=The Sense of Kind and the Sense of Difference.=--Doctor Giddings
declares in fine summary "we may conceive of society as any plural
number of sentient creatures more or less continuously subjected to
common stimuli, to differing stimuli and to inter-stimulation, and
responding thereto in like behaviour, concerted activity or
cooeperation, as well as in unlike or competitive activity; and
becoming, therefore, with developing intelligence, coherent through a
dominating consciousness of kind while always sufficiently conscious
of difference to insure a measure of individual liberty." Democracy
tends to enlarge the area of those who, while conscious of kind that
unites, are also keen in desire to develop in liberty any natural
difference which can make their personality felt as distinctive or
powerful. The individual differences among women were wholly ignored
in the past. They were never in reality all alike, as they were
commonly thought to be. The usual designation of a subject class lumps
all together as if all were the same. It is the mark of emergence from
the mass to the class, and from the class to the individual, that more
and more defines differences between persons. Women have now, for the
first time in the civilization called Christian, arrived at a point in
which differences between members of their sex can claim social
recognition. They are, therefore, now called upon as never before to
balance by conscious effort the personal desire and the social claim.
The family, more than any other inherited institution, feels the
oscillations between the individual demand for personal achievement
and the response to the social need for large service within group
relationships which now, for the first time, stir in the consciousness
of average women.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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