Stella Benson’s “Two Women Sing” sets two voices against each other, yet both sing the same incantatory refrain: “Oh woman—woman—woman—.” The repetition is not agreement; it is a shared rhythm for two rival answers to one question. The first woman asks whether a woman should be a friend to woman at all. Her answer is coldly pragmatic. She deals with man and gets back more than she lends. Friendship with women, by contrast, looks like a losing bet: “Who but a witless gambler plays / For farthing stakes these golden days?” In a time she calls golden, female solidarity is priced as small change. She concludes that woman “Must only play the game that pays.”
The poem’s language is deliberately financial. Lend, reclaim, interest, gambler, stakes, loan, value, claim, pay: this vocabulary turns relationships into transactions. The first voice does not pretend otherwise; she speaks from inside a system where a woman’s survival may depend on attaching herself to male power rather than to other women. The “farthing stakes” image is especially sharp. A farthing is a tiny coin, so the first woman dismisses loyalty to women as a paltry investment compared with the profitable business of dealing with man. The phrase “the game that pays” hangs over the first song like a rule of self-interest.
Then the second woman answers with the same refrain but a different tense. Her song is set “To-morrow,” when “woman shall awake” and “arise, and realise / The goodly value of her stake.” It also changes the grammar: the first voice is tightly personal, “I deal with man,” while the second speaks of “woman” and “she” as a whole waking body. Where the first woman sees farthings, the second sees value. She keeps the economic language, but she reverses its aim. She will “lend her loan, and claim / Her rightful interest on the same.” The image is no longer a woman lending to men and hoping to reclaim more; it is a woman holding capital in herself and demanding what is owed. The word “rightful” is the hinge. It turns profit from something extracted through manipulation into something justly owned.
The construction of the poem reinforces this debate. Each song has the same eight-line shape, and the refrain appears at the beginning and near the end, so the second voice seems deliberately to occupy the first woman’s form while changing its meaning. The dashes between “woman—woman—woman” slow the line into three separate calls, almost like a tolling or a sigh, binding the voices together even as they disagree. Most lines move in a tight four-beat pattern, giving the debate a proverbial, song-like snap: “Reclaim with interest all I lend,” “The goodly value of her stake.” The internal echo of “arise, and realise” makes waking and understanding happen in the same breath. Rhymes such as friend/lend, plays/days/pays, and awake/stake, claim/same/game compress ideas into memorable oppositions. The repeated “paying game” is used first as cynicism and finally as hope.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to pretend that sisterhood is automatically easy or profitable. The first woman’s logic is not dismissed; it is answered. Benson’s second voice does not say that money and games do not matter. She says that women must learn “at last the paying game”—not abandon the field, but revalue the stake. The poem offers a feminist vision grounded in self-respect and future awakening, while still acknowledging the pressures that make women see each other as bad investments. Its two songs, set side by side, ask readers to hear both voices and recognise which one they want to echo.