Behind the Scenes Minis: Busy Emily

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Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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. 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. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M