schedules are perfectly feasible in manual work. The fourth social
principle to be accepted in the interest of women and the family is
one little perceived at the present time: namely, that which marks the
limitations of social usefulness in the specialization of labor
itself.
=Dangers of Specialization in Professional Work.=--We are beginning to
see that this process may be carried so far that a shallow and a cheap
person may so fill the exacting and narrow routine of a specialty of
manual work or professional service as to check ambition and power to
achieve a full and rich personality. Last of all, the social
principle, by which the claims of personality and the demands of
social solidarity (now so entangled in friction) may work smoothly to
individual and social well-being, the principle yet to be clearly
outlined and helpfully applied, should receive interpretation and
guidance through the race-experience of women. For that service the
social education of women must be lifted to a far higher plane of
intellectual and ethical culture. Deeper than all the problems which
the booming of the guns of this world war has forced upon the dullest
social consciousness is the question, How may the individual
conscience and personal ideal of the spiritual elite be harmonized
with, not destroyed by, the levelling process of democracy? Saints
and sages have always marked out the pathway of the future. How can
they still dower a common life pressed insistently toward uniformity
of action? May it not be that human beings of the mother-sex who have
paid and still must pay a price, one by one, for each single life, and
who have at the same time always been held and still must be held as
supreme upbuilders of the social fabric, shall lead the race toward
the solution of this most spiritual problem of democracy? It is not,
however, solely to make women better fitted for a dual role in social
order and social progress that we are socializing education: men also
must be better fitted to the tasks of social serviceableness within as
truly as without the family. No one has doubted the claim of society
upon man to be a useful worker and a competent manager of affairs in
the world. Until lately, however, few have seen that, as the
"Declaration of Eights and Duties" set forth in 1795 by those who
willed the freedom of France, "No one is a good citizen if he is not a
good son, a good father, a good brother, a good friend, a good
husband." It has been enough for a man to be able to achieve something
of value; his personal character has not been, held of such great
moment throughout the ages of the past.
Now we are beginning to demand that men be good in the sense they have
long demanded that women shall be, and that women shall be strong in
what they do as well as in what they are. This new demand strikes at
the roots of what has been called the "social evil," but which is the
most unsocial of all the pathological conditions of modern society.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account