IN DEFENSE OF FEMINISM

...Dangerous, because although she swears she is retired, she proclaims her farewell to feminism in articles instead of in the unpaid letter columns...

...This is one more of a spate of articles appearing in the popular magazines denouncing women, feminism, and the woman's movement...

...Maladjusted...

...He was the pillar of strength of the suffrage cause in and out of Parliament...

...Less than a third of American women over 14 are gainfully employed, and many of these think they are only transients in the labor market, to be rescued by marriage...

...I regret to see that this theme has now pushed its way into your columns and in the same issue is even kicked around carelessly by Stuart Chase...

...It is not yet clear whether in the United States this is a lucrative fad or part of the world-wide reactionary wave set in motion by World War I. This much is clear—that so far every modern dictatorship has proceeded to destroy the hard-won rights of women along with the much more publicized repression of religious and political minorities...

...Of course, they would not suit her argument for both were happily married to feminist husbands and performed biologically with the frequency current in their time...

...They are too busy to read Barth and much too busy to contradict her...

...I am proud that in our otherwise gory and destructive age, to women belongs this superlative achievement in patience, perseverance, and self-restraint...

...Out of every 100 such women, 78 declared they worked because they had to and only 22 worked because they liked work-ing or being financially independent...

...During World War II, almost half of these 17 million working women were married...

...With the chances of a woman having to earn her own living increasing rather than decreasing, it stands to reason that the better she is trained to be self-supporting, the better her chances in the labor market...

...It may take the young husband who has wrestled with household chores, or an imaginative, public-spirited building tycoon...

...Both require talent, temperament, stamina...

...There was William T. Stead, the famous editor, who even went to prison to expose the white slave traffic...

...And then they will hang out that really revolutionary sign: WORKING PARENTS WITH SMALL CHILDREN WELCOME...

...Lecturing and writing represented Ramona Barth's career...

...Of these, Susan B. Anthony is the only one associated with the organized woman's movement...

...I am grateful to the pioneers of dress reform that I can wear comfortable, hygienic, functional clothing that is both healthful and beautiful...

...They probably never thought about it at all and would probably deny the charge, although in practice they are feminists performing both biologically as women and productively as human beings...

...For one thing, their husbands, not being ministers, or even pacifists, are draftable or possibly already dead...

...Mrs...

...It was their sudden discovery that because they were women they were hampered in freeing others that they were shocked into doing some liberating on their own account...

...I am grateful to the suffragists for having achieved the unique political miracle of liberating half the human race without shedding a drop of blood or destroying a foot of property...

...I shall never forget how young and alive they were in spirit...

...As she also tends to outlive her husband, she may well have to choose between working after his death or subsisting on relief of some kind...

...Catt survived two feminist husbands, but had no children from either...

...Both writing and lecturing have a high fatigue potential, and living with a writer or lecturer, irrespective of sex, is usually pretty rugged for the rest of the family...

...In the good old days—even in much of 18th Century Europe —many a learned thesis was written on the evils of teaching girls to read and write...

...Some were beautiful or handsome even in old age...

...But one of these days, if the women don't do it, the men will discover that the individual kitchen, gadgets and all, is no more essential than the individual pot-bellied stove—and they are going to abolish it...

...She is dangerous because she is as likely to try and make a living out of being a renegade as she once tried to make feminism pay off...

...They revive all the pet cliches of the earliest anti-suffragists and anti-feminists, now refurbished with the authority of the psychoanalyst quack...

...She is the world's oldest practicing feminist...

...There were innumerable facets to their personalities, and like the character actresses of old, they pulled out whatever part did the most good...

...Yes, the load of breadwinner, mother, and houseworker is too heavy and too much...

...They need free day nurseries, low-cost household service...

...Now the working woman will have to solve the problem for herself...

...Barth and her kind, with their irresponsibly publicized farewells, may help shut the doors to higher education, vocational training, and adequately paid employment to those "benighted, defeminized" girls and women who either have no talent for "hot buttered, crusty bread" or who must earn the filthy lucre with which to buy the ingredients, pay the rent, gas, and electricity before their cooking and baking can evoke that approving light in father's or husband's eye...

...Are they feminists...

...She skips the fact that almost half a century passed before Wool-stonecraft's Vindication of the Rights Ramona Barth's "Farewell to Feminism" in the April Progressive provoked the most heated controversy and the greatest outpouring of mail in our recent history...

...Probably, but I know none personally...

...Strange, too, that Mrs...

...I am sure the Ramona Barths do not speak for them or about them...

...I am engaged in research for a book on The Life and Times of Rosika Schwimmer, the last of the feminist immortals, so that I have not only gone over the American woman's movement but have also dug into the international one from the Atlantic to the Balkans...

...And the feminists long ago deduced this basic lesson from the facts of the Industrial Revolution...

...The Anthonys and Stantons, the John Stuart Mills and Keir Hardies did not slave away a lifetime at freeing women in order to force every woman into a career...

...I have not only read about these "vicious, perverted" creatures, I have also read their letters in Rosika Schwim-mer's archives...

...IV Surely no one will try to stop Ramona Barth's retirement...

...some were wrinkled and bent...

...Barth's daughter to plan flaky piecrusts for her future husband...

...All about me I see many of these inarticulate feminists...

...For the working woman has a real problem which the feminists knew all about and were about to solve when World War I came along and forgot to go away...

...Widows and orphans will again be produced en masse and many a little woman will find herself leading three lives simultaneously, instead of one...

...What of H. N. Brailsford (still alive), who with Henry Nevin-son resigned from the London Daily News because of its unfair attitude to suffrage...

...And over half of these married ones planned to continue working after the war...

...These articles are all more or less of one stripe, written with crackling crispness and total superficiality...

...The others are about as representative of that world-wide ferment of women as Mesdames DuBarry and Pompadour would be of the now-glorified pre-revolution-ary period...

...Of the Europeans, Marianne Hainisch (mother of Austria's first president), Klara Honegger of Switzerland, Helene Stoecker of Germany...

...What worries me is that Mrs...

...ulating to boys as well as girls without having made the slightest effort at being pontifical...

...III Thus, the great majority of women who have to combine marriage with breadwinning outside the home, work for a salary for the same reason that most men do—not because it makes them happy, but because they have to...

...Miss Wynner has been active as an organizer and speak' er on world government...

...Despite their age they met me on my own ground and at my own level...

...They were at once the fiery reformers, the cautious diplomats (of the old school), the irresistible charmers, and the uncompromising fighters...

...either because they were the sole support of their families or because without their earnings the household could not have been maintained...

...But it may well happen that Anna Rosenberg will take that future husband and not give him back, and daughter Barth will have to bake pies for a much larger clientele than she intended, and get paid in cold cash and not merely with approving looks...

...With the saving from the abolished kitchens, they are going to build nurseries, kindergartens and play space right on the premises and staff them with trained people...

...It may take a little longer to complete the woman's revolution...

...I am grateful to the Drysdales (mother, son, and daughter-in-law), the Sangers and the Dennetts, pioneers of the birth control movement, that it is possible for women in many countries to plan their families and space their babies...

...I, for one, am grateful to the pioneer feminists and suffragists...

...All these women are too busy and most of them too poor to lie on the psychoanalyst's couch...

...hence our pleasure in presenting this article by Miss Wynner, followed, on Page 23, by a brief rejoinder by Mrs...

...Most of them had fulfilled their biological role and were mothers and grandmothers...

...Each one bore and bred her successor in the movement: Alice Stone Black-well and Harriot Stanton Blatch...

...Barth's article is not only destructive but completely irrelevant in a time when the world is rushing again into war, when the American military pick Anna Rosenberg to be the Judas cow leading 18-year-olds to organized mass murder, and when more women than ever will be driven by high prices or drafted by government into the labor market...

...Chapman and Catt...

...Barth's rejoinder, "A Fond Farewell," follows Miss Wynner's article...

...Lecturing also involves prolonged absence from home and suit-case living...

...And what of the unforgettable Keir Hardie, George Lansbury, Sir John Cockburn, Lord Lytton, Laurence Housman, and a host of others in all countries who gave unstintingly of time and devotion and who braved ridicule and even prison...

...Moreover, I had the privilege of meeting and talking with some of these organizing geniuses in their seventies, eighties, and nineties...

...There was John Stuart Mill whose essay on "The Subjection of Woman" ranks alongside his immortal works "On Liberty" and "Representative Government...

...Ramona Barth does not know it, but what she is revolting against is not feminism but the unfinished state of the woman's revolution...

...It is much more likely than not that the average girl born from here on will be gainfully employed before, during, or after her marriage...

...The demand for an articulate exposition of the other side was overwhelming...

...Obviously, to hear Ramona Barth tell it, they too were demented and perverted...

...I see the peasant woman working in the field beside her husband, her baby lying in the shadow of a bush so that she can nurse it whenever it cries...

...To put it into the cliches of the cosmetic ads: they had personality and glamour beyond the capacity of any Helena Rubenstein to compound...

...And no one will force her daughter into college where she may jeopardize her superlative talent for producing "hot buttered, crusty bread...

...II And it is unfair to speak of the woman suffragists and feminists without recalling the men...

...In terms of the total population, the percentage of those engaged in these tensely creative fields is extremely small...

...They were inspiring and stimEDITH WYNNER is co-author, with Georgia Lloyd, of "Searchlight on Peace Plans: Choose Your Road to World Government," a thor-ough study oi peace proposals originally published in 1944 and revised in 1949...

...Perverted...

...Others remained single...

...Yes, I am grateful to the feminists and suffragists, men and women...

...Rubbish...

...V It is all very well for Mrs...

...They worked in order that those women who wanted to—and the even greater number who had to—should have the right to use their brains as well as their ovaries...

...and concentration...

...Yet if anyone ought to have come down with a "masculine protest," it was surely Elizabeth Cady whose father embittered her childhood with reproaches for not being a boy...

...Hers is not a unique case in the history of reform...

...I marveled and still marvel at their wonderful and inexhaustible capacity for indignation and enthusiasm...

...For these "mad" creatures overflowing with "masculine protest" could never have won their victories without the help of men who either preceded them in feminism or were converted by the justness of their case...

...There was Condorcet among the French Encyclopedists who probably influenced Wollstonecraft...

...Barth does not mention Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone Blackwell, both of them raving feminists, among her maladjusted personalities...

...In short, all the comforts of a first class hotel at prices they can afford...

...But Mrs...

...With Rosika Schwimmer of Hungary and the world, I worked at very close quarters for 15 years...

...of Women was rediscovered by the woman's movement, just getting organized...

...Among those I met were Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Stone Black-well, Harriot Stanton Blatch, Kath-erine Devereux Blake, Alice Park, Margaret Sanger...

...These good ladies were over their ears in anti-slavery work...

...She interrupt' ed her biographical research work on the life and times of Rosika Schwimmer, with whom she worked, to write this reply to Ramona Barth's article, "Farewell to Feminism," in the April issue...

...If she hasn't the imagination, the perseverance, and the organizing ability to do it, it may take the men to finish the woman's revolution...

...They are going to build cooperative housing with one big central kitchen, buying, cooking, serving, and dish-washing for each family in the building at non-profit cost...

...The Ramona Barths do their best to foster this illusion despite the irrefutable statistical fact, available from the Women's Bureau, that the number of working women has been increasing steadily from two million in 1870 to 17 million in 1949...

...After all, Mussolini was a socialist before he founded fascism...

...After all, the majority of American women are still housewives and nothing else...

...Barth's personal solution of retiring from breadwinning and letting her husband support the seven of them is not applicable to millions of working mothers...

...Yet going entirely on her own limited experience in an extremely unrepresentative field, Ramona Barth makes sweeping generalizations about the approximately 17 million American "career" women who forego the delights of exclusive devotion to unpaid housework in order to support themselves and their dependents...

...Ramona Barth picks out Margaret Fuller, Susan B. Anthony, Mary Wollstonecraft, and George Sand as the perverts who foisted feminism on Americans and proves to her own satisfaction that they were neurotic, maladjusted personalities, the embodiment of "masculine protest...

...Are there "maniac, driving" women among them of the Barth variety...

...VI Ramona Barth's irresponsible, half-baked, hysterical ranting is dangerous...

...Ramona Barth, trying to combine five children and a career on a low income, without household help, wants to restrict women again exclusively to child, kitchen, and church...

...The fortunate few who have a real talent and genuine creative pleasure in the work that they do may be said to have careers...

...And henceforth every morning I shall remind myself of the freedoms they won for me and my generation to make up for the ingratitude and slanders of the Ramona Barths who, consciously or unconsciously, seek to destroy these hard-won achievements...

...There were, of all people, those dreadful Marxists, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and August Bebel...

...They were warm and sympathetic and tirelessly interested in other people's problems...

...All were womanly in the highest meaning of • the word for one no longer thought i of them merely as women but as human beings at their finest...

...Dignified as queens, yet essentially humble as is all true greatness...

...Husband and wife working harmoniously in the same profession and often in the same office...

...Why she did not, I think is properly the business of Carrie and Messrs...

...I see the dentist, doctor, and lawyer couples...

...They were alert, interested in everything, and exceedingly well-informed...

...I see the small businesses all over the city: the butcher shops, green-grocers, dress shops, and variety stores, often with husband and wife working together, often the woman alone...

...I see the hundreds of thousands of married teachers all over the world, raising their own and other people's children...

...I am grateful to Josephine Butler and the abolitionist crusaders that it is possible in most countries for a woman to walk alone in the evening without being dragged to a police station on the charge of engaging in unlicensed prostitution...

...I am grateful that they placed in my hands the suffrage key with which to unlock the doors to further freedoms which they no longer had time to win for us...

...They were brilliant and modest...

...It was sure to destroy their femininity and at the same time make them easier victims of seduction...

...I am grateful to Emma Willard for breaking a trail in the education of women...

...It was not Wollstonecraft but the pompous abolitionist gentlemen at that 1840 Anti-Slavery Convention in London who exiled the American lady delegates to the curtained balcony who are to blame for Ramona Barth's growing pains of emancipation...

...If her marriage ends in divorce or her husband's death, she will have to go back to work unless she can live off alimony or insurance...

...These women need practical help, not defeatism...

...What was it about these women that made them different from all the other old women of their time to me, a teen-ager...

...Who can repay F. W. Pethick-Lawrence, who with his wife sacrificed a fortune for the suffrage cause...