.

It will be like the pulling down of a rotten tenement. First (with a
great shocked outcry from some persons of my own sex) the facade goes,
looking nice enough, but showing up for painted tin what pretended to be
marble; then the dark, cavelike rooms exposed, with their blood-stained
floors and their walls ineffectually papered over the accumulated filth
and disease; and so on, lath by lath, down to the cellars, with their
hints of unspeakable horrors in the dark.

It is to this conclusion that these chapters draw: That women have a
surer instinct than men for the preservation of the truest human values,
but that their very acts of conservation will seem to the timid minds
among us like the shattering of all virtues, the debacle of
civilization, the Goetterdaemmerung!

CHAPTER VIII

FREEWOMEN AND DORA MARSDEN

This is by way of a postscript. Dora Marsden is a new figure in the
feminist movement. Just how she evolved is rather hard to say. Her
family were Radicals, it seems, smug British radicals; and she broke
away, first of all, into a sort of middle class socialism. She went into
settlement work. Here, it seems, she discovered what sort of person she
really was.

She was a lover of freedom. So of course she rebelled against the
interference of the middle class with the affairs of the poor, and threw
overboard her settlement work and her socialism together. She was a
believer in woman suffrage, but the autocratic government of the
organization irked her. And, besides, she felt constrained to point out
that feminism meant worlds more than a mere vote. The position of woman,
not indeed as the slave of man, but as the enslaver of man, but with the
other end of the chain fastened to her own wrist, and depriving her
quite effectually of her liberties--this irritated her. Independence to
her meant achievement, and when she heard the talk about "motherhood"
by which the women she knew excused their lack of achievement, she
was annoyed. Finally, the taboo upon the important subject of sex
exasperated her. So she started a journal to express her discontent with
all these things, and to change them.

Naturally, she called her journal The Freewoman. "Independent"
expresses much of Dora Marsden's feeling, but that word has been of late
dragged in a mire of pettiness and needs dry cleaning. It has come to
signify a woman who isn't afraid to go out at night alone or who holds a
position downtown. A word had to be