Women's Wild Oats: Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards

Published in the aftermath of the Great War's upheaval, these essays constitute a bracing polemic for nothing less than the total reconstruction of British society. Catherine Gasquoine Hartley seized upon the moment when the old order trembled: with men dead and women proved indispensable in factories, offices, and hospitals, the Victorian moral architecture had cracked beyond repair. Her argument is辛辣 and uncompromising, women had earned the right to new freedoms, new economic personhood, and a radically revised relationship to marriage, motherhood, and their own bodies. The title itself is a provocation: 'wild oats' had always been a male privilege, the expected sowing of sexual and social freedom before settling down. Hartley demands to know why women should not claim the same. These are copiously documented, fiercely argued essays that pulled no punches in 1920, and they retain their power to disturb a century later. For readers interested in the intellectual history of feminism, the hidden archives of first-wave thought, or the seismic social shifts that wars accidentally unleash.