Feminism; Women; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
Losing sight altogether of the inestimable benefits to woman secured by
the intervention of men between her and the hardest and the most
debasing employments, she further protests, "any attempt to divide the
occupations in which male and female intellects and wills should be
employed, must be to attempt a purely artificial and arbitrary
division."
"Our cry is, _We take all labour for our province!_"
Nevertheless, clever and intuitive woman as she is, she confesses (now
the Italics are mine), "_It may be with sexes as with races, the
subtlest physical differences between them may have their fine mental
correlatives_." And yet, oh why, having come upon so promising a vein of
truth, did she not follow it to its logical conclusions, and find in it
all the answers to her extremist demands, and, with these, the
refutations of her Feminist plea and claims?
Men and women are unlike not only in "_the subtlest physical
differences_" which "_may have their fine mental correlatives_." They
are unlike in the most obvious and basic facts of physical constitution
and of biological function. And these must inevitably entail mental and
temperamental correlatives more intrinsic and farther reaching even than
the subtler physical differences she recognises as being possibly
modifying factors in psychical aptitude.
Advocating soldiering even for the sex, Miss Schreiner says: " ...
Undoubtedly, it has not been only the peasant-girl of France, who has
carried latent and hid within her person the gifts that make the supreme
general."
Here is fallacy again. Joan of Arc was, beyond all things, woman. Not
the man in her, but the woman in her, and her Supra-conscious womanly
attributes it was which (inspiring her by way of mystical voices and
visions) impelled her so to transcend her woman-nature that without
knowledge of arts military or of strategic science, as, too, without
experience, she was able, by intuitive prescience, to lead her
compatriots to victory. For the soldiers, perceiving the Light in her
face, followed in awed confidence whithersoever she led.
In earlier days of civilisation, this intuitive and visionary faculty of
woman was recognised and honoured.
II
In _The Human Woman_, Lady Grove presents a wholly contrary view to Miss
Schreiner's.
With her, woman suffers less in being shut out from the labour-market
than in having been driven from the home.
"The woman has been driven from her home into the labour-market.
The fact of 82 per cent. of the women of this country working for
their living is an ugly rebuff to the pretty platitudes about the
home," she says.
" ... The stupendous mistake that has been made up to now is in
supposing that it is men's judgment only that should decide
questions, and hence the hopeless state of unravelled misery
existing in the world, side by side with all the wealth and wonders
of the age.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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