But I saw more than the crowd of men and boys. On those faces I saw the
light of discovery, and I seemed to hear a voice, a voice that speaks
down through the years from a Roman cross, "Behold thy mother." The
clamor of the unparalleled conflict has been the quiet in which for
the first time woman's cry for justice has been really heard and fully
understood.
Great Britain, the butt of our jokes because of her stolid slowness
and stubbornness in an opinion or tradition, saw her window-smashers
turn to munition-makers, saw her social butterflies don the garb of Red
Cross nurses, saw her women rise to help win the war; and Great Britain
was convinced.
And what have we found this "new woman," this woman of war, to be?
First of all, we have discovered that she is not new; that she is the
woman of old, the woman of yesterday, to-day, and forever.
But, while woman has not changed, her times have; and with intelligent
heroism she is fighting against fearful odds, to adjust the machinery
of society to meet modern needs. One has declared that already
three-fourths of woman's former sphere has slipped away from her. Back
at the beginnings of the race she was in all things partner of the man.
She not only bore children and reared them; she was armor-bearer as
well, tent-maker, planter, tender, and reaper of the harvests.
But gradually changes came. Men no longer spent all of their time
in fighting or preparing to fight. They began to relieve women
in the fields and to assume more and more the heavier portion of
building-operations. Women found more time for the nursery and kitchen,
for the loom and spinning-wheel.
As civilization progressed, still fewer men went away to battle, and
war became less frequent. Minds with leisure became inventive, and
machinery simplified household labors. Even the nursery was invaded;
for the cry was no longer, "Give me sons, many sons," but, "Give me fit
sons," and the honor in mere numbers in childbearing gave way to the
distinction of quality as well.
Then, too, the home itself reached out beyond the pioneer clearing
which formerly held all of its activities, until its interests became
identified with all the problems of a society no longer bounded by
family, village, tribal, or even racial lines. It is as unreasonable to
insist that women in their social and political relations to-day remain
as they were before the advent of the public bakery, the tailor-shop,
the candy-kitchen, the public school, and the legalized saloon as it
would be to insist that they go back to the spinning-wheel or that they
assume again as a normal occupation the hod-carrying of the builder.
Civilization faces a female ultimatum to-day. Ah, more than that,
it is a racial ultimatum; for effete women produce their kind, and
final racial standards are fixed in the womb. This is the ultimatum:
_Parasite or partner?_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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