'Philosophical vacuity and political ineptitude': The Freewoman's critique of the suffrage movement 1

Women's History Review

Volumn 11, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 613-630

  Delap, Lucy ^a  

^a KING'S COLLEGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34247443898     PISSN: 09612025     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09612020200200340     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. Joannou and other participants in 'The Feminist Forerunners' conference (Manchester Metropolitan University, July 2000) extremely valuable, and am indebted to them
2. Dora Marsden, The Freewoman, 14 December 1912, p. 73
3. Edwardian anti-suffragism has been seen as predominantly deployed within a wider 'anti-feminist' culture, represented by public figures such as Lord Curzon, Lord Cromer and Sir Almroth Wright. It is usually perceived as characterised by misogyny and rancour towards women, as discussed by Brian Harrison (1978) Separate Spheres: the opposition to women's suffrage in Britain (London: Croom Helm). Recent work, however, has re-evaluated the anti-suffragism of thinkers such as Mary Ward, and has attempted to align their anti-suffragism with a strand of what has been called 'social feminism'. See Beth Sutton-Ramspeck (1999) Shot Out of the Canon: Mary Ward and the claims of conflicting feminism, in Nicola D. Thompson (Ed.) Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question, p. 205 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) and Julia Bush (2002) British Women's Anti-Suffragism and the Forward Policy, 1908-14, Women's History Review, 11, pp. 431-454. Though The Freewoman was critical of such 'social feminism', this article can be seen as part of a project to unhitch the association of feminism of this period with suffragism, and look at alternative feminist politics that have tended to be discarded from the feminist 'canon'
4. Suffragism in this article refers to both 'militant' and 'constitutional' wings. As Sandra Holton (1986) points out in Feminism and Democracy: women's suffrage and reform politics in Britain 1900-1918, p. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), the distinction is often unhelpful, and I prefer to distinguish, where necessary, according to group membership
5. The origin of the term 'feminism' is commonly attributed, in its French form of 'feminisme', to the early nineteenth-century Utopian socialist, Charles Fourier. One of its earliest usages in English is found in the Westminster Review article, 'Feminism', probably written in 1898 by Ben Elmy and Elizabeth Wolstoneholme Elmy, under the pseudonym 'Ellis Ethelmer' (Feminism, Westminster Review, January 1898, pp. 50-62). This article attempts to clarify the nature of feminism by quoting from a variety of literary and political thinkers on the Woman Question, none of whom themselves use the term. The Freewoman's explicitly feminist subtitle, thirteen years later, suggests the rise in popularity and recognition of the term, though it still connoted the 'modern' or 'advanced' aspects of the women's movement. In the early Edwardian period, 'feminism' was not well established
6. Stanley Hall's (1907) Adolescence, pp. xiv, 565, 564 (New York: D. Appleton & Co.), for example, experiments with 'femininist', 'feministic' and 'feminist' to describe the women's movement. Prior to this, it was only mentioned in dictionaries as the 'rare' equivalent of 'womanism'
7. See Nancy Cott (1987) The Grounding of Modern Feminism, pp. 3-6 (New Haven: Yale University Press) and Richard J. Evans (1977) The Feminists; women's emancipation movements in Europe, America and Australasia 1840-1920, p. 39 note 1 (London: Croom Helm)
8. M.P. Willcocks, The Freewoman, 18 July 1912, p. 175
9. Woman's Future, Evening Standard and St James's Gazette, 25 October 1911, p. 20
10. Charlotte Despard, in Brougham Villiers (Ed.) (1907) The Case for Women's Suffrage, pp. 195-196 (London: Fisher Unwin)
11. Mrs Winton Evans, The Vote, 9 September 1911, p. 248
12. Housman's public speech was reported in The Vote by A. Mitchell, 18 May 1912, p. 77
13. The Crusade, August 1912, quoted in Lisanne Radice (1984) Beatrice and Sidney Webb, p. 194 (London: Macmillan). See also Peter Beilharz & Chris Nyland (1998) The Webbs, Fabianism and Feminism (Aldershot: Ashgate) for more discussion of the relationship between Fabians and feminism
14. McMillan, in Brougham Villiers, The Case for Women's Suffrage, p. 115. Sandra Holton also quotes McMillan and discusses feminists' politicisation of the home in Feminism and Democracy
15. As Ethel Snowden put it, women were the 'crowned queens of the home' (a political metaphor), and should be given appropriate responsibilities outside of the bounds of the domestic (Ethel Snowden [1908] Women and the State, in Constance Smedley [Ed.] Woman: A Few Shrieks! p. 133 [Letchworth: Garden City Press]). Of course, feminist literature was also replete with alternative conceptions of the home
16. See, for example, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Home, Its Work and Influence and What Diantha Did, reviewed in The Freewoman, 29 February 1912, pp. 296-297
17. Carol Dyhouse (1989) discusses feminist conceptions of the home in her Feminism and the Family in England, 1880-1939 (Oxford: Blackwell)
18. Susan Kingsley Kent (1987) Sex and Suffrage, 1860-1914, p. 227 (Princeton: Princeton University Press)
19. Georgina Waylen (1998) Gender, Feminism and the State, in Vicky Randall & Georgina Waylen (Eds) Gender, Politics and the State (London: Routledge)
20. Seth Koven (1993) Borderlands: women, voluntary action and child welfare in Britain, 1840-1914, in Seth Koven & Sonya Michel (Eds) Mothers of a New World, pp. 94-135 (New York: Routledge)
21. Hardie, in Brougham Villiers, The Case for Women's Suffrage, p. 83
22. Quoted in Holton, Feminism and Democracy, p. 12
23. See ibid., p. 14; and Marilyn Friedman (1987) Care and Context in Moral Reasoning, in Eva Kittay & Diana Meyers (Eds) Women and Moral Theory (Toronto: Rowman & Littlefield)
24. Carol Gilligan (1982) In a Different Voice: psychological theory and women's development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press)
25. Olive Banks (1981) Faces of Feminism, p. 90 (Oxford: Martin Robertson), quoted in Kent, Sex and Suffrage, p, 59
26. Snowden, 'Women and the State', p. 133
27. Patricia Hollis (1987) Ladies Elect: women in English local government 1865-1914, p. 7 (Oxford: Clarendon Press)
28. Quoted in Lisa Tickner (1989) Spectacle of Women: the imagery of the suffrage campaign, p. 159 (London: Chatto & Windus)
29. Les Garner (1990) charts the dispute, revealed in letters in the DMC, Princeton University Library in A Brave and Beautiful Spirit: Dora Marsden 1882-1960 (Aldershot: Avebury)
30. See also Bruce Clarke (1996) Dora Marsden and Early Modernism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press) and Cary Franklin's contribution to this issue
31. Marsden to Pethick Lawrence, DMC, Princeton University Library, 9 January 1911, Box I, Folder 29
32. See Lucy Delap (2000) The Freewoman, Periodical Communities and the Feminist Reading Public, Princeton University Library Chronicle, LXI, pp. 233-276. See Cary Franklin's article in this issue for more details of The New Age and Edwardian periodical networks
33. Marsden, The Freewoman, 11 April 1912, p. 404
34. Chew, The Freewoman, 18 April 1912, p. 435, emphasis in original
35. M.N. Neilson, The Freewoman, 21 December 1911, p. 91
36. M.P. Willcocks to Grace Jardine, 8 February 1912, DMC, Box III, Folder 10
37. Muriel Nelson, The Freewoman, 7 December 1911, p. 53. Maria DiCenzo discusses the self-sacrifice and commitment demanded by the suffrage groups of their 'newsies', those selling the suffrage papers in her contribution to this issue
38. Drysdale, The Freewoman, 21 December 1911, p. 89
39. Edith Browne, The Freewoman, 25 January 1912, p. 187
40. Witcop, The Freewoman, 22 February 1912, p. 273
41. Browne, The Freewoman, 11 January 1912, p. 153
42. West, The Freewoman, 3 October 1912, p. 390
43. Boord, The Freewoman, 14 December 1911, p. 70
44. Billington-Greig, The Freewoman, 21 December 1911, p. 86. See Brian Harrison's (1987) account of Billington-Greig in Prudent Revolutionaries: portraits of British feminists between the wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press)
45. Billington-Greig, The Freewoman, 21 December 1911, p. 85
46. See also Anne Femihough (2000) 'Go in Fear of Abstractions': modernism and the spectre of democracy, Textual Practice, 14, pp. 479-497
47. Tite, The Freewoman, 21 December 1911, p. 91
48. Ayrton to Gawthorpe, 26 November 1911, DMC, Box II, Folder 25. See Maroula Joannou's article in this issue for the outraged responses of readers to Freewoman criticisms of the WSPU
49. Catherine Furley Smith, Morning Post, 26 July 1912, p. 5
50. A. Maude Royden, The Times, quoted in The Freewoman, 11 July 1912, p. 142
51. Common Cause, 1 August 1912
52. Emily Leaf, Morning Post, 29 July 1912, p. 4
53. See Hollis, Ladies Elect, p. 6
54. Mary Augusta Ward (1889) An Appeal against Female Suffrage, in Jane Lewis (Ed.) (1987) Before the Vote Was Won: arguments for and against women's suffrage, p. 410 (London: Routledge)
55. Ward, quoted in Sutton-Ramspeck, 'Shot Out of the Canon', p. 211
56. Marsden, The Freewoman, 4 January 1911, p. 130
57. The Freewoman, 5 September 1912, p. 311