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
having a nervous constitution ever on the verge of hysteria and impulsive
insanity; but if we are to believe him, and the Sandwich magistrate,
men are far more dangerous lunatics and should certainly be put under
restraint.
Let us get out of this nightmare and come to the real world as we know
it. Certainly there are some blackguards and some lunatics of both sexes.
Certainly there is, and perhaps always has been, some antagonism between
the sexes. It is the most constant endeavour and the most firm faith of
progressive men and women that this antagonism should cease. We do not
believe it to be necessary and we do believe it to be altogether bad.
A great deal too much is made of the differences between men and women
under civilised conditions. Mr. Heape’s bogey-man is depicted as a sort
of Saturn devouring his children, regardless of their welfare, desiring
woman simply as the instrument of his pleasure, possessing no personal,
national or racial love. Woman, on the other hand, is pictured to us
as having no personal feelings towards her mate, desiring him only for
the purpose of motherhood, and desiring even motherhood so faintly that
the least thing will put her off it. It is difficult to have patience
with a description so preposterously untrue to ordinary life. And Mr.
Heape’s recommendations for dealing with this appalling condition are
the most extraordinary part of the whole queer affair. For he would
have us “rattle into barbarism” with open eyes. According to him, all
civilisation, all the united efforts of persons to make a more endurable
dwelling-place on earth, all care for the future of the race, is by
origin womanly, and yet—and yet—the all-devouring male is to abandon this
hardly acquired civilisation, to cease to learn of the woman, and once
more to roam the world and leave his squaw to take her chance with the
papooses!
To suggest that man can go on modifying his material conditions, piling
luxury on luxury, and yet need not adapt himself and his sexual life to
these conditions, but can remain primitive brute beast, is wilfully to
blind oneself to facts, and such blindness, if it were common, would
indeed be the cause of race suicide. So long as either sex preys upon
the other, or enslaves the other, we are in danger of finding that man,
having conquered the world, becomes his own victim.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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