Amber Blanco White (1887–1981)

Amber Blanco White deserves recognition as an important female pioneer for humanist thought in Britain. For a brief period in 1908 and 1909 Amber Reeves, as she still was, shot to notoriety because of the affair she conducted with H. G. Wells. The scandal could easily have broken both of them, especially Amber. But it didn’t.

Amber Reeves was born on 1 July 1887 in Christchurch, New Zealand, first child of William Pember Reeves and his wife Maud, a rising young couple in the colony. After the Liberal Party’s election victory in 1890, Pember Reeves became the government’s policy wonk, overseeing an ambitious programme of land reform, old age pensions, giving women the vote in 1893 and establishing a system of industrial arbitration. Innovations of this sort earned New Zealand a reputation as the social workshop of the world. Much of which was down to Pember Reeves.

Though Pember Reeves was a skilled director of policy he was a poor politician, losing out in the contest for supremacy in 1894 after the early death of the prime minister John Ballance. In what was widely seen as a sideways promotion, Pember Reeves took on the post of High Commissioner for New Zealand in London. This gave young Amber access to an education not available to her in New Zealand. After Kensington High School, she studied at Newnham College, where she gained first class honours in both parts of Moral Science Tripos. She was active in the Cambridge Fabian Club and was widely recognised as a brilliant student and excellent speaker.

Wells’ affair with young Amber Reeves was the A-list scandal of 1908 and 1909 in England, one that stayed with them both for the rest of their lives. Beatrice Webb acknowledged her brilliance but thought her ‘a terrible little pagan – vain, egotistical and careless of other people’s happiness.’ Even more spitefully, Virginia Woolf noted her intelligence and her willingness ‘to like people, even though they were stupid.’ After her marriage in 1910 to George Rivers Blanco White (1883-1966), a left-leaning lawyer and Fabian, Amber would normally have been expected to step back into shamefaced obscurity. Instead, she had a long public career, gaining a degree of recognition in her own right over the next forty years, as an administrator, politician, and public intellectual. She gave birth to three children: Anna-Jane (1909-2010), her child by Wells, and her two by Blanco White, Margaret (1911-2001), who became an architect and married the scientist Conrad Hal Waddington and Thomas (1915-2006), who became a distinguished patent lawyer. Then in 1916, most unusually for a woman with her past, Amber Blanco White worked as Director of Women’s Wages in the Ministry of Munitions.

With a husband, three children and, after 1916, a full-time job, Amber Blanco White still found time to write four novels, for which she retained her maiden name. The Reward of Virtue (1911), A Lady and Her Husband (1914), Helen in Love (1916), and Give and Take (1923) all explored aspects of contemporary society and the role women play in them. Her experiences working in a government department also proved useful in her last, often thought to be her best, novel. 

Toward the end of the 1920s Blanco White’s life took a new direction, once again helped along by H. G. Wells. In 1929 she had joined Morley College in London as a tutor in psychology, a role she retained until 1965. She had attracted attention with some intelligent articles in high-profile magazines on banking. Impressed, Wells approached Blanco White for help on the third of his so-called textbooks for the world. After The Outline of History and The Science of Life, it was the job of The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind to offer an overview on politics, the economy and society for the general citizen. Wells had run into difficulties with earlier collaborators and wanted Blanco White to help rescue the project. The timing was perfect as Blanco White was seemingly done with fiction and was looking to assert herself in the world of fact. Unlike other early contributors, Blanco White soon demonstrated her intellectual versatility and organisational efficiency. She produced material for several sections of the work in chapters seven, nine, and ten, and persuaded Wells to include what became the eleventh chapter, on the role of women in society.  

After her collaboration with Wells, Blanco White gathered together her articles on banking as a Fabian Society pamphlet in 1934, published under her married name. She was part of the activity among centre-left intellectuals during the Depression to help the Labour Party recover from the trauma of the MacDonald government and build a new policy of state socialism. The Nationalisation of Banking was a competent assessment of the challenges of nationalisation and was remarkably free from the ideologically-driven optimism of much writing of this sort of the time, which foresaw nothing but sunlit uplands.

Her next book, The New Propaganda (1939) reflected her move toward psychology as her chief area of interest. As well as some intelligent analysis of how propaganda works, and speculations about the psychology of fascism, Blanco White urged the left in Britain to take some lessons from propaganda in the way it communicated with its own supporters. She also recognised the similarities between fascist and communist propaganda methods in a way uncommon among left-wing writers at the time. No less than fascists, communists, she noted, liked to lump their opponents together, in the same paranoid binary of us-versus-them.

The move away from politics was complete by the time Blanco White’s next book, Worry in Women was published in 1941. Unusually it was directed specifically to women, wanting them to understand that unconscious repressions lay behind so many forms of female behaviour and many attitudes unhelpful to the full realisation of authentic selfhood. As a convinced Freudian, Blanco White argued that repressed anxiety and guilt, she wrote, are ‘the chief enemy of human happiness and which dogs and hampers most of us from the cradle to the grave.’ Anticipating what Simone de Beauvoir was to say in more flowery language at the end of the decade, Blanco White wrote: ‘Almost everywhere a man is regarded as a social asset – which encourages him – a woman as a social liability, which discourages her.’ Written in everyday language, Blanco White wanted women to understand how they worked and how they are worked on. Blanco White also anticipated Betty Friedan when she spoke of suburban neurosis as a condition affecting millions of women. 

A good case can be made that Ethics for Unbelievers is Amber Blanco White’s most significant book. Though many thinkers had spoken of ethics in a secular context without reference to monotheist presuppositions, few people had specifically framed a book on the premise that, given God is dead, how do we now live? Like many good books, Ethics for Unbelievers fell stillborn from the press. It paid the price for swimming against the tide of thinking at the time. Blanco White’s book sat astride several disciplines, most notably philosophy, psychology, and what became known as religious studies, in a way that made specialists uncomfortable. And among the general public, the mood was not conducive to any challenge to the still ubiquitous belief that monotheistic religion is the bedrock of any civilised body of ethics. In the anxious years after the war, with revelations of Auschwitz fresh in people’s memories and the horror of atomic warfare a new reality, people were in no mood to meddle with supernatural verities. As with so many valuable philosophical works, its significance lies not so much in the answers proffered as in the questions posed. We can now see her thought was too beholden on Freudian concepts and categories. Nevertheless, it anticipated much evolutionary psychology and physicalist work in this area today. Ethics for Unbelievers deserves credit for pointing out the elephant in the room. 

After Ethics for Unbelievers, Amber Blanco White withdrew from public life somewhat. She continued teaching psychology at Morley College until 1965. In 1966 husband died and her own health problems worsened. She became somewhat disillusioned with the Labour Party in Britain, and celebrated Edward Heath’s victory in 1970. In her old age, attention was transferred to her valuable collection of Chinese ceramics. She died on 26 December 1981, aged 94.

By Bill Cooke

Bill Cooke is a historian of humanism. His most recent book is H G Wells and the Twenty-first Century (Liverpool University Press, 2023). Other works include a biography of Joseph McCabe, the centenary history of the Rationalist Press Association, and an intellectual history of humanist thought since the Enlightenment.

_{Main image: L-R: Maud Pember Reeves; Amber Pember Reeves holding Anna-Jane; Mary Robison. From ‘My Life’ by Dusa McDuff}