Amber Reeves

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Amber Blanco White (née Reeves; 1 July 1887 – 26 December 1981) was a British feminist writer and scholar.

Early life

Reeves was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, the eldest of three children of Fabian feminist Maud Pember Reeves (née Robison; 1865–1953) and New Zealand politician and social reformer William Pember Reeves.

The family moved to London in 1896, where her father became New Zealand's Agent-General. Her widowed aunt, cousins, and servants joined the household in Cornwall Gardens, Kensington. "London was hateful after New Zealand", she said. "No freedom. No seashore. Streets, streets, streets. Houses, houses".

Reeves attended Kensington High School until 1904, and then travelled to Europe to become fluent in French. Her father was not fully converted to the higher education of women; when he gave her the choice between being presented at court and going to the University of Cambridge, she chose Cambridge. Reeves then began studying Moral Sciences (philosophy) at Newnham College in 1905. It is unlikely her father raised further opposition as he always spoke highly of her academic achievements.

Work and family life

Reeves was employed by the Ministry of Labour, in charge of a section that dealt with the employment of women. Part of her job was encouraging workers and employers to see that women were capable of a much wider range of tasks than was usually expected. She later took responsibility for women's wages at the Ministry of Munitions. In 1919, she was appointed to the Whitley Council, but in that same year her appointment was terminated. Humbert Wolfe, a public servant, wrote to Matthew Nathan, the secretary of the council, pointing out that Amber's termination was chiefly on the grounds that she was a married woman, and that letting her go from the public service was "really stupid".

By 1921, her vigour in the women workers' cause had led her to come up against ex-servicemen who exercised considerable power through their associations. She was told a deputation of MPs had approached the minister and claimed that no ex-serviceman could sleep in peace while she remained in the civil service. She received a dismissal notice and, aside from time with the Ministry of Labour in 1922, that was the end of her civil service career. She began to work on her book Give and Take, which was published in 1923. Amber did not take well to being a housewife; at one point she wrote:

There was some strain in her marriage with George Rivers Blanco White. In their youth they had both adopted positive attitudes toward the free expression of love that were common in the literary, intellectual and left-wing society at the time, but as they grew older these attitudes were beginning to change. Writing of marriage in her book Worry in Women, she stated that if people choose to break ethical codes they had to be prepared to cope with guilt. She also stated that if a wife was unfaithful, she should not tell her husband, writing, "if ever there is a case for a downright lie, this is it".

In addition to Anna-Jane, Reeves had two children, Thomas, a patent lawyer, and Justin, an architect. Justin, who married the biologist Conrad Hal Waddington, is the mother of mathematician Dusa McDuff and anthropologist Caroline Humphrey.

Later life

In July 1960, Rivers suffered a stroke which left him paralysed down his right side. Reeves was distraught and during the last years of his life she worried a lot and became depressed. She wrote to her daughter Anna-Jane, who was in Singapore at the time, "If there is a Confucian temple in K.L., you might make a little offering (if he does like offerings)... ...I have more faith in him now than in our own deity who seems to be letting us down all round". When Rivers died on 28 March 1966, Reeves was determined to keep living as normally as possible. She was visited by New Zealand historian Keith Sinclair who was writing a biography of her father, and twice by interviewers from the BBC (a 40-minute interview with Denys Gueroult was broadcast by Radio 4 in September 1970). Although she enjoyed discussing politics and world affairs, she felt disillusioned about the socialist hopes of her youth, and supported the Conservatives in the 1970 election. She believed that the wrong people were leading the left and that only diehards would vote for them.

In December 1981, she was admitted to a hospital in St John's Wood and died on 26 December aged 94.

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Political career

Reeves was invited to speak on behalf of both the Liberal and Labour Party candidates during the 1924 election campaign. "The Liberal audiences were lovely narrow decent people," she said of Labour. They sat in rows and clapped their cotton gloves... However, when I reached the Labour meetings in the slums, among the costers, the railwaymen, and the women in tenth hand velvet hats, I knew immediately that they were my people. She joined the Labour Party and later supported her husband as the Labour Party nominee for Holland-with-Boston in Lincolnshire. The seat had been vacated in a by-election earlier this year, and White lost the election.

Reeves tried to find her theories on currency in her book The Nationalisation of Banking, which was later adopted by the Labour Party, and she and Rivers became responsible for a party publication called Womens Leader. Reeves were still active in the Fabian Society, and by this time, several Fabians understood that they must work within the parliamentary Labour Party. In 1931 and 1935, she ran twice as a candidate for Hendon.

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