November 17, 1911, To the Editor of The Standard, “The Spirit of Unrest”
Davison likely knew of Marjorie Bowen (1885-1952) because of the spectacular success
of her novel The Viper of Milan (1906), first of a series of 150 books of history, historical
romance, gothic horror, and biography she wrote over the course of her life, under a
variety of pseudonyms. Between The Viper of Milan and the date of Davison’s letter, Bowen
published six subsequent novels, all popular successes. She was hailed as a young genius,
her youth somewhat exaggerated by the publisher of The Viper of Milan who advertised
that she was born in 1888. Ironically, according to Amanda Salmonson’s online biography
(http://www.violetbooks.com/bowen.html), Bowen’s own life had been much more limited,
unhappy and restricted than the brave assertions Davison takes exception to would lead
one to believe. It’s conceivable that in the heady years of her early success that Bowen did
feel that women could achieve great things on their own talent, but it is also true that her
income from her writing was not hers to keep or spend, but rather placed under her mother’s
control and seemingly dispersed as soon as it was earned. According to Salmonson, she fled to
Paris, seeking independence and liberty, but eventually gave in to her mother’s importuning
and returned to London. In 1912 she married Zefferino Constanza, and Italian engineer, and
went to live in Italy, away from her family. Davison rejects Bowen’s opinion that women
can achieve the independent success they desire, calling attention to the masses of women
for whom financial success is beyond their grasp. She cites women working in sweat shop
conditions of employment, and the unknown number of women subjected to sexual slavery
in what was termed the white slave traffic in which women were reduced to a sub-human
status, entirely defined by their sex. Affirming her conviction that progress and evolution
must win the day, she identifies “the spirit of the age” as the means by which all women will
claim full humanity and autonomy.
Sir, — The contribution of Miss Marjorie Bowen to ‘Women’s Platform’ headed ‘The Spirit of
Unrest’ will do more to win converts to the Suffrage cause than many an eloquent defence
of it. This young girl of genius who has leapt suddenly into unexpected fame is clearly
a ‘darling of the gods’; but still, no one could have foreseen that she could conclude her
article with such an entirely selfish note as that struck by the words: ‘A gifted woman can
now, without touching even the fringe of masculine activities foreign to her nature, exercise
an influence and achieve a fame equal to the utmost that the demand for freedom could
wring from a weakening race of men in any lamentable future.’ Because Miss Marjorie
Bowen and Mrs. Humphry Ward have been so lucky as to achieve this result, are they
to tell the thousands of slaves of sweating and the white slave traffic that women ‘are
as free as they are ever likely to be under any conditions of affairs’? Such a statement
is a hideously selfish mockery. What Miss Bowen has failed to grasp is that the spirit
manifested among women is the spirit of the age, which no longer allows us to be poor
dumb brutish things, but human beings with a voice, a will, a soul, an intellect.
EMILY WILDING DAVISON
31, Great Coram-street, W.C.