Women as World Builders.
An Early Popularization Of The Feminist Movement
[Labor]. Dell, Floyd. Women As World Builders: Studies in Modern Feminism. Chicago: Forbes and Company, 1913.
Small 8vo., olive green cloth, stamped in gilt and blind; a fine, fresh copy.
First edition of Dell’s first book; number of copies unknown. Contains sympathetic discussions (from a “masculine viewpoint”) of leading American feminists during the early years of this century. Dell describes writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman as “The most intransigent feminist of them all,” the one “most exclusively concerned with the improvement of the lot of women, the least likely to compromise at the instance of man, child, church, state, or devil.” Social activist Jane Addams, who founded the famous “settlement houses” in Chicago during the 1880s, had the “gift of imaginative sympathy... She sees both sides; and even though one side is the wrong side, she cannot help seeing why its partisans believe in it.” Isadora Duncan, the renowned modern dancer, championed the “development of the female sex to beauty and health” and in her choreography demonstrated “the original strength and the natural movements of woman’s body.” Emma Goldman was an “advocate for freedom,” especially from the tyranny of convention and fear of public condemnation. But in Dell’s estimation Goldman was not so effective a writer for women as Dora Marsden, editor of the radical journal The Freewoman. Her goal was to inspire confidence in women: “She nerves them to the effort of emancipation.”
A member of the Chicago School, Dell gained recognition as both novelist and playwright. He lived for a time in New York where he was a familiar figure in Greenwich Village, active as a advocate for various liberal causes. In later years his chief interests were psychoanalysis and child rearing.
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