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The Spirit of Unrest

Posted on November 17, 1911 by Emily Davison Posted in Letters

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.

The Standard
« Militant Woman Suffragists
November 19, 1911 To the Editor of The Sunday Times and November 26, 1911, To the Editor of The Sunday Times »

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Available now from the University of Michigan Press:

In the Thick of the Fight: the Writing of Emily Wilding Davison, Militant Suffragette, by Carolyn Collette.

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