The New Freewoman, August 1 1913

This issue of The New Freewoman is particularly interesting.  The best part is their long and detailed response to the suffragism crisis, including a direct response to Orage and Hastings of The New Age.  With typical hardheaded materialism, Marsden frames everything as a problem of an inequality of power, based in an unequal distribution of property.  The argument runs thus: individuals seek power over their own lives, which is only possible if they have property.  The only way to acquire property is to get if from someone who has it.  Because women have no property, their only option is to sell themselves (echoing an earlier argument) into marriage for security and property (ultimately power).  Because most men are poor, they must sell their labor for the same reasons.  The trouble with liberating women in an unequal society is, that women will not command the high price they used to command (this is Hastings's argument, see last New Age).  The market will tank, so to speak.  If women enter the labor force, they will in turn hurt the labor market and drive down the cost of labor, which will make it harder for working men to support families.  That's the diagnosis from The New Freewoman.  The solution is for people to become aware of their value in the market: "When power becomes more self-conscious, it will make it clear that while dignity and freedom are myths, power is a reality and that it comes from within" (64). I also came across this line, which I know I've heard quoted partially before, perhaps in de Beauvoir?:

"Men had the hunger : the womanly woman was the loaf. So that whereas men had a sex, women were the sex, which regarded as a "commodity," she sold in the best market."

Rebecca West outdoes herself with an excellent short story, "At Valladolid."  It has many disturbing moments, but I am beginning to believe that her contributions to The New Freewoman aren't as autobiographical as I had thought.  Angsty, dark stuff. 

Author "F.R.A.I.," a regular contributor, writes a feminist interpretation of Frazer's Golden Bough, which means that I've encountered both texts that inspired The Waste Land within a month of each other. 

Ananda Coomarswami has been appearing occasionally in many publications: here Huntley Carter gives him a thrashing for introducing sexist Indian holy texts to the misunderstanding West.  Good for contrast, because everyone else seems to like him: he worked on a special supplement to The New Age.  I'll be on the lookout for more about him. 

Plenty of food for thought.  I'm excited to see what the response is...