AustLit

'This paper revives Stella Miles Franklin’s 1917 play, ‘Virtue’, a long-forgotten protest drama about economic servitude, sexual desire, and the perils of prostitution. I discuss the ways Franklin uses ‘Virtue’ to first, protest the perils of female economic vulnerability that lead working women into liaisons with men, and second, to illustrate the dangerous promiscuities associated with modern sex radical solutions to women’s sexual subordination that enslave rather than liberate. I suggest Franklin’s feminist politics on the cusp between New Womanist claims challenging sexual codes and those endorsing the sexual morality of a previous generation ideally positioned her to produce a new realism gesturing towards a modernist literary aesthetic in its economic critique of sexual expressions masquerading as ‘freedom’.'

Source: Abstract.