Indubitably a woman is under no obligation to sacrifice herself to the
good of her sex by foregoing needed employment in the hope that it may
fall to a man gifted with dependent women. Nevertheless our
congratulations are more intelligent when bestowed upon her individual
head than when sifted into the hair of all Eve's daughters. This is a
world of complexities, in which the lines of interest are so
intertangled as frequently to transgress that of sex; and one ambitious
to help but half the race may profitably know that every effort to that
end provokes a counterbalancing mischief. The "enlargement of woman's
opportunities" has benefited individual women. It has not benefited the
sex as a whole, and has distinctly damaged the race. The mind that can
not discern a score of great and irreparable general evils distinctly
traceable to "emancipation of woman" is as impregnable to the light as a
toad in a rock.
A marked demerit of the new order of things--the _regime_ of female
commercial service--is that its main advantage accrues, not to the race,
not to the sex, not to the class, not to the individual woman, but to
the person of least need and worth--the male employer. (Female employers
in any considerable number there will not be, but those that we have
could give the male ones profitable instruction in grinding the faces of
their employees.) This constant increase of the army of labor--always and
everywhere too large for the work in sight--by accession of a new
contingent of natural oppressibles makes the very teeth of old Munniglut
thrill with a poignant delight. It brings in that situation known as two
laborers seeking one job--and one of them a person whose bones he can
easily grind to make his bread; and Munniglut is a miller of skill and
experience, dusted all over with the evidence of his useful craft. When
Heaven has assisted the Daughters of Hope to open to women a new "avenue
of opportunities" the first to enter and walk therein, like God in the
Garden of Eden, is the good Mr. Munniglut, contentedly smoothing the
folds out of the superior slope of his paunch, exuding the peculiar
aroma of his oleaginous personality and larding the new roadway with
the overflow of a righteousness stimulated to action by relish of his
own identity. And ever thereafter the subtle suggestion of a fat
philistinism lingers along that path of progress like an assertion of a
possessory right.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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