The Future of the Women's MovementSwanwick, Helena M. (Helena Maria)
General
The Future of the Women's Movement
Swanwick, Helena M. (Helena Maria)
Women -- Social and moral questions; Women's rights
We are in for very big changes—social, economic and political. No one
can doubt it. In what spirit are we going to make those changes? They
are long overdue, and the amount of needless suffering caused by our
slowness in adaptation is appalling. Dead creeds cumber the ground in
all directions, and men make no serious effort either to resuscitate or
decently to bury them. We say one thing and we do the other, and we merit
the certificate given to us by international acclamation, of being the
most canting nation on earth. Some of us do not like change. When did
older people ever like change? Change implies thinking, and if there is
one thing the majority of people hate more than another it is thinking.
There is always in most of us a pathetic hope that some day we shall come
to a state where the machinery of life will go of itself and we shall
be safe and free from the necessity—so exhausting—of eternal vigilance.
Free also from the terrible necessity of judging for ourselves and from
the difficult task of loving our neighbour as ourselves. But those who
hate change—the catlike people with whom I have every sympathy—should
ask themselves, “Am I going to stop just here? And, if so, why? Is this
really the warmest, prettiest spot, and is there room for the others
here?” Most people who know even a corner of life, as it is for the less
fortunate, would admit that the present does not offer the most perfect
conditions imaginable for all. “But it might be worse, and so we will not
move, for fear of worse befalling. All the efforts of our forefathers,
all their mistakes and sacrifices and heroisms we will accept, but this
generation will not add one brave deed to the record of time.” If this
opinion were universal, this generation would be dead, and rotting fast.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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