In the general chaos of conflicting feelings she is losing her
instinctive adaptation to her biological rôle as race bearer, and is
attempting adaptation to man’s reality. She is making the effort to win
for herself some differentiation and development of the ego function
apart from her instinctive processes. This is the great problem
confronting woman today; how can she gain a relation to both racial and
individual obligations, instead of possessing one to the exclusion of
the other? Must she lose that which has been and still is her greatest
strength and value? I for one do not think so, although I am fully
conscious of the tremendous psychic effort and responsibility involved
in the changing standards. It is necessary that women learn to accept
themselves and to value themselves as beings possessing a worth at
least equal to that of the other sex, instead of unthinkingly accepting
standards based on masculine psychology. Then women will recognize
the necessity of developing their total psychic capacities just as
it is necessary for men to do, but they will see that this does not
involve imitation of men or repudiation of their most valuable psychic
functioning. The real truth is that it has at last become apparent to
many women that men cannot redeem them.
It is not the purpose of this article to deal with the practical
issues involved in the new moral freedom. One thing however is clearly
evident: Women are demanding a reality in their relations with men
that heretofore has been lacking, and they refuse longer to cater to
the traditional notions of them created by men, in which their true
feelings and personalities were disregarded and denied. This is the
first result of the new morality.
Transcriber’s Notes
A few minor errors in punctuation have been corrected.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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