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
Girls, as well as boys, should, _before puberty_, be taught the simple
facts of sex, and this should be done in connection with other simple
science teaching. They will accept these facts quite serenely, if they
are not greatly stressed and differentiated from other knowledge. They
should not be troubled with pathology until they are full grown. Boys and
girls should be brought up together, and the barrack system of living
should be entirely abolished for both sexes. This does not mean that boys
and girls should do all the same things, either in work or play; these
should be adapted to the ascertained capacities of the individuals and
not arranged on rigid _a priori_ schemes. If the girl has grown to young
womanhood with a healthy and active body and mind, she will have all the
essentials for good motherhood, and if she wishes to learn the details of
mothercraft, by all means give her opportunity to do so. But it is not
necessary, or even desirable, to force every young woman to do this. If
she is broadly developed as a human being, she can learn mothercraft when
she is about to marry. Then, indeed, she should learn it, and the man who
is about to marry should also study the duties of parentage.
It is one of the fond delusions of middle-class reactionaries that a
girl will be a better mother if she idles about at home when she has
left school, instead of taking up some definite and attaching work.
This is absolutely untrue. Many of the qualities that go to make a good
mother can be developed and strengthened in other work. The aimless,
vacuous young woman of our middle classes is a standing reproach to her
parents, who are silly enough to require or allow her so to waste all
her virtue, and in the end allow it to die of atrophy. The parasitic
daughters require a whole book to themselves, and I hope they will get
it. For my part, when I consider the mixture of petting and tyrannising
to which they are subjected in the home, I am more often surprised by
their sense than by their folly. That they ever do anything useful is to
their credit, when one thinks how their lives are ordered to discourage
purpose, concentration, thoroughness, independence and responsibility.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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