being like this is

(02:37):
also a thing that needs addressing. Yeah, um mitigate some
of my initial like girl, Yeah, but it is also
I mean, I I find myself torn because on the
one hand, I'm like, you see the problem, get in
there and help. But on the other hand, I also
recognize that every human has limits, and like it's not

(03:00):
like she could save every person that needed help in
the world, right right, It's like I have the parts
of me that really really want to criticize that decision,
and also the part of me that's like, she literally
worked herself into an early grave trying to help people.
I'm sitting in my house in the air conditioning making podcasts.

(03:25):
So anyway, a thing that we did not really get
into is that her brother, Leonard, who she was really
close to, Like he was a figure within the within
liberal politics in Britain, and he wrote things that were
related to racial equality and discrimination and things like that
during his lifetime, some of which sounds uh up two

(03:48):
set best uh some of it it's it's one of
those things where it's like a white person writing in
the nineteenth century about racism and writing against race is
um but is also reinforcing racist ideas. It's like there's
that level of it because he wrote a lot about

(04:10):
how Britain's colonial empire was subjugating people of color specifically
but black people, and that the people within the British
Empire like should have full voting rights regardless of color.
But then he would make comments about like I'm not
really sure if that would work in the United States though, uh,
And I'm like, yeah, that thing you just said is racist, dude,

(04:33):
Like you were in the middle of trying to argue
for equal legal and political rights and then also said
this really racist thing. But he wrote a letter at
one point to W. E. B. DWO Boys where he said, quote,
there is nothing of greater importance for the future of
white civilization itself than the establishment of more justin humane
relations across the color line. And I was like that.

(04:56):
I I feel like she and her brother had a
lot of mental processes on this subject, that we're in
common with each other, but like how it played out
into the practical work of their lifetime, there's like a
disconnect there for sure. Every single time I read about,

(05:17):
wrote about, revised the part about, or described to another
person her funeral in South Africa specifically, it really choked
me up, both because of just what the thing was
like and the fact that she when she died she
did there was very little attention paid to that fact
in any kind of official uh capacity within Britain, and

(05:40):
then when her ashes were sent to South Africa, it
was a like totally opposite story. Anyway. Do you know
what part of her story gave me pause? I don't know.
I found touching a little melancholy. Is the idea that
she had spent so much time traveling around and trying
to help other people, she felt rootless. Yeah. I hadn't

(06:02):
really thought of that. That really hit me in a
weird way where I was like, oh gosh, can you imagine, right,
Because I think for a lot of us, home is
so key to our identities and our mental and in
many cays physical health. Like just having a place where
you go that is yours and it's your little nest.
And like the idea of not having that sense of

(06:25):
I just want to go home because there is no
home is very like it breaks my heart. Yeah. Yeah.
I also wonder if World War One had not happened,
whether her focus would have stayed the same in South Africa,
whether she ever would have turned her attention to the

(06:48):
black population of South Africa, especially in when you get
to the parts towards her later life, when she was
writing about like whether the Women Monument was really a
monument for all women, are only the white women. I
kind of wonder like whether she would have had a
different focus had she continued to be working in South

(07:09):
Africa rather than starting to work instead in Europe after
the war. I don't really know. I just have a
ton of a ton of complicated feelings for her. I
admire the determination with which she did all of this
work for so much of her life, and also wish
her work had been more inclusive. Of course. Yeah, it's um,

(07:32):
it's one of those ones, as we said as we
started talking about it, like there's you cannot help but
have mixed feelings about the whole thing. Yeah. What I
don't have mixed feelings about, and what I think she
would hate is how her legacy just became this, uh,
this African or nationalist talking point. I don't normally try

(07:53):
to speak for people from the past, but in this case,
I think her own writing and things she definitely said
during her lifetime, I do not think she would want
her legacy to be used in that capacity. And I
think she had she lived to see apartheid, that it
would have morally totally upset her. Oh for sure. Uh So, anyway,

(08:15):
that is many complicated feelings about Emily Hothouse. If you
want to send us a notar history podcast that I
heart radio dot com. Uh If your weekend is coming up,
I hope it's a relaxing weekend. If you've got work
things happening, I hope your work goes as well as possible.

(08:39):
We will be back on Saturday with a Saturday Classic
and then next week with brand new stuff. Stuff you
missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
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(09:00):
your favorite shows. M