Marriage as a Trade

London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd, 1910. FIFTH EDITION (first published 1909). 8vo, pp. vi, 284, [8 adverts]. Green cloth, gilt lettering to spine, black lettering and ruling to upper board. Bottom edge untrimmed. Slight lean to spine, bruising and wear to extremities, bump to front bottom corner. Edges and endpapers tanned, Rosamund Billington's feminist-cum-Libran ex libris to front pastedown, foxing to front. Else, clean and tidy. A brightly-bound copy of a later edition of Hamilton's critique of marriage, with a pleasing feminist provenance. Very good. Jisc LHD lists no holdings of this final full-price edition (preceding the 1912 'New and Cheaper' edition.


Playwright, journalist and suffragist, Cicely Hamilton (born Cicely Hamill, 1872-1952) is perhaps best known for her A Pageant of Great Women (1910), co-conceived and directed by Edy Craig, while her short story, How the Vote was Won, was successfully dramatised by Craig's partner, Christopher St. John a year earlier. Like Corbett and Holme, Hamilton served with a Scottish Women's Hospitals unit during WW1, based north of Paris (ODNB). A prolific author, of both fiction and non-fiction, in this title (published originally in 1909), Hamilton addresses marriage as the main livelihood for women and how it shapes her, arguing that it isonly by working that women will gain independence. Not unsurprisingly, Hamilton notes in her Preface: "I am not of those who are entirely satisfied with woman as she is: on the contrary, I consider that we are greatly in need of improvement, mental, physical and moral".


Rosamund Billington, BA, BPhil, Phdis a British suffrage historian and sociologist, active academically 1976-2004.