Cicely Hamilton, Independent Feminist

Abstract

tunity equal to any man's to succeed in her endeavors, and would not condone injustice against her. Hamilton's creative writing for the women's cause was a valuable, timely contribution to the growth of women's rights because of its command of female situations. However, like her polemical works it reveals that she picked and chose among the currents of her day and-perhaps unawares-was impelled by others. Given her feminist perspective, her novels and plays indeed are curiously disappointing in their resolutions of the situations they capture so well. Her imaginative work therefore gains added interest today as a demonstration of how difficult it may be for even the staunchest of would-be rebels to violate the aesthetic canons of her own day and her own social conditioning. Hamilton came by her feminist sympathies almost inevitably, through experiences of discrimination. The daughter of a struggling army officer, she was a late Victorian new who never married and always supported herself once she was grown. In the 1890s, she abandoned an uncongenial career in teaching (and her family name, Hammill) for some ten years of acting on the provincial stage and on the prewar London stage. She also became a playwright (twenty plays), a journalist, and a novelist during the course of her professional career. As her autobiography recalls, being an actress taught her that the average woman in the theater not only earned less than her male counterpart, but had to bear heavier expenses. On tour her costumes, unlike his, were not neces