“When Andrea Dworkin died, both the press and her moderate feminist critics responded with a mélange of barely concealed glee and smug relief. Christopher Hitchens was one of the few to speak out in her defense, lamenting that the world had become a lonelier place without an Andrea Dworkin to dispute with. ‘[S]he could write, and think, and argue,’ he wrote, ‘and it was often a pleasure to disagree violently with her, which is more than I can say for some of her detractors.’ I suspect this is how many feel at Hitchens’s own passing. It’s certainly how I feel.”

http://nomadsun.wordpress.com/2011/12/17/farewell-hitchens

A brilliant evocation of a pre-First World War Britain when the old system, which was basically a liberal one, came under tremendous shocks from the movement for women’s suffrage, the movement to disengage from Ireland and the rise of organized labor. In the chapter on the rise of women’s suffrage he describes beautifully all the morbid symptoms that appear when the long-repressed—especially sexually repressed—group begin to take their own measure.

The suffragette movement simply for women’s franchise, for the right of women to vote, was attacked by all kinds of people for its weirdness. For the way the women started to dress as men, to neglect their families and to behave promiscuously. Many of these symptoms, up to and including suicide on some occasions, were indeed present but when the air cleared one could see that it was the result of the original repression. It was a phase through which the movement had to pass.

A wonderful socialist feminist book which calls for women’s negotiation with men after having achieved more terms for equality.

“Let’s make a deal with the men. Half our children are going to be boys, we can’t get along without them. Men and women get married,” she wittily points out, “in exactly the same numbers. Let’s do it, but let’s do it now, because now we’re going to be taken more seriously.”