Feminism; Women; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
Women have suffered more, _psychically_; because this way lay their
nature and their human lot. Men have suffered more, _materially_;
because here lay theirs. And since advancement comes by suffering, women
are reaping to-day the harvest of past travail of their sex, in the
higher psychical development which now characterises that sex. During
centuries when men were vastly too hard-pressed by the struggle for
barest existence to have been aware that they possessed souls, women
were privileged to be aware of theirs--by the affliction thereof.
The immediate purpose of this fencing of the women behind the stronger
frames, the stronger wills, and stronger brains of fighting males was
the Racial one, of course. While men battled with environment and with
alien aggressors for their lives and for their food, as for those of the
family, the sheltered women were alike the loom and cradle of the Race.
As well, they made havens, or homes, for the fighters to return to for
sleep and refreshment. They plied a simple, primitive agriculture,
practised a primitive healing art, and otherwise evolved The
Humanities. But since mortal power is limited, power expended in one
direction is power withdrawn from some other. Power spent in battle is
power lost to progress. The woman who, with the instinct for home and as
shelter for her babes, laid the foundations of Architecture in a hut of
mud, was enabled to do this solely by virtue of masculine protection.
It is in peace only that Progress arises, in leisure that The Arts
evolve. And woman, walled in by the lives of the males, found leisure of
body and mind to pluck flowers for the adorning of her hut, to shape
platters of clay, and, later, even for embellishment of these with crude
designs. Thus she was the first artist.
The fighting male was--by necessity--destructive. He invented a club.
The female was--by privilege--constructive. She invented the needle (a
fish-bone, doubtless). And while the male transmitted to offspring his
virile fighting and destructive qualities, woman tempered and humanised
these by incorporating with them her milder traits and artistries of
peace. Lacking the male aggressive and protective faculties, however,
increasing in skill and resource with his ever further Adaptation to
(and of) environment, woman's gentler and humanising aptitudes would
have had neither opportunity for evolution, nor scope for exercise and
further sway.
II
I have been reading an account, by a naturalist, of some phases in the
life-history of crabs. And it is interesting to find even among
creatures so low in the Life-scale (although Darwin regarded these as
the most intelligent of _crustaceæ_) that same instinct of protection of
the female which is seen in the higher orders of creation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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