The Freewoman was an English feminist weekly review published between 23 November 1911 and 10 October 1912, and edited by founder Dora Marsden and Mary Gawthorpe.
[1] Although The Freewoman published articles on women's work for wages, housework, motherhood, the suffrage movement, and literature, its notoriety and influence rested on its frank discussions of sexuality, morality, and marriage.
The Freewoman urged tolerance for male homosexuality,[2] advocated for free love, and encouraged women to remain unmarried.
In June 1913 Marsden started The New Freewoman, which was concerned more with literary modernism than feminism and was funded by Harriet Shaw Weaver.
[6] According to many of the female readers, The Freewoman expressed beliefs more radical than those held by most feminists during the early twentieth century.
However, with the job opportunities and improved possibility of economic and social independence from the years preceding and during the Great War, some women forged identities separate from the confines of marriage.
Marsden's rather liberal and forward thinking opinion on the definition of feminism is what caused future debates amongst other prominent feminists of the time.
[12] The paper also suggested the idea of communal cooking, saying that if the man and woman divided the household duties, women could work outside of domestic life.
Its aims are the same: the means of production and exchange to be the property of the community as a whole, but under Syndicalism the control of conditions of work are to be in the hands of those who perform it.
With the paper's belief that feminism was more than just the right to vote, its views on the suffrage movement were unlike most feminists in Britain during the twentieth century.
The paper, but more specifically Dora Marsden's beliefs and opinions were far too liberal and progressive for its early twentieth century audience.
Despite having an extremely small circulation, the paper's strong beliefs and opinions were widely known and debated against and provided the impetus for future feminist activists.