Aëthnic Union
The Aëthnic Union was a radical feminist organisation based in London, England, founded around 1911 by the lawyer and writer Thomas Baty, who also used the name Irene Clyde. It was associated with pacifism, egalitarianism and social arrangements that rejected binary gender categories. Members included Eva Gore-Booth, Esther Roper, Jessey Wade and Dorothy Cornish, who were active in women's suffrage, animal welfare and education. The Union organised meetings and discussion groups, and later writers have linked its ideas to those developed in the feminist journal Urania.
History
In 1908, the lawyer and writer Thomas Baty, also known as Irene Clyde and later described in scholarship as a transgender figure, began a correspondence with the London Society for Women's Suffrage. In 1911, Baty founded the Aëthnic Union in London; the name "Aëthnic" was taken from the Greek "ethnos", meaning a race.The Union's membership included activists and intellectuals such as Eva Gore-Booth, a poet and suffragist, together with Esther Roper, Jessey Wade and Dorothy Cornish. Their work in suffrage, animal welfare and education overlapped with the Union's concerns. Maait Pepperell describes the Union as a venue for discussion of non-binary gender and social relationships and as a forerunner of some of the ideas later expressed in Urania.
The Union's principles included rejecting a binary organisation of humanity into "masculine" and "feminine" ideals and seeking a society in which people were not restricted by prescribed gender roles: "Society has split perfection into two, and imposes on the individual spirit conformity to one of two warped ideals: the stern masculine and the trivial feminine." In a 1912 advertorial for the organisation in The Freewoman, Baty wrote:
As things are, that insistent differentiation drags in its weary trail at every turn. In the dress they wear, in the games they play, in the occupations they follow, in their very food and drink, it is constantly borne in upon people that they must assimilate themselvs to one or the other imperfect type. They are never permitted to be themselves. They are forced to strangle their own free development. From that soul-murder the Union would liberate them.
Members of the Union published articles and organised discussions. According to Maait Pepperell, internal disagreements over class and political strategy limited the Union's wider influence.
The Aëthnic Union met on the last Thursday of January, March, May, July, September and November, and sources describe it as active for about three years. By 1916, Baty had moved to Japan and the group's activity came to focus on the production of Urania, which then carried many of its gender-related ideas.