Feminism; Women; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
Because, in view of the masculine qualities latent in women, allied with
the circumstance that masculine powers are those most profitable and
effective on the plane alike of physics and of economics, it has seemed
an inevitable conclusion that these dormant male potentialities were
_powers lying idle_; virgin soil which, tilled and cultivated, would
yield fruitful harvest. And this for the benefit not of woman solely,
but of Humanity at large. Strangely enough, the converse proposition has
not presented itself. A pity! For it might have brought enlightenment.
Because it presents itself outright in the form of a patent absurdity.
Suppose a Man's Movement which should have had for aim the cult in males
of their potential woman-qualities! Not for an instant could the project
have found footing as being rational, its ends desirable, or as
improving upon Nature. Everywhere is pity or contempt for the effeminate
man. He is regarded as a poor creature, neither one thing nor the other;
as little the peer of true man as he is notably an unworthy counterfeit
of woman.
Yet how is this? Is it that we admit the male-sex to be so vastly and
intrinsically superior to the female that we are not satisfied for half
only, but demand that the whole human species shall be male?
Nevertheless, since masculine qualities, although undeniably present,
are normally latent in women, they must be inferior in power and calibre
to these same qualities in men. Otherwise, in place of remaining in
latency, they would assert themselves like men. Woman's inferior
masculine powers, even when developed to the full, can equip her,
therefore, to be no more than inferior male; "lesser man" merely, in
place of being "diverse"--the highly-differentiated, finely-specialised
being for which Nature would seem to have been shaping in her, during
untold æons of progressive differentiation.
IV
The prevailing notion is that these masculine potentialities dormant in
women are powers common to both sexes, which have been blighted in the
one by long generations of educational and vocational disabilities
precluding exercise and outlet for them. Or that they are powers which
have been dwarfed by long "subjection" of the sex in maternal and
domestic functions mainly.
Consulting Biology, we find that such artificial repression of Faculty
in the mother (even were artificially-repressed faculty transmissible as
such) could in no way have limited itself, in succeeding generations, to
inheritance by daughters. On the contrary, the more we learn of the laws
of Heredity, the more it is seen that Faculty descends from mother to
son, rather than from mother to daughter. And yet, despite the
sex-disabilities, personal and social, which are now condemned as having
precluded the mothers of earlier eras from developing their masculine
abilities, such mothers transmitted masculine characteristics in
ever-increasing degree to successive generations of male offspring.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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