the whole of life, but especially to sex-love, maternity, the rearing
and education of children, joy and rapture and promise surpassing
anything known to the purely instinctive life of the past. Of course we
are bewildered. Civilization without decay is at last a possibility.
Let us have knowledge and patience: blaspheming and violence will ruin
all.
It is for modern women and for men who can understand the problem to
make an end to secrecy, shame, and starvation where sex is concerned.
There has been a good deal of freedom in action, but less boldness
in speech, because of the heavy penalties involved. For some women
speech is impossible; those who are secure must fight their battle.
How old and proper people love a vigorous and god-like young male!
How they look askance upon, brow-beat, and bully his equivalent in
the opposite sex! Here is a community for ever starving and choking
its finest women, stifling their voices in education and public life;
then turning and rending the submissive residue for being what years
of intimidation have made them. Let them marry, you say, and make a
success of that and their children. That would be well enough but for
the taboos and disabilities with which marriage is surrounded. Feminism
led women away from the home that they might return armed and unsubdued
to make marriage tolerable. Women who have been free remember the
horror of the approach to marriage: a barrier for most of us to free
public activity; a life-long contract only to be broken in disgrace
and public disgust; aunts, uncles, social duties that exasperate and
are totally unnecessary; the common view that henceforward husband and
wife are one and indivisible, and the wife for ever to be burdened with
her husband’s duties and affairs; looks of surprise and reproach if we
enjoy other male society; constraint in the manner of men formerly our
friends; income, if we have any or can still earn, taxed as a part of
our husband’s; children, which, had we had them illegitimate, would
have been our own but now are our husband’s; worst of all, the looks
and smiles from silly women broken in to slavery, congratulating us on
having done well and made ourselves secure for life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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