This is by way of a postscript. Dora Marsden is a new figure in the feminist movement. Just how she evolved is rather hard to say. Her family were Radicals, it seems, smug British radicals; and she broke away, first of all, into a sort of middle class socialism. She went into settlement work. Here, it seems, she discovered what sort of person she really was.
She was a lover of freedom. So of course she rebelled against the interference of the middle class with the affairs of the poor, and threw overboard her settlement work and her socialism together. She was a believer in woman suffrage, but the autocratic government of the organization irked her. And, besides, she felt constrained to point out that feminism meant worlds more than a mere vote. The position of woman, not indeed as the slave of man, but as the enslaver of man, but with the other end of the chain fastened to her own wrist, and depriving her quite effectually of her liberties—this irritated her. Independence to her meant achievement, and when she heard the talk about "motherhood" by which the women she knew excused their lack of achievement, she was annoyed. Finally, the taboo upon the important subject of sex exasperated her. So she started a journal to express her discontent with all these things, and to change them.
Naturally, she called her journal The Freewoman. "Independent" expresses much of Dora Marsden's feeling, but that word has been of late dragged in a mire of pettiness and needs dry cleaning. It has come to signify a woman who isn't afraid to go out at night alone or who holds a position downtown. A word had to be chosen which had in it some suggestion of the heroic. Hence The Freewoman.
The Freewoman was a weekly. It lived several months and then suspended publication, and now all the women I know are poring over the back numbers while waiting for it to start again as a fortnightly. It was a remarkable paper. For one thing, it threw open its columns to such a discussion of sex that dear Mrs. Humphry Ward wrote a shocked letter to The Times about it. Of course, a good many of the ideas put forth in this correspondence were erroneous or trivial, but it must have done the writers no end of good to express themselves freely. For once sex was on a plane with other subjects, a fact making tremendously for sanity. In this Miss Marsden not only achieved a creditable journalistic feat, but performed a valuable public service.
Her editorials were another distinctive thing. In the first issue was an editorial on "Bondwomen," from which it would appear that perhaps even such advanced persons as you, my dear lady, are still far from free.
"Bondwomen are distinguished from Freewomen by a spiritual distinction. Bondwomen are the women who are not separate spiritual entities—who are not individuals. They are complements merely. By habit of thought, by form of activity, and largely by preference, they round off the personality of some other individual, rather than create or cultivate their own. Most women, as far back as we have any record, have fitted into this conception, and it has borne itself out in instinctive working practice.
"And in the midst of all this there comes a cry that woman is an individual, and that because she is an individual she must be set free. It would be nearer the truth to say that if she is an individual she is free, and will act like those who are free. The doubtful aspect in the situation is as to whether women are or can be individuals—that is, free—and whether there is not danger, under the circumstances, in labelling them free, thus giving them the liberty of action which is allowed to the free. It is this doubt and fear which is behind the opposition which is being offered the vanguard of those who are 'asking for' freedom. It is the kind of fear which an engineer would have in guaranteeing an arch equal to a strain above its strength. The opponents of the Freewomen are not actuated by spleen or by stupidity, but by dread. This dread is founded upon ages of experience with a being who, however well loved, has been known to be an inferior, and who has accepted all the conditions of inferiors. Women, women's intelligence, and women's judgments have always been regarded with more or less secret contempt, and when woman now speaks of 'equality,' all the natural contempt which a higher order feels for a lower order when it presumes bursts out into the open. This contempt rests upon quite honest and sound instinct, so honest, indeed, that it must provide all the charm of an unaccustomed sensation for fine gentlemen like the Curzons and Cromers and Asquiths to feel anything quite so instinctive and primitive.
"With the women opponents it is another matter. These latter apart, however, it is for would-be Freewomen to realize that for them this contempt is the healthiest thing in the world, and that those who express it honestly feel it; that these opponents have argued quite soundly that women have allowed themselves to be used, ever since there has been any record of them; and that if women had had higher uses of their own they would not have foregone them. They have never known women to formulate imperious wants, this in itself implying lack of wants, and this in turn implying lack of ideals. Women as a whole have shown nothing save 'servant' attributes. All those activities which presuppose the master qualities, the standard-making, the law-giving, the moral-framing, belong to men. Religions, philosophies, legal codes, standards in morals, canons in art, have all issued from men, while women have been the 'followers,' 'believers,' the 'law-abiding,' the 'moral,' the conventionally admiring. They have been the administrators, the servants, living by borrowed precept, receiving orders, doing hodmen's work. For note, though some men must be servants, all women are servants, and all the masters are men. That is the difference and distinction. The servile condition is common to all women."
This was only the beginning of such a campaign of radical propaganda as feminism never knew before. Miss Marsden went on to attack all the things which bind women and keep them unfree. As such she denounced what she considered the cant of "motherhood."
"Considering, therefore, that children, from both physiological and psychological points of view, belong more to the woman than to the man; considering, too, that not only does she need them more, but, as a rule, wants them more than the man, the parental situation begins to present elements of humor when the woman proceeds to fasten upon the man, in return for the children she has borne him, the obligation from that time to the end of her days, not only for the children's existence, but for her own, also!"