The New Freewoman: No. 1, Vol. 1, June 15th 1913.
by Dora Marsden
This is the epoch of the gadding mind. The mind "not at home" but given to something else, occupied with alien "causes" is of the normal order, and as such must be held accountable for that condemning of the lonely occupant of the home-the Self-which is the characteristic of the common mind. With the lean kind-the antithesis of those "Fat" with whom latterly we have be come so familiarised-the most embarrassing notion is that of the possession of a self having wants. To be selfless is to have attained unto that condition of which leanness is the fitting outcome. Hence, the popularity of the "Cause" which provides the Ideal to which the "desired self-sacrifice can be offered". The greater the sacrifice the Idol can accept the greater is it as a "Cause," whether it be liberty, equality, fraternity, honesty or what not. If ten thousand starving men, with their tens of thousands of dependants, starve in the Cause of Honesty, how great is Honesty. If a woman throws away her life for freedom, how great is freedom. And no mistake.
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The New Freewoman: No. 1, Vol. 1, June 15th 1913.
by Dora Marsden
"The Cause to which I have given my life." This is a message, the last but one of Mrs. Pankhurst. The Cause is the "Vote." With so many shoddy phrases extant we prefer to examine what Mrs. Pankhurst has given in order to secure the privilege of the vote, rather than be put off with the phrase "my life," which may well be rhetorical, as was that of her daughter when she spoke of "doing her bit, for her seven years" and then left the bit and the years to others. Six years ago Mrs. Pankhurst would have said: "I want the vote given to me." Now she has to say "I have given myself to the Cause-the Vote." The alteration in attitude displayed does indeed illustrate what (rhetoric apart) Mrs. Pankhurst has given of herself in this agitation. She has literally abandoned her judgment and her original ambition, which was to be an active participant in state politics. A member of the Labour Party she fell an honest victim to the illusion regarding political power which made Mr. Tom Mann in 1891 say, "When next we strike, we shall strike on the ballot-box," an illusion which increased in intensity until 1905-6 when the attention bestowed on the political side of labour organisation had its effect in the return of a greatly augmented labour party to the House of Commons, and at which time Mrs. Pankhurst's union actually took birth. Its formation was the high tempered response of a capable woman to the snubs and neglects suffered by women in an organization wholly man led. Her ambition for herself was to be of the same order of power, if of better quality-as the Macdonalds, Hardies and Snowdens. For her daughter, having provided her with the legal training so advantageous to political guile, her ambitions were boundless. She was to be given the choice of office, Prime Minister or Lord Chancellor, and either position she would have adorned. A legitimate ambition founded on a legitimate basis-the Vote. Therefore "I want the vote" six years ago. And now? The first wild passion of women's insistence spent; the effective mouthpieces and actionists fallen out from her ranks; herself in the process of rapidly advancing invalidism, alternating between prison and nursing home, her mouth effectually closed; her daughter settled as a quiet pamphleteering suffragist abroad; and the vote? In the dim and speculative future! What has happened? She has pinioned herself with words-words-words, and these, not her own. She ventured into the maze of the symbolists, whose vulturous progeny-the empty concepts-got her! She began to "lead a Cause," and imperceptibly the Cause became Leader-leading where all causes tend-to self-annihilation. Mrs. Pankhurst may die and great is the Cause. What Cause? The Cause of the empty concept-the fount of all insincerity: the Cause of the Symbol-the Nothing worked upon by the Dithyramb.
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For fear of being guilty of supporting the power of another "empty concept" we hasten to add that the term "Woman Movement" is one which deserves to go the way of all such- freedom, liberty and the rest- to destruction. Accurately speaking, there is no "Woman Movement." "Woman" is doing nothing- she has indeed, no existence. A very limited number of individual women are emphasising the fact that the first thing to be taken into account with regard to them is that they are individuals and can not be lumped together into a class, a sex, or a "movement." They- this small number- regard themselves neither as wives, mothers, spinsters, women, nor men. They are themselves, each cut off from and differing from the rest. What each is and what each requires she proposes to find by looking into her own wants- not "class" or "race" wants- which explains her repudiation of "descriptions by function." If primarily women are to regard themselves as Woman or as the Mother, their satisfactions as individuals would be subordinated to an external authority: the requirements of the development of Woman or Mother as such- Empty concepts again. "Woman as such" and "mother as type" has no reality: the subordination of the individual to the Interest (another word for Cause) of motherhood, or the "Interest of the Race" is the old trick, subjugating the real to the unreal. A woman as a mother, takes on the accidental "mother characteristic" merely by the way, wholly for her own satisfaction. She is so because she wants, not be cause of any wants of the community, the State, the Race, or any other faked-up authority. The centre of the Universe lies in the desire of the individual, and the Universe for the individual has no meaning apart from their individual satisfactions, a means to an end. The few individual women before mentioned maintain that their only fitting description is that of Individual: Ends-in-themselves. They are Egoists. They are Autocrats, and government in their autocracy is vested in the Self which holds the reins in the kingdom of varying wants and desires, and which defines the resultant of these different forces as the Satisfaction of Itself. The intensive satisfaction of Self is for the individual the one goal in life.
The New Freewoman: No. 2, Vol. 1, July 1st 1913.
by Dora Marsden
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"Woman Movement" forsooth. Why does not someone start a "straight-nose movement," or a "mole movement," or any other movement based upon some accidental physical contouration ? They would be as sensible as we who have run a "Skirts movement" which is the essential meaning of "woman movement. " Woman - Is there such a thing even as a woman sensed from the inside? If so, we have got to learn what it is. Never in the course of a long life have we felt "There, I feel that as a woman." Always things have been felt as individual and unique, as much related to other women as to other men-which is none at all; every thing has been sensed as of Ourself, of which the gender has yet to be learnt: the gender of the self we have yet to learn. For us it has no community with women: nor has it with men. It is solitary and unique.
Do we then repudiate sex, one asks? Again the questioner confuses the accidental outer with a real inner. Inner feeling, attracted impulse, occasionally enters the sphere of sex. But in itself feeling is sexless. It is not necessary to repudiate feeling or to harbour it; we can please ourselves regarding it. On the other hand the physical differences which are all which exist of sex, obviously are not exactly in our province either to repudiate or to acquire. If men and women would try to turn their attention away from the infinitesimally small differences which distinguish them, as handsome people have to turn their attention away from their good looks, we should soon have heard the last of Man and Woman spelt with capitals, and the day of the individual would be at hand. And the measure of the individual would be not sex, but individual power.
Our reference to the Race and the Individual, has raised an old controversy which could, in our opinion be laid at one stroke, by denying the validity of the concept: "Race." It can be effectually maintained that the "Race" concept is made up as we make up the concept Eternity for instance, by adding together chunks of time-lengths placed end by end, until we are tired; then making pretence of totalling the additions, calling the total Eternity and placing this over against Time as an opposition. The Race is the concept formed by adding one individual to another, carrying on the process to boredom, slurring the finish, and dabbing on a label. Thus is the Race formed and placed in opposition to that which composes it: i.e., Individuals, as Eternity opposes its sole substance-Time. Our answer then is that the " Race " is empty when that which it opposes is taken from it. It is Nothing apart from the individual. The word should be abolished and a periphrasis put in its place. But granting to the opposition for the moment, that "Race" may have a reason for existing-that what it connotes is a reality as yet uncovered by other and concrete labels, we can still state our attitude towards pretensions advanced in its name. If it is a reality, and has anything to give, we will accept it, but without any corresponding reciprocity. We have nothing to give to it. It is welcome however to our leavings when we are dead; old thoughts for instance, old systems, and any other cramping vestments made only to our measure we may leave behind. (Such things as these are we believe the only bequests of the race which the race-cultists have to show.)
While we are alive however, we are too much engrossed with our own performance to be prepared to sacrifice to the Future. Moreover we believe that the individuals of the future, if they are worth anything at all, will be as well able to look after themselves, as we are to look after ourselves. In short there may be glorious and radiant individuals in the dim future as there have been in the past: but they are no concern of ours. Our joy is not in them: their beauty is not ours. We can adapt George Wither's lines and say of the future with truth,
" If it be not such for me,
What care I how good it be?"
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