Feminism; Women; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
Over-development of the large and cruder muscles dwarfs those smaller
and more delicate ones which adapt to the softer and subtler departments
of faculty. And while despoiling these smaller muscles which subtend
gentle and delicate artistries, the crude larger ones, hypertrophied by
athletic activities, become alike a burden and a curse to their
possessor. Because not only is their upkeep a continual and a
superfluous tax upon her vital powers, but their hunger for continued
function in further such crude activities afflicts her with turbulent
impulses, for which the more civilised vocations supply no scope. The
militant Feminist movement was as much an explosion of suppressed
muscularity in young women deprived of other outlet for accumulated
muscle-steam, as it was an ebullition of masculine mentality on the part
of its leaders.
Hysteria and other neuroses, obsessing hobbies and crazes, are, more
often than not, morbid and distressing consequences of habits acquired
at school and college, of developing abnormal high-pressures of muscular
and nervous energy. Masculine war-occupations have similarly evoked male
muscularity and mentality in women. So that--War over--they find it
well-nigh unendurable to return to the more refined and humanising
womanly employments of their pre-war days. While on the other hand,
employers are bewailing the rough and coarsened manners, personality and
speech, as too the clumsy movements and ineptitudes of domestic
servants, nurses and others, de-sexed by War-work in respect of the
higher qualities and efficiencies of their sex. Many of these sturdy
motor-drivers, lusty W.A.A.Cs. and strapping Land-girls have lost all
taste as well as aptitude for the finer arts of life and of the home.
Efficient in the handling of plough or gun or lorry, woe to the hapless
babe or invalid subjected to their hard, forceful touch!
V
Language is scarcely emphatic enough to characterise the painful (and
insane) exhibitions of Public-school and College "Sports," in which boys
and young men, whose vital forces are needed beyond all things for
development, may be seen with faces whereon is neither joy of action nor
pride of achievement, but only the pained rigidity of supreme heart and
nervous strain, as they strive for goals that are no test of true
physical fitness, but, on the contrary, prove physical lopsidedness.
In confirmation whereof is the fact that many such athletes die young,
and die suddenly. Or they live the years when men should be still in
their prime--valetudinarian and hypochondriac. The secret of health and
nervous power is the constitutional capacity to _store reserves_ of
vital energy, for expenditure as required. Exhausting sports in youth
engender habits of _over-expenditure_ thereof.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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