chosen which had in it some
suggestion of the heroic. Hence The Freewoman.

The Freewoman was a weekly. It lived several months and then suspended
publication, and now all the women I know are poring over the back
numbers while waiting for it to start again as a fortnightly. It was a
remarkable paper. For one thing, it threw open its columns to such a
discussion of sex that dear Mrs. Humphry Ward wrote a shocked letter to
The Times about it. Of course, a good many of the ideas put forth in
this correspondence were erroneous or trivial, but it must have done the
writers no end of good to express themselves freely. For once sex was on
a plane with other subjects, a fact making tremendously for sanity. In
this Miss Marsden not only achieved a creditable journalistic feat, but
performed a valuable public service.

Her editorials were another distinctive thing. In the first issue was
an editorial on "Bondwomen," from which it would appear that perhaps
even such advanced persons as you, my dear lady, are still far from
free.

"Bondwomen are distinguished from Freewomen by a spiritual distinction.
Bondwomen are the women who are not separate spiritual entities--who are
not individuals. They are complements merely. By habit of thought, by
form of activity, and largely by preference, they round off the
personality of some other individual, rather than create or cultivate
their own. Most women, as far back as we have any record, have fitted
into this conception, and it has borne itself out in instinctive working
practice.

"And in the midst of all this there comes a cry that woman is an
individual, and that because she is an individual she must be set free.
It would be nearer the truth to say that if she is an individual she
_is_ free, and will act like those who are free. The doubtful aspect in
the situation is as to whether women are or can be individuals--that is,
free--and whether there is not danger, under the circumstances, in
labelling them free, thus giving them the liberty of action which is
allowed to the free. It is this doubt and fear which is behind the
opposition which is being offered the vanguard of those who are 'asking
for' freedom. It is the kind of fear which an engineer would have in
guaranteeing an arch equal to a strain above its strength. The opponents
of the Freewomen are not actuated by spleen or by stupidity, but by
dread. This dread is founded upon ages of experience with a being who,
however wel