Haldane, Charlotte (1894–1969)

British novelist and journalist, who, despite a varied career as a woman of letters, remains best known for her first novel, the dystopia Man's World (1926) . Name variations: (pseudonym) Charlotte Franklyn. Born Charlotte Franken in Sydenham, London, England, on April 27, 1894; died in London on March 16, 1969; daughter of Joseph Franken and Mathilde (Saarbach) Franken; had a sister Elizabeth; niece-in-law of Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane (1862–1937); married Jack Burghes, in 1918; married J(ohn) B(urdon) S(anderson) Haldane (1892–1964, a geneticist and biochemist), in 1926; children: (first marriage) Ronald John McLeod Burghes (b. January 1919).

Charlotte Franken was born in 1894 in the south London suburb of Sydenham into a wealthy German-Jewish family. Her father Joseph Franken was a successful fur merchant, while her New York-born mother Mathilde Saarbach Franken remained culturally more German than British, having spent her formative years with relatives in Frankfurt am Main. Besides the complexities of her family background, young Charlotte had to endure the opposition of her parents when it became clear during her teens that she had literary ambitions. Gifted in foreign languages (she had spent almost five years at a school in Antwerp, Belgium), Charlotte was a voracious reader, but plans for her to study languages at the Bedford College for Women had to be abandoned in 1910 when her father suffered serious business reverses. After a brief course at a secretarial school, Charlotte found work at a concert manager's office, where her duties included translating ballet synopses of Anna Pavlova from French into English. Soon she was working for a music publisher, ghost-writing articles under the names of music-hall stars for women's pulp magazines.

The start of World War I unleashed anti-German sentiment throughout the United Kingdom, and Joseph Franken, as a British subject, was declared an enemy alien. To avoid internment, he sought refuge in a still-neutral United States. Charlotte chose to remain in London, keeping a low profile because of her family's German background. In 1916, using the pseudonym Charlotte Franklyn to disguise her Teutonic surname, she published her first short story in The Bystander magazine. In 1918, Charlotte married Jack Burghes, a war veteran who had returned from the front suffering from shellshock. After the couple's son Ronald was born in January 1919, Charlotte supported her family by working as social editor and freelance reporter for the Daily Express and Sunday Express. One of the first newswomen on Fleet Street, she was soon known throughout the British Isles for her well-argued articles championing married women who like herself carried the burden of supporting war-wounded husbands and young children. Convinced that the divorce laws were unfair to women, Charlotte relied on current court cases to reinforce her claims. Although regarded by many of her readers as a militant feminist, she in fact believed that while women needed to break the shackles of traditional female roles they should not embrace society's definition of male roles. In time, her idealistic assessment of motherhood and marriage resulted in strong criticism of her views from radical feminist quarters.

In "The Sex of Your Child," an article she published in the Daily Express in July 1924, Charlotte forecast the issues to be raised by a technique for prenatal sex determination and predicted that such a scientific advance would bring about major changes in the social organization of race and gender. Only months earlier, the geneticist and biochemist J.B.S. Haldane had published Daedalus; or, Science and the Future, a novel in which he predicted the possibility of one day successfully carrying out extrauterine gestation. Fascinated, Charlotte sought out J.B.S. for advice on a novel she was planning. Although both were married, they quickly fell in love. The affair became an open scandal and nearly cost J.B.S. his readership at Cambridge University. Only in 1926, after Jack Burghes had divorced Charlotte, was it possible for her to finally marry J.B.S. Haldane.

That same year, Charlotte resigned from the Daily Express and published her first novel, Man's World. She writes of a dystopia (a place that advocates a malevolent social order) in which the state advances its goals, namely the progressive development of the white race, by highjacking scientific advances for its patriarchal, nationalist, and racist imperatives. In this community, which foreshadows Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), women who do not wish to have children must accept sterilization, after which they can behave "promiscuously" and are free to be artists or serve as administrators. The other women, much more highly regarded by the community, serve as "vocational mothers" and determine the sex of their children by performing "Perrier exercises" during pregnancy. As members of "motherhood councils," they control the genetic stock of the state and regulate the proportion of male and female babies.

Although most critics have interpreted Man's World as a dystopian novel, some scholars have suggested that the work may have been intended to depict a feminist utopia. Whatever its intent, it was enthusiastically reviewed at the time of its publication and remains Charlotte Haldane's best-known work. Her next book, Motherhood and Its Enemies (1928), surprised and angered a majority of feminists, because its essential argument was that only after having mated and borne children could a woman be regarded as "normal." The book's controversial nature made it the center of an intellectual storm. Although it was clearly a strongly pronatalist work, Motherhood and Its Enemies was not merely a polemic for traditional marriage and procreation patterns. Many of her suggestions in this work were in fact progressive if not radical in nature, including her strong advocacy of the use of contraceptives by married women, the regular use of anesthesia in childbirth, and a systematic investigation of the most effective methods of child-rearing and primary education.

Within a year of their marriage, Charlotte and J.B.S. found themselves settled into a hectic but exhilarating routine of lecturing, writing and travel. In 1927 and 1928, they attended academic conferences in Geneva and Berlin, selling copies of Motherhood and Its Enemies. After a trip to the Soviet Union in 1928, the Haldanes became increasingly convinced that the Soviet model of social reconstruction was the ideal for a capitalist world in disarray. Their faith in Communism was strengthened in the early 1930s, when the great Depression brought immense suffering to millions. Throughout the 1930s, Charlotte published novels, including the essentially autobiographical Youth Is a Crime (1934). Although she had revealed her skepticism about the automatic benefits of science and technology in Man's World, Charlotte followed her husband's trailblazing work in biochemistry and genetics with great interest. Her journalistic experience, as well as an ability to present the essential facts of complex scientific experiments in clear prose, led to the founding of the Science News Service, a successful enterprise that sold scientific articles to the popular press. For a decade, Charlotte Haldane ran this agency, writing most of the articles herself.

After the appearance of Nazi Germany in 1933, the Haldanes became increasingly active in the British Communist Party. Because of her Jewish origins, Charlotte regarded the Hitler regime as a personal as well as ideological threat. With the eruption of a Fascist-initiated civil war in Spain in the summer of 1936, Charlotte played an important role in recruiting British volunteers for the International Brigade that fought the Franco forces, spending a number of months in Paris to help bring the volunteers to the border where they illegally entered Spain. Troubled by the struggles of the Spanish Republic, in 1938 she returned to that country to serve as guide and interpreter for Paul Robeson, the American singer, actor and political activist. In May 1938, Haldane spoke eloquently on behalf of Spain at the Second World Congress Against Fascism held in Marseilles. With Japanese aggression in China, in 1938 Charlotte Haldane went to China on a special assignment for the Daily Herald. Her reportage from the Orient made it clear that a war in Europe was all but inevitable.

As a Communist, Haldane was shocked by the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact signed in late August 1939. She suffered "mental discomfort" from the Soviet Union's dramatic about-face, but did not rebel against party discipline, still trusting the Stalin regime. Soon after Nazi Germany attacked the USSR in June 1941, Haldane became the first British woman war correspondent to be assigned to the Russian front. Writing for the Daily Sketch, she witnessed an epic struggle that would eventually cost tens of millions of lives and incalculable destruction of factories, cities, towns, villages and cultural monuments. Although Haldane would publish a book in 1942 documenting in positive terms the heroic spirit of resistance of the Soviet peoples,Russian Newsreel: An Eye-Witness Account of the Soviet Union at War, her stay in the USSR proved disillusioning. What she witnessed with her own eyes—a population living with disease, poverty, and fear—made it impossible for her to continue to swallow the Stalinist propaganda that this was a nation that had succeeded in creating a socialist commonwealth. On visits to collective farms, Haldane was shocked by the over-whelming passivity. She was particularly shaken by the image of a young mother carrying her starved infant to its grave.

On her return to England, Charlotte Haldane severed her ties to the British Communist Party. As she would explain in her autobiography Truth Will Out, unlike her husband, who remained a committed Communist to the end of his life, she could no longer respond to the party's propaganda, blindly follow its discipline, or believe in "the sacred text of Communism, the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin." This ideological break marked the end of her marriage. Since 1939, she and J.B.S. had seriously considered divorcing, but pressure from party officials (who argued it would bring negative publicity down on the British Communist movement) had delayed their final decision.

Even before her divorce in 1945, Charlotte Haldane paid a heavy price for having broken with the Communist movement. Held in contempt as a defector by Communist intellectuals and most of their sympathizers, she became "a political leper" and was shunned by her former friends. A faction of journalists on Fleet Street sympathetic to Communism kept her from getting assignments as a war correspondent. Haldane was also considered suspect by British Intelligence, which assembled a dossier on her because of her many years as a Communist. At first, she earned a modest living writing articles for Every-woman, a journal aimed at low-income housewives. Rescue from her predicament, and an assured source of income, came from the BBC which in August 1943 hired her to work in its Eastern Service. When George Orwell gave up his BBC post as "talks producer" in the Indian Section of the BBC Eastern Service, Haldane succeeded him. She would work for the BBC well into the 1950s, at the same time continuing to write novels. Starting in 1951, when she published a life of Marcel Proust, Haldane wrote a number of finely crafted biographical studies, including well-received volumes on Marie d'Agoult , Mozart, Alfred de Musset, and Madame de Maintenon .

In her final years, Charlotte Haldane struggled with health problems, including failing eyesight, but she continued to write and remained active. Recent studies of Haldane make a persuasive argument that she is a significant personality in modern Britain's intellectual and cultural history. As Susan Squier has noted, Haldane was a woman of deep contradictions who, although she was a self-declared lifelong feminist, also created in Man's World an "antifeminist classic" that appears to support the idea of vocational motherhood while blaming suffragists and "spinsters" for devaluing motherhood. Her denunciations of anti-Semitism are contradicted by the same novel's white-only social order run by eugenicists whose leader is a "particularly Jewish" visionary named Mensch. In some of her writings, Haldane championed the beneficence of the modern scientific enterprise, while in others, including Man's World, she sounds the alarm bell over the dangers of scientists in control of a repressive state apparatus.

sources:

Adamson, Judith. Charlotte Haldane: Woman Writer in a Man's World. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1998.

Armitt, Lucie, ed. Where No Man Has Gone Before. London: Routledge, 1991.

Bowker, Gordon. Pursued by Furies. London: Harper-Collins, 1993.

Clark, Ronald William. J.B.S.: The Life and Work of J.B.S. Haldane. NY: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Clute, John, and Peter Nicholls, eds. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. NY: St. Martin's Press, 1993.

Ferguson, Neal A. "Women's Work: Employment Opportunities and Economic Roles, 1918–1939," in Albion. Vol. 7, no. 1. Spring 1975, pp. 55–68.

Gates, Barbara T., and Ann B. Shteir, eds. Natural Eloquence: Women Reinscribe Science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.

Haldane, Charlotte. "Passionaria," in Left Review. Vol. 3, no. 15. April 1938, p. 926.

——. Truth Will Out. NY: Vanguard Press, 1951.

Hartley, Jenny, ed. Hearts Undefeated: Women's Writing of the Second World War. London: Virago Press, 1995.

Ingram, Angela J. C., and Daphne Patai, eds. Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals: British Women Writers, 1889–1939. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Kent, Susan Kingsley. "The Politics of Sexual Difference: World War I and the Demise of British Feminism," in Journal of British Studies. Vol. 27, no. 3. July 1988, pp. 232–253.

John Haag , Associate Professor, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia