Concerning Women.
“It Will Be Foolish To Assume That Women Are Free, Until Books About Them Have Ceased To Have More Than An Antiquarian Interest...”
La Follette, Suzanne. Concerning Women. New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1926.
8vo.; ruby red cloth, spine stamped in black; yellow dust-jacket; essentially a fine copy.
First edition of a book which provides, according to the dust-jacket, “a vigorous and picturesque account of the modern woman and her problems.” Chapters include “Woman’s Status, Past and Present”; “Institutional Marriage and Its Economic Aspects”; “The Economic Position of Women”; “What Is To Be Done”; and the optimistically-sounding “Signs of Promise.” Suzanne La Follette was an American leftist feminist who was connected with The Nation, The Freeman, and other radical periodicals.
A fascinating and, even today, provocative manifesto, which opens with a cynical challenge entitled “The Beginnings of Emancipation”:
It will be foolish to assume that women are free, until books about them shall have ceased to have more than an antiquarian interest. All such books, including this one, imply by their existence that women may be regarded as a class in society; that they have in common certain characteristics...No such assumption about men would be thinkable. Certain masculine qualities, so-called, may be singled out by amateur psychologists and opposed to certain feminine qualities, so-called; but from books about the sphere of man, the rights of man, the intelligence of man, the psychology of man, the soul of man, our shelves are mercifully free. Such books may one day appear, but when they do it will mean that society has passed from its present state through a state of sexual equality and into a state of female domination... (pp. 1-2)
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