The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

THE DECLINE OF MILITANT FEMINISM
feminism and the Labour party, and the way in which a new
kind of feminism was developing. Meikle proposed that feminists
should work for the following reforms: ‘socialism, school clinics,
schools for mothers, and the endowment of motherhood.’ 6
It seems that, at this time, some socialist women saw
themselves as feminists simply because they were women
operating with a new and unaccustomed independence in the
field of social work. They did not see feminism as requiring a
struggle for equality with men or as being in any way threatening
or challenging to men’s behaviour or to the advantages that
men had gained at women’s expense. A challenging form of
feminism in which women’s interests could be seen as conflicting
with those of men would have been hard to sustain for women
involved in a mixed-sex labour movement in which all were
supposed to be united and working for a common goal. A
reaction to this constraint was to adopt welfare goals in the
place of feminism and to represent them as one and the same.
In the mid-1920s pre-war militant feminism was not in
evidence, but there were two distinct varieties of feminism whose
proponents engaged in a debate. There were those like Lady
Rhondda, who wanted feminism to be about equal rights, and
others who wanted a ‘new feminism’ which would be concerned
with women’s special, meaning biological, needs. Eleanor Rathbone
is the most notable example of those who promoted the
‘new feminism’. Rathbone’s career, as described in Mary Stocks’s
biography, shows that she was the perfect ‘type’ of welfare
feminist. 7 Her first experience of social and political work was
in the Victoria Women’s Settlement in Everton, a working-class
neighbourhood of Liverpool, in the 1890s. In settlement houses
university-educated young women and men lived among the
working classes and engaged in social missionary work. From
1904 Rathbone was honorary secretary of the Women’s
Settlement. At the same time she did much unpaid social work
in Liverpool, writing in 1909 an article about the living
conditions of a casual labourer. Rathbone’s ideas were beginning
to move towards the cause for which she is most remembered,
the endowment of motherhood, by 1913, when she was on
Liverpool Women’s Industrial Council and writing about the
condition of widows under the Poor Law. She proposed that
widowed mothers of young children should receive state-aided
pensions, on the grounds that their labour in looking after
children was as valuable to the state as the paid work of any
man. In making this argument she showed the trait which was
151