Feminism; Women; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
We need urgently, indeed, such a House of Women to employ its native
wisdom, its intuitive apprehension, and its moral and emotional impulse,
and, moreover, to bring its experience and tact to bear upon a
hundred-and-one tangled and neglected issues of moral and social reform.
In order to remedy evils that have come, from long neglect, to be a
cancer, slowly and surely sapping and vitiating our national life and
endangering our racial supremacy.
IV
That women may do useful work in male departments of politics and
economics is quite beside the question. Far more valuable work is needed
and is possible from them in their own especial fields of aptitude. In
these latter, moreover, they would be fostering, in place of
sacrificing, that morale and those distinctive talents Nature has
specialised in them. While their withdrawal _in toto_ from male
political and economic functions would put men on their mettle, and
stimulate their efforts and achievement therein.
Woman's influence, like that of Religion, is most potent when it is
indirect and inspirational. Like the Church, when she exchanges her
indirect and devotional ministrations for direct and material ones,
temporal or militant, she destroys herself or the peoples she dominates.
Or she destroys both.
It is common fallacy that so long as the world's work is done and its
affairs tolerably well conducted, it is of no significance whatsoever by
which sex these ends are attained.
Sight is lost of the intrinsic truth that Life exists for Man--not Man
for Life; its purpose being the evolution of the human Species by way of
the evolution of human Faculty. The world's work has no slightest value
save as spur and instrument of human education. And the evolution of the
dual orders of human Faculty having differentiated the human Species
into two sexes, each representing a wholly different order of
Faculty--obviously the perfection of both orders of Faculty and,
accordingly, the further evolution of both sexes wherein these orders
are respectively specialised, can be attained only by the exercise, by
each order, of the rôle and the functions that best evoke its powers.
If, therefore, the male sex repudiates its allotted rôle and functions,
and forfeits, in consequence, the education of its distinctive talents
and moral, by shelving its responsibilities upon the other sex,
howsoever capable a substitute this other sex may prove itself, man acts
as foolishly and fatuously as the schoolboy who shirks his schooling and
the discipline thereof, by enlisting his capable sister to do his
lessons for him.
It is, at the same time, man's duty and his privilege manfully to
shoulder and ably to perform his own allotted part in Life's affairs.
Evading this, or from a false conception of chivalry allowing woman to
usurp a share therein, he degenerates inevitably; in default of his
natural spur to development. Moreover he obliges--or connives at woman
doing likewise, in respect of her allotted part.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account