I'm only going to report on Beatrice Hastings's editorial, "Feminism and Common-Sense." This is a recurring series of letters, and though it is good to have Hastings back, it's always depressing when she writes about feminism. Her thesis: the establishment feminists are attacking prostitutes because of the decline in the marriage rate, not for moral reasons (remember the White Slave stuff?). But it's not the prostitutes that are lowering the marriage rate--it's loose women who sleep around and try to be "pals" with men instead of getting married. Note how Hastings rails against herself. The fundamental flaw in her argument is that she takes it for granted that men will only marry virgins, though she acknowledges this as a disaster: "the unchangeable little tragedy is that the average man considers a temporarily loose woman a confirmed loose woman... wheras she is liable to prove an immaculate monogamist" (343). The solution? A capitulation before nature, a return to "virtue" by which she means sexy feminine mystique: "Mrs. Humphrey Ward was lately jeered at in 'Votes for Women' as suggesting a return to the poke bonnets and flounces, but a woman in a poke bonnet and flounces was a charming mystery... I should say that the craft of wearing clothes is pretty well lost to-day: we are all too busy putting them on!"
Of course, Beatrice Hastings was a fiercely independent woman who was "loose" enough to cut notches in her bed for every man who slept in it. The contrast is intense, almost too much. I am fascinated by Hastings--her rough start in life may be leading her to warn women away from her own path, a path that I tend to read as liberated? More on this as it develops.
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