http://dl.lib.brown.edu/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&id=130382138...

To follow up on the issue of The Freewoman that we looked at for last class, I decided to go ahead and take a look at the first issue of that magazine's successor, The Egoist, published in January of 1914. After reading The Freewoman, I found myself immediately drawn to Dora Marsden's opening editorial for this magazine, "Liberty, Law, and Democracy," located in the magazine's first three pages. Coming from The Freewoman, I expected a strongly philosophically bent piece, which I found, but what surprised me about this piece is how deftly the piece's philosophical language was employed to make a stinging political point.

In this piece, Dora Marsden decontructs the idea of Democracy as being representative of individuals, but rather as a representative of "interests." She then goes on to state that laws only guarantee the protection of one "interest," while at the same time implying the supression of an opposing interest which was not able to gain sufficient support to defend itself. She then goes on to criticize liberty, stating that liberty serves not to make peoples free, but to serve as something for the weak to lay claim to so that government (here meaning those "interests" that hold sway) can appear not to be ruling over those whose "interests" are being oppressed. Here, Marsden excellently illustrates just what is wrong with women not having the right to vote. After all, when you have an entire gender of people silenced in your government, how is that supposed "democracy" not really just one interest brutally suppressing another?