The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

THE DECLINE OF MILITANT FEMINISM
biological motherhood, and submerged all the interests of all
women into the glorification of reproduction. In her exposition
of the ‘new feminism’ in a 1925 speech to NUSEC, reprinted in
the journal the Woman’s Leader which she edited, she
characterised the ‘old feminism’ as the pursuit of legal equality
and equal pay. Rathbone was scathing about this sort of
feminism and called for it to be abandoned on the grounds that
it would be difficult to achieve and likely to enrage various
bodies of men in the process.
This defeatism symbolises the failure of feminist energy in
the 1920s when Rathbone could call for the abondonment of
feminist aims simply because they were unpopular and difficult
to achieve. The Woman’s Leader became the mouthpiece for
the ideas of Rathbone’s ‘new feminism’ whose concerns were
outlined in a policy statement later in 1925. The article attacked
a definition of feminism offered by the novelist Rose Macauley
which was that feminism represented ‘attempts by women to
possess privileges (political, professional, economic or other)
which have previously been denied to them on account of their
sex’. 12 The aims of ‘new feminism’ were to be as follows: ‘that
the whole structure and movement of society shall reflect in a
proportionate degree their experiences, their needs, and their
aspirations.’ Rathbone called this a ‘wider conception of
feminism’. At first sight it might seem so. In fact Rathbone’s
idea of women’s needs and aspirations was limited to what she
saw as the dictates of their biology. She wanted women to ‘fulfil
the potentials of their own natures’ in the way that Havelock
Ellis and the other sexologists had declared to be appropriate,
in motherhood. Rathbone’s belief in this separate sphere for
women led her to concentrate on bettering the conditions of
motherhood and gaining more respect and reward for
motherhood as an occupation:
we demand that this particular occupation shall focus the
same measure of social attention and respect as any large
and nationally important occupation in which men are
engaged…. We demand that the economic basis of
motherhood shall be the kind of economic basis that men
would regard as acceptable for any occupation in which
they themselves were engaged. 13
There was opposition to the ‘new feminism’ from feminists who
were not prepared to renounce the idea of equality with men.
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