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
Reference has been made to the half-heartedness of the school of
physical force. While asserting loudly that physical force rules and
always will rule the world, these people become very indignant if they
are accused of immorality, or even of unmorality. Few have the moral
courage to declare themselves unmoral, and the physical force apologists
for the domination of man over woman always proceed to argue that this
domination is not merely a “regrettable fact,” but is all for the best.
They argue that men as well as women possess a moral nature (which is
undeniable), and that they will direct their physical force in accordance
with their moral nature, which is, in public affairs, superior to that
of women. I have already touched upon the lack of foundation for this
assertion of superiority. There is too little ascertained fact and
far too much speculation and assertion on this point. Mr. Frederic
Harrison (whose connection with Positivism has done little to modify his
profoundly unscientific temperament) has published some essays on the
women’s movement, in which he picks out certain ugly characteristics
common to humanity and attributes them to women only. He professes
such a respect for women, such admiration for their moral, spiritual
and even intellectual qualities, that one really wonders how it comes
that he thinks it necessary to scold them so much. He sees them acting
in politics with “that spite and untruthfulness which is too often the
failing of some good women,” showing “a rancour, an injustice towards
persons, a bitterness of temper, which cause them to fling away common
sense, fairness, truth and even decency.” Dear, dear! How bad these good
women are, and who would have supposed that this passage was written by
a philosopher who holds that women are, “as a sex,” morally superior to
men? One would have supposed that to have accused good women of lying,
spite, folly, injustice, rancour and indecency was not to leave much
over to hurl at the bad ones. But he proceeds to say that it is woman’s
very possession of higher qualities which makes her political judgments
“untrustworthy and unstable.” One seems to have heard something very
like this in the course of the Dreyfus case, when it became a reproach
to be “intellectual.” But if these are the characteristics of women,
according to Mr. Harrison, we may smile to see how he gives himself
away, unintentionally, when he comes to those of men. He has just been
alluding to the “fair, impartial temper” with which men “habitually weigh
all sides of a question,” and declaring that “all political questions
and all parliamentary elections really turn, or ought to turn, on nicely
balanced judgments”; yet when he comes to anticipate what would be the
effect of women’s enfranchisement upon the judicial mind, the fair
impartial temper of men, he declares that it would weaken men’s respect
for women’s opinion and even their respect for women: “_The women’s
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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