“I have never met the normal woman”: Stella Browne and the politics of womanhood

Abstract

F. W. Stella Browne (1880–1995) and her views on female sexuality have been much discussed of recent years. These discussions have tended to rely on a limited number of her copious (if often hard-to-find) writings, and have also failed to take into account where Stella, as an individual woman, was coming from. In the light of ongoing researches into her life and career, this article locates her writings in her life of activism in a wide variety of causes. It argues that her opinions about women's needs do not conform to a simplistic model of a ‘New’ feminism of difference, and that her relationship to the thought of contemporary male sexologists has been presented in a one-dimensional and misleading way. Her tripartite commitment to feminism, socialism, and individualism is illustrated, drawing on a wide range of her writings and statements between 1912 and 1937. In her crusade to celebrate and liberate the “variety and variability of women” Stella sought constantly to overthrow concepts of a monolithic female nature as well as to reject the Double Moral Standard: ‘normality’ to her was an instrument for the oppression of women. Consideration is also given to the wider influence of her ideas.