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
The individual man may want individual woman to be weak for him only, but
the laws which men together make require women to be strong, not even
as women, but as superwomen. Because men have experienced the use of
women as individuals, because they still have relics of the old barbaric
ownership feeling, they desire still to keep women individual, isolated,
unorganised. Now even if a woman, by her mother wit, influence and powers
of cajoling and tormenting, may be supposed capable of dealing with her
individual man, the situation becomes very different when man begins to
band himself together with man in guilds, unions, corporations, parties
and armies. He can then proceed to crush women by his organisations.
The individual appeal of love and family is powerless against the
impersonality of law, the combination of millions of persons all of
one sex. It is curious to note that, though men have been organising
themselves for centuries, and for the most part rigidly excluding women
from their organisations, yet women have not complained, nor suggested
that this was “anti-woman”; on the contrary, they have universally done
what they could to help the men’s organisations. But now that women are
beginning to organise themselves, there is raised here and there and
everywhere the alarm cry of “Anti-man!” and sentimental appeals are made
to women which are totally inappropriate in this connection.
Mr. Harold Owen falls into this mistake when he says (_Woman Adrift_,
p. 234): “The relations between man and woman are not political or even
social, they are personal in the highest degree, and in a kind that
exists in no other relation of life whatever.” Such a mistake, like
another of which mention has already been made, is only possible by the
use of the rhetorical singular, and even then it does not follow that,
because _a_ man and _a_ woman may have personal relations, there are not
social and political matters of the greatest moment involved in those
relations. That there are, man has acknowledged ages back, by making laws
to regulate the relations of men and women. We know that a woman has no
personal relations at all with the millions of men who govern the world
she has to live in, and we resent the misplaced appeal to sentiment of a
personal kind in such a connection. Social, political, racial sentiment
there may be, but personal sentiment can only exist between individuals,
and all sentiment is not good either,—the sentiment of power and
ownership, for instance, when they are held over human beings.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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