Amber Blanco White (née Reeves; 1 July 1887 – 26 December 1981) was a New Zealand–born British feminist writer and scholar.
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 own 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 own 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.
While at Cambridge Reeves began to associate with other young women who shared her intellectual enthusiasms and socialist political leanings, forming a lifelong friendship with Eva Spielmann (later Eva Hubback), who became an educationalist. She became involved in a number of societies, including the debating society. In 1907, she led the inter-collegiate debate with Girton, arguing that "the socialist conception of life is the most noble and the most fruitful, both for the state and the individual."
In 1906, she founded the Cambridge University Fabian Society (CUFS) with Ben Keeling, a member of the (somewhat inactive) existing Fabian society in the town. CUFS was the first society at Cambridge to enlist women from its founding. Young women met regularly with men as equals and discussed everything from religious beliefs to social evils to sex, which would have been impossible in the conventional atmospheres of their homes.
She excelled in her studies, taking a double first in 1908. Gilbert Murray once wrote of an address she had given to the Newnham Philosophical Society, "It seems to me quite the best college paper that I have read—I mean as treated by a young person and from a non-metaphysical point of view." A fellow student described her as "intellect personified" after a lecture she gave to the Philosophical Society.
H. G. Wells had been a friend of Reeves' parents and one of the most popular speakers to address the CUFS. After Reeves' address to the Philosophical Society it was rumoured that she and Wells, one of the most prominent and prolific writers of the first half of the twentieth century, had gone to Paris for a weekend. Their appearance together at a supper party thrown for fellow Fabian and Governor of Jamaica Sir Sydney Olivier, 1st Baron Olivier was the first open declaration of the romantic relationship between the pair. Wells claimed that Reeves responded to his taste for adventurous eroticism, and the "sexual imaginativess" that his wife Jane could not cope with. Wells maintained that their relationship be kept silent, though Reeves saw no reason why their exciting affair be kept a secret. Once their relationship became well known, there were numerous attempts to break it up, particularly from Amber's mother and from George Rivers Blanco White, a lawyer who would later marry her.
Reeves was anxious not to break up Wells's marriage, though she wanted to have his child. The news that she was pregnant in the spring of 1909 shocked the Reeves family, and the couple fled to Le Touquet-Paris-Plage where they rented a house together. Whilst there, Wells sold his family home in Sandgate and bought a new house for his wife and two sons in London. Considerable social pressure on both sides mounted for them to stop seeing each other. Unhappy in France, after three months they decided to leave Le Touquet. On 7 May 1909, she married Rivers Blanco White. Despite the marriage, Reeves and Wells carried on seeing each other, much to the consternation of everyone else. Due to social pressure, the affair finally ended by the spring of 1910. In her later life she wrote, "I did not arrange to marry Rivers; he arranged it with H.G, but I have always thought it the best that could possibly have happened."
Wells wrote the roman à clef Ann Veronica based on his relationship with Reeves. The novel was rejected by his publisher, Frederick Macmillan, because of the possible damage it would do; however, T. Fisher Unwin published it in the autumn of 1909, when gossip concerning Wells was rampant. Wells later wrote that while the character of Ann Veronica was based on Amber, the character he believed came closest to her was Amanda in his novel The Research Magnificent. On 31 December 1909, she bore a daughter, Anna-Jane, who did not learn that her real father was H. G. Wells until she was 18.
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:
The life of washing up dishes in little separate houses and being necessarily subordinate in everything to the wage-earning man is I think very destructive to the women and to any opinion they may influence. It is humiliating and narrowing and there is nothing to be said in its favour... ...Oh how I should like some hard work again that brought one up against outside life.
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 (Margaret) Justin Blanco White, an architect. Justin married the biologist Conrad Hal Waddington, and had two daughters, mathematician Dusa McDuff and anthropologist Caroline Humphrey.
Reeves published four novels and four non-fiction works, dealing with a variety of subjects, but all sharing a common socialist and feminist critique of capitalist society. These are:
Give and Take: A Novel of Intrigue (1923)
The Nationalisation of Banking (1934)