This great, deep, serious movement for woman's emancipation has in the
course of time received a new name, the "Woman Question." The change in
terminology signifies a change in the attitude of thought. From a real
emancipation movement, that is, a movement to free the restricted powers
of woman and her restricted personality, the movement has become a
question, a social institution with officers, a church system with
dogmas. Certainly we still hear in books and speeches that the woman
question is being discussed and urged, in its relation to the happiness
and development of the whole of humanity. But in reality the woman
question, since it became a fact, a cause with an end of its own, since
its champions have lost more and more their appreciation of its
connection with other great questions of the day, is tending to
increase the civil rights and the fields of woman's labour. In both
cases people really have the women of the upper classes in view. This
has been the end, and it is thoroughly justified and justifiable. But,
in striving for this end, those who are aiming at it have come more and
more into opposition to the first and highest of all rights, the rights
of the individual woman to think her own thoughts, to go her own ways,
even when these thoughts and these ways follow other courses than those
of the advocates of woman's rights. While this group is, on one hand,
very far from conceding to the individual woman the freedom which
belongs to her, it is, on the other hand, blind to the results of the
self-assertion of the whole female sex. In taking up work more and more
external in character, they are blind to the profound and revolutionary
effects of this movement, on the conditions of labour in the present
day, on the existence of man and the family, on society as a whole.
Doing away with an unjust paragraph in a law which concerns woman,
turning a hundred women into a field of work where only ten were
occupied before, giving one woman work where formerly not one was
employed,--these are the mile-stones in the line of progress of the
woman's rights movement. It is a line pursued without consideration of
feminine capacities, nature, and environment.
The exclamation of a woman's rights champion when another woman had
become a butcher, "Go thou and do likewise," and an American young lady
working as an executioner, are, in this connection, characteristic
phenomena.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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