Every human being who is socially alive is aware that this right to
control one's life is the emptiest phrase to describe reality in a
society built up on a capitalistic basis. It is doubly empty where woman
is concerned. I have never heard a woman desire that woman should fulfil
military duties as an equivalent for having civil rights like man. But
this would be the consequence of the argument that woman should have no
privileges on the ground of her sex. The greatest privilege that can be
thought of in modern society is to be spared the discomforts and loss of
time that come from military training, to be exempt from the dangers and
the terrors of war. That women are not absolutely incapable of service
in warfare, women have shown on many occasions, especially in the Boer
War. So when the advocates of women's rights hesitate before this
extreme consequence of their principle, and introduce the functions of
motherhood as a cogent ground for the privilege of being freed from
military service in time of war (even if women at some time should
receive the same civil rights now enjoyed by man), they are in the
highest degree illogical. Other women with more logic declare that on
another battle-field, a still more destructive one, that of the factory
system, the same maternal functions require certain privileges for
woman, and these same functions must result in subjecting her to certain
limitations of her individual right to control her life. That is, she
cannot pass beyond the limits drawn by nature, without interfering with
the rights of another, the potential child.
It lies in the individual sphere of woman's choice as of man's choice
not to choose marriage, or to desire it without parenthood; and for
exemption from the latter, real altruistic as well as real egoistic
reasons can be urged. It lies in the individual choice of the woman, as
well as of the man, to isolate herself from what may be regarded as an
obstacle to her individual development, or to her freedom of movement.
She can do without love or motherhood, if the one or both of these are
regarded from this point of view. Woman has the full right to allow
herself to be turned into a third sex, the sex of the working bees, or
the sexless ant, provided she finds in this her highest happiness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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