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
I need not quarrel with his assertion of the original difference between
man and woman with regard to sexual relations. “I think,” he writes, “it
cannot be denied that while sexual passions and sexual gratification are
of far more moment to the Male, the idea of the family is, in its turn,
essentially a Female sentiment. The former inculcates and stimulates
the roving freedom which is characteristic of the Male, the latter
consolidates the family, and for the first time establishes the Female
as an essential part of a social structure.” (The last sentence is dark
to me, but let it pass.) The statement may be taken as broadly true of
primitive man. Further, it is quite clear that Mr. Heape is uttering
almost a platitude, when he states (p. 195) that “The Male and Female
are complementary; they are in no sense the same, and in no sense equal
to one another; the accurate adjustment of society depends upon proper
observance of this fact.” No one thinks Male and Female are “the same,”
nor when people speak of “equality” do they in fact use the word in a
mathematical sense. What people do wrap up, in confused and misleading
terms, is, that although women are not the same as men, they have many
of the same properties and therefore many of the same requirements.
Shylock’s plea for the Jew has been quoted with much force by women and
on behalf of women: “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt
with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same
means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian
is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge?”
Men cannot deny that women need food, like men, and that women
catch infectious diseases, like men, and that women, like men, need
satisfaction for their sexual nature, although by their actions men
sometimes do not demonstrate their knowledge. But there are other
needs—of the human spirit—less demonstrable, which women have as much
as men: the need for freedom and joy, for pride in themselves and their
work, for consciousness that the sacrifices they make are willing, not
enforced. And, when women demand “equality” with men, what they are
asking is, that they shall have equal opportunities to do the things they
feel able to do, and also that they should have for their peculiarly
feminine work—the work which men cannot do—more help, more training, more
expenditure of public money, and more scope altogether to do it in ways
adapted to the modern world they live in.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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