Welcome

This is the blog for the Rebel Pen Club. The foundation of the RPC was reported on in the Sydney Morning Herald on the 14 January 1914. It says: 'The Rebel Pen Club was formed by the members of Bebel House Working Womens College in London, founded by Miss Ethel Carnie, a Lancashire mill hand, who Has published two volumes of poems and some delightful fairy tales. Of object of the club is to help working women who have a talent for writing to turn it to account, and the membership is rapidly growing. "All are workers, and all write, or, at any rate, hope to write," said Miss Carnie to a London interviewer. "What I feel is that literature up till now has been lop-sided, dealing with life only from the standpoint of one class. What we of the Rebel Pen Club hope to do is to write of what we know, of the things we have heard and seen down in the depths. We want to tell the world the unvarnished truth about the life of the workers, and to set down the opinion of the workers at first hand." In due course myself and others will be posting on Ethel Carnie: the republication of her works, the discussion of her works themes, her life, the social context in which she lived and wrote. I shall also be posting extracts from The Woman Worker, for which she wrote, and of the Clear Light, the anti-fascist journal she and her husband, Alfred Holdsworth, edited. A key focus of the RPC, as it was in Ethel's time, will also be the discussion of this 'lop-sidedness' of literature, which still exists. And not just in literature - but in media too. Whatever we read, no matter what the subject, it has been overwhelmingly written not by the one who has experienced the situation, or who has knowledgeable experience of the situation, but more often that not, one who has set themselves up as an 'outraged voice' of the person/group of persons. This setting up as voice of particular issues and demographics is an increasingly urgent issue, I feel. In our main left-leaning newspaper, The Guardian, most of the writers employed by the paper seem to be Oxbridge educated, with little direct experience of what they write of. And so, we can see their position as being somewhat parasitical of the 'working-class woman'; they build their journalistic career on her back, and in the meantime, her voice remains silent. Who is the working-class woman? What are the specific challenges she faces in our society today? And, as I contended in one blog post for the Guardian's Comment is Free, aren't we all working-class now in that we all have to work, a subversion of Tony Blair's statement that we were all middle-class! These are the issues that Ethel Carnie would have grappled with. And so we must now take up the baton.