‘Philosophical vacuity and political ineptitude’: the freewoman's critique of the suffrage movement 1

Abstract

The Freewoman has commonly been read as an example of New Woman periodical publishing, through its focus on women's sexuality and autonomy from men. The journal appears to offer a more daring, twentieth-century and modern ‘new woman’, more willing than even her 1890s counterpart to embrace free unions or sexual experimentation. The Freewoman's extraordinary discussions of sexuality have tended to distract historians' attention from other elements of the debates it engendered. In particular, the political argument found within its pages has received insufficient attention; the journal tends to be misread as a socialist publication. Placing the journal as part of the New Woman narrative lends itself to an alternative view of the political subject of The Freewoman; the New Woman focus on individuality, autonomy and creative genius plays an important part in the distinctive political debates found within the journal. Although the suffrage struggle dominated Edwardian feminist activism, many Freewoman contributors rejected the vote entirely. In aperiod when new liberal or Fabian conceptions of an increasingly interventionist state appeared to sit comfortably with feminist demands for a more inclusive and socially responsible state, The Freewoman took an anti-statist stance. Rejecting the common suffragist metaphor of the state as the home writ large, Freewoman contributors saw the state as machine-like. The author explores the motivations for these positions, and the development of an individualist-feminist, or even egoist stance. Specifically, she outlines contributors' rejection of militant suffrage activism, and their contestation of the citizen as a rights-holding and consenting political subject, and maps the alternative political structures suggested within The Freewoman, and the manner in which concepts of individuality found within New Woman discourse served to construct a disturbingly elitist and even coercive feminist politics.