Abstract
This article explores the Freewoman’s relation to culture, as well as its role as a countercultural periodical — one that resisted hegemonic ideas and styles — and in the creation of an emotional (counter)community. It follows Raymond Williams’s understanding of culture as having two senses: one is ‘a whole way of life’ — everyday practices — the other arts and other creative endeavours. The Freewoman was cultivating a view of feminism as a way of life that encompassed both these meanings, as its editor, Dora Marsden, encouraged the expression of both traditional and novel perspectives, working to connect everyday life to a vision of a feminist, perhaps utopian, future. My focus here is on three main ideas of culture and community under Williams’s general framework of ‘culture’: cultural resistance and counterculture, cultural citizenship, and emotional countercommunity. These aspects of the Freewoman were central to its feminist politics, and I offer that attention to emotions and emotional communities can enrich our understanding of periodicals and their political workings.
Highlights
An announcement appearing in the Daily Herald on 6 December 1913 promised that the current issue of the New Freewoman ‘contains a powerful interpretation of the insurrectionist movement’, labelling the journal ‘an intellectual acid’, meant to consume such concepts as ‘Rights, Justice, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and the rest’.1 The metaphor of intellectual acid, suggesting an active, even violent, attack on liberal values, captures something fundamental about the Freewoman, the New Freewoman’s predecessor
My focus here is on three main ideas of culture and community under Williams’s general framework of ‘culture’: cultural resistance and counterculture, cultural citizenship, and emotional countercommunity. These aspects of the Freewoman were central to its feminist politics, and I offer that attention to emotions and emotional communities can enrich our understanding of periodicals and their political workings
What does it mean for a periodical to be part of, or to be, a counterculture? Its content, style, or politics have to resist the mainstream, be it on a specific issue or as a way of being and understanding society more broadly
Summary
In placing itself in opposition to mainstream ideas of the public sphere, the Freewoman can be thought of as what Nancy Fraser has termed a counterpublic; a public existing contemporaneously with the hegemonic public of Habermas’s notion of a public sphere, and challenging it. The question at issue is [...] whether some other movement outside politics, independent of the governing machine, would not provide a surer and a speedier way to full human liberty.’[27] The Freewoman was an appropriate periodical in which to publish this ‘destructive’ criticism, as it distanced itself from formal political aspirations, and espoused a broader view of the political often with an anarchist bent that emphasized associational relationships as the basis for society, even if Billington-Greig here refers to these kinds of associations as external to politics In this sense, the periodical reflects the capacity that Fraser sees in the post-bourgeois public sphere, to ‘envision democratic possibilities beyond the limits of existing democracy’.28. Political shows the paper’s power in providing a space for the envisioning of different political possibilities
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