In The Egoist Vol. 1, No. 3 in the Views and Comments section titled “The Chastity of Women,” (44-46) the unknown author of the article—possibly the editor, Dora Marsden—responds to Christabel Pankhurst’s “The Hidden Scourge and how to end it.” Pankhurst’s original piece, as described in “The Chastity of Women,” argues that to end the “scourge” (venereal disease), society requires “Votes for Women as for men, and Chastity for Men as for women” (44). The Egoist interrogates this claim and, in doing so, examines the odd connection between women’s sexuality and their right to vote, as well as the rhetoric of “purity.”

That Pankhurst makes a connection between suffrage for women and chastity for men is important, even outside of The Egoist’s response, because her argument so clearly reveals a correlation in early 20th century public consciousness between purity and political power. For women, their power is often reduced to their purity—so much so that chastity becomes a commodity ensuring their happy future. As The Egoist articulates, for young women to abstain from pre-marital sex “serves to keep up their value as saleable goods before marriage” (46). While men had various forms of political, economic, and social power—the vote is a key example of this power—women had only their sexual currency. The Egoist describes the way in which women “give themselves in marriage”: “the attitude they adopt is not that of persons who satisfy their own desires, but of those who in kindness allow others to satisfy theirs” (45). A woman’s virginity, saved to ‘give’ to her husband, then becomes her one commodity, and her sexuality exists, not for her own pleasure, but for someone else’s. As Pankhurst’s argument seems to imply, if women are given another power in society—that of the vote—then their value would rise in society, and they would be worth more than just their sexuality. Pankhurst’s plan seeks to give women another social power; however, she does not seek to radically alter the system of social power all together. Pankhurst does not commit to freeing women from the pressure of purity, but instead she condemns men to the same rules and anxieties regarding purity and sexual shame that women have long endured.

Pankhurst’s suggested proposal reveals a foundational belief in early 20th century culture that posits a woman’s sexual purity as her most valuable possession. However, what Pankhurst fails to realize is that purity rhetoric must be abandoned completely for women to ever be free of its power to define their worth. The Egoist, in analyzing Pankhurst’s use of the word “chastity,” comes to the important conclusion that what Pankhurst is really concerned with is not chastity—the mental, emotional, spiritual state of being “chaste”—but rather the physical state of virginity. The Egoist concludes, “That is is to be “virgin” rather than chaste she has in mind is supported by the fact that the word she uses in developing her argument is “untouched,” which is speaking enough and might be taken to be conclusive” (45). While Pankhurst connects the suffrage movement to women’s chastity, implying that a woman’s worth lies in her chaste nature, The Egoist sees through this connection. Instead, the article places Pankhurst’s argument precisely on the female body, suggesting that Pankhurst’s parallelism between suffragism and chastity is obsessed, not with purity of virtue, but purity of body and the physical state of being a virgin.

The Egoist article spends much of its space examining the downfalls of remaining “pure.” While it would seem that the response and solution to this problem would then be individual complete sexual looseness, The Egoist instead lumps together the idea of both sexual promiscuity and sexual purity as problems to be solved. The notion of constructing one’s identity around either of these two categories perpetuates the same unhealthy dichotomy created by purity culture. The Egoist states, ““Vice” cannot throw off its “pure” character. The two are one-—related to each other as the observe and reverse of a coin: the under and over of the same psychological condition” (46). The rhetoric of vice or purity as integral to one’s identity must instead be abandoned completely; only then can women free themselves from shame-based purity rhetoric and distance themselves from the notion that their sexuality is a commodity to be cashed in for someone else’s benefit.