I'm a day late, but Rebecca West, feminist, suffragist, author, critic, was born on December 21, 1892. In 2008, her feminist sentiments remain all too relevant:
"I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat."
Rebecca West (1892-1983): West wrote about the suffragist Emily Davidson, who threw herself in front of the king's horse at the Derby. The essay 'The Sterner Sex' (1913) records her thoughts at the wedding of her cousin, her sympathy for the women working for the Army Clothing Employees' Union, and her anger: "I saw a world of women struggling as the American capitalist men of today struggle, to maintain a parasitic sex that is at once its tyrant and its delight..." West's essay about Emmeline Pankhurst, 'A Reed of Steel' (1933) is among her best works on the period. Her first book was about the writer Henry James. . . In the autumn of 1913, at the age of 19, West started her turbulent love affair with H.G. Wells, although she had called him in an article from 1912 "the old maid among novelists".
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