http://dl.lib.brown.edu/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&id=1301600832453127&view=pageturner&pageno=8

In this review of Harold Owen's book "Woman Adrift" (on page 368 of the issue of Freewoman we read for class), Rebecca West uses the venue of the feminist magazine to deliver a scathing criticism of the opinions of Mr. Owen. This criticism is extremely sarcastic and caustic: she herself admits, in claiming that something Owen wrote is inaccurate, "It would be easy to prove that such is not the general rule by citing the opinion of greater legal authorities than Mr. Owen. But that would spoil the fun. So let us concede him his point." West is treating Owen as if he were a little boy and the two of them were playing a game. But instead of letting him win, her concession of his point is completely mocking. Since she has already determined in the first paragraph that "a steam-engine ought not to crush a butterfly", she is free to spend the rest of the article making her own point, and she does this by using her own rhetorical wit to slander Owen and his lack thereof.

Owen had apparently stated in his book that "Woman is wholly superfluous to the state save as a bearer of children and a nursing mother." This heavy-handed rhetoric contrasts with West's freer, more sophisticated prose. Her lighter style suggests that she is relishing in the sense of freedom that writing for the journal gives her. And with that freedom, she aggressively takes on Owen's book. An established feminist throughout her career, West exemplifies here the aggressive spirit of feminism in the early twentieth century. Her mechanism for carrying out this transgression is an inversion of traditional gender roles; if Owen says that a woman's only function is to reproduce, then she proves him wrong by her mere publishing of this article, as well as the fact that she dismantles his arguments as if he were a two-year old. She is replacing the old Victorian ideals that Owen represents with the new modern values of freedom and equality, and the fact that she is doing so with writing is indicative of this change.