Bill C., I'm no expert, and would welcome being corrected if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that H.D.'s intended audience was always a small group of avant-garde poets, rather than The General Public. I am unaware that she made any political statements for wider consumption. In her epic
Trilogy (which I have not read), she reportedly draws on her experience of having lived through the London Blitz, but I don't think she ever publicly commented on other aspects of World War II. But again, I don't really know.
Tony, thanks for the examples of Mistral and Gilman. Such racist views didn't occur to me in the context of this conversation for two reasons. First, I was focused on expressed views of fascism and anti-Semitism by female poets in the U.S. who were contemporaries of Pound. Gilman wasn't noted for her poetry [Edited to say: Wrong, she's got
a bio at the Poetry Foundation site, so this was just ignorance on my part], and died in 1935; Mistral wasn't a U.S. citizen. And second, I hadn't heard of Gilman's white supremacism before you mentioned it. (I was aware of Mistral's, but hers has always struck me as more of a cultural appropriation and assimilation thing than an imprisonment and extermination project like the one that Pound seems to have had in mind. More on that later.)
In general, I've long been aware that the feminist movement has occasionally drifted into racism, because so much of feminism is concerned with liberating the women of a particular social class from the trap of "women's work" in the domestic sphere--often at the expense of women in lower social classes.
Household drudgery is far less labor-intensive now than it once was, but until recently there were few labor-saving devices. The safe handling of food used to consume much time and effort. There were no freezers. Even iceboxes were iffy; once the ice melted past a certain point, food in some areas of the box entered unsafe temperature zones. Since importing crops from the Southern Hemisphere in a timely manner was not feasible, seasonal availability was a big thing. Without monumental food preservation undertakings like tomato and peach canning, one's family might not have fruit or vegetables in any form all winter, and might thus suffer scurvy-related problems. Today we think nothing of throwing away a mass-produced sock with a hole in it; back then, it was typical for someone to hand-knit such items, and when they got too damaged to be darned, to ravel their yarn to be knitted into something else. Et cetera. Nowadays, men are more inclined to help out at home, in part because it's become socially acceptable for men to admit to doing so, and in part because there is so much less of it to do. It's one thing to volunteer to take over the family's laundry, when doing the laundry means pushing a button on a washing machine; it's quite another when washing machines haven't been invented yet.
One might argue that stereotypical "women's work" forms a large percentage of the foundation of Maslow's pyramid. Without being able to take for granted that basic, physiological security about one's food and shelter, no intellectual life is possible for anyone.
If one liberates certain people from time-consuming domestic tasks (so that these folks might have time to achieve their full intellectual and creative potential), one must inevitably foist the lion's share of such chores upon some less fortunate human being.
One way to justify this division of labor is to deem those on the short end of the stick somehow inferior and undeserving of better, anyway. This is one way (among many, some fairer than others) in which men have traditionally justified foisting household drudgery upon women. This is also how some women have justified foisting it upon poorly-paid, less-educated household servants, often of ethnic groups different from their own. You don't have to feel guilty about depriving someone else of the opportunity to pursue intellectual endeavors, if you believe that that person's fundamental capacity for intellectual endeavors is inherently less than your own...or if you believe you are fairly and adequately compensating them for their labor in other ways.
See Thomas Jefferson's (admittedly, very conflicted) justification of slavery.
Overall, Mistral's unsavory views on race seem far more nuanced than Gilman's. First of all, Mistral's views seemed to have changed over time, with her most extreme statements being made when she was younger...when she, like more stereotypical white supremacists, believed that the future of Western civilization depended on the white race retaining its racial purity. She later shifted to a somewhat more palatable (although I still find it repugnant) belief that the future of Western civilization in Latin America depended on the assimilation and appropriation of other races, so that they might disappear into a population and culture that remained primarily European-dominated. She thought that the state had an interest in promoting the right sort of miscegenation; for example, Mistral supported a governmental program that encouraged people to emigrate from Germany and Yugoslavia and settle in the indigenous-dominated areas of Chile, ideally taking indigenous spouses (to improve the stock through interbreeding, as it were).
Although white herself (of Basque descent on both sides), she frequently presented herself as "mestiza," and she referred to the Latin American population as "nuestra raza"--"our race"--so often than many people assume that she was literally of a mixed-race background. She did champion the rights of indigenous peoples, and even those of African descent, particularly with regard to educational opportunities...but this boon of education had the stated or implied goal of "civilizing" the descendants of non-Europeans by instilling superior European culture into them. Hmmm.
In short, Mistral's racial views were a lot more complicated than Pound's straightforward anti-Semitism, although I still find them unsettling. By the way, my husband and I are of different races, and our children are obviously mixed, but we don't feel we're participating in a eugenics program to improve society's DNA composition. Blecch. [Edited to say: We also don't feel we're contributing to racial pollution. We're just people who happen to love each other.]
But yes, Tony, I stand corrected on my previous suggestion that feminist heroes might be given a pass on these sorts of statements, while men like Pound are held more accountable by later generations. I think it was the case when I was a student a quarter-century ago, but it is no longer. And if more people have heard of the Pound controversy than the Gilman controversy, it's probably because more people have heard of Pound than have heard of Gilman. [Edited to say: And Pound's situation was pretty newsworthy at the time, while Gilman's views were not all that unusual back then.]
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