Laurence Housman (1865-1959)

Housman’s traditional Victorian upbringing, with its rigid sense of social propriety, contributed strongly to his becoming the activist – and humanist – he did. He viewed the household prayers of his childhood as performative and empty, and held a particular disdain for the ways in which the subject of sex was clouded in mystery, or avoided altogether. ‘It was this sanction of obscurantism’, he wrote:

… which started the breach between myself and the narrow Conservatism of my upbringing. I could not feel that any social or religious system, which so sedulously refused to tell and to face the truth, deserved respect; and though for a while I still conformed, it was without heart or conviction.

‘Taught by these monstrous perversions of modesty’, he said, ‘I had become a feminist and a suffragist long before the day of battle actually arrived.’ Both Laurence and Clemence became devoted supporters of women’s suffrage, not merely partaking in protests but helping to organise, defend, and create art for them. In 1907, Laurence was among the founding members of the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage (alongside a later Ethical Union President, Henry Noel Brailsford). The Housman home became the headquarters of the Suffrage Atelier (‘An Arts and Crafts Society Working for the Enfranchisement of Women’), and Laurence wrote and spoke prolifically for the cause. In 1911, Clemence Housman became the first woman to be imprisoned for the refusal to pay taxes in the cause of suffrage. She was taken to Holloway Prison, and Laurence was the speaker at a meeting organised by the WSPU to protest her arrest. In 1914, he was a founding member of the United Suffragists.

On his death, The Times described Housman as an ‘idealist and iconoclast… a figure of versatile and idiosyncratic distinction.’ He was appropriately characterised as a ‘born radical under a conservative skin… clothed in the formidable traditions of the Victorian era,’ which ‘he proceeded by degrees to shed’. In this way, he was typical of a generation of humanists and activists who, finding the faith and expectations of their childhoods no longer viable, embraced a practical philosophy of good works, rooted in a professed agnosticism. Housman was remembered too for:

… an ebullient humour which was very characteristic of the man, which overflowed in his intimate correspondence, and which salted a view of the world at large as something to be shocked and pin-pricked and teased into lively apprehension.

This untiring creativity, married with a powerful sense of social responsibility, underpinned Housman’s decades-long devotion to reform. He championed honesty and openness in private and public life, unafraid of defending unpopular causes, or those deemed controversial by wider society. This central commitment to thinking for himself, while working with and alongside others, was at the heart of the Ethical movement to which he lent support for almost 40 years, and continues to animate organised humanism today.