Urania
Urania was a privately circulated feminist journal published between 1916 and 1940, remarkable for its radical rejection of gender as a meaningful category. Decades ahead of its time, it argued that fixed distinctions between the sexes were an artificial constraint on human freedom. Issues from 1919 to 1940 are held at the LSE Women's Library (part of the Hall Carpenter Archives) and have been digitised via the LSE Digital Library.
Founding and editors
Urania was established in 1916 by a close circle of activists, writers and lawyers with overlapping connections to the suffragist movement and the Theosophical Society. The five editors were:
- Eva Gore-Booth, Irish poet, labour activist and suffragist
- Esther Roper, secretary of the North of England Society for Women's Suffrage and Gore-Booth's lifelong partner
- Irene Clyde (the pen name of Thomas Baty, 1869–1954), an English international lawyer and author
- Dorothy Cornish
- Jessy Wade
Several editors, including Irene Clyde and Eva Gore-Booth, were members of the Aëthnic Union, a radical feminist organisation founded by Baty in 1911 with the express aim of liberating people from artificial sex differentiation.
Irene Clyde – who had previously published the feminist utopian novel Beatrice the Sixteenth (1909), depicting a society without gender distinctions – was the intellectual driving force behind much of Urania's philosophy. Modern scholars describe Baty variously as non-binary, genderfluid, or transgender; a private declaration written in 1926 noted: "From my earliest years I hated sex. The reason was that I wanted to be a girl."
Philosophy
Each issue of Urania carried its founding declaration:
The journal held that "Sex is an accident" – that gender was a social construction rather than a biological given, and that the suffragist goal of equality within existing gender categories did not go far enough. True emancipation, in Urania's view, required the abolition of fixed gender categories altogether. The editors promoted androgyny and same-sex unions as spiritually transformative, drawing on Theosophical ideas about the soul's capacity to transcend sex across lifetimes.
This position placed Urania well outside mainstream feminism of the period, and ahead of the theoretical frameworks developed decades later by Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler.
Content
Urania did not publish original essays in the conventional sense. Instead it curated and commented on newspaper cuttings from across the world – stories of women living as men, of same-sex relationships, of gender-nonconforming individuals, and of what would now be called gender-affirming surgeries. Examples drawn from China, Japan, the United States and Europe were presented as evidence that the categories of "man" and "woman" were neither universal nor fixed.
The journal also engaged critically with the sexology of its day, resisting the tendency of contemporary scientists to pathologise gender variance, and instead allowing community voices to define their own experience.
Publication
Urania was never sold publicly. It was printed at the Manoranjan Press in Bombay and distributed free of charge to approximately 250 readers under the informal notice that it "can be had by friends." It appeared bimonthly in its early years, later shifting to a triannual frequency as printing costs increased.
Despite its small circulation, copies reached university libraries at Oxford, Cambridge, and several American institutions – though some Oxford women's colleges refused to hold it.
Later years and legacy
Eva Gore-Booth died in 1926, a decade into Urania's run. The journal continued under the remaining editors until 1940 – a total of 24 years of publication.
Urania has since been recognised as a significant early document in the history of transgender and gender-nonconforming thought, and as evidence that trans and gender-nonconforming people have longstanding connections to feminist movements. It featured in the British Library's Unfinished Business exhibition on the history of women's rights.
Archives
Issues from 1919 to 1940 are held in the Hall Carpenter Archives at the LSE Women's Library and were digitised in 2023, making them freely accessible through the LSE Digital Library.