Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
There is no doubt that if to-day in Turkey or Algiers, countries
where woman's sphere is most thoroughly confined to the home
circle, it was proposed to admit them to social life, to remove
the veil from their faces and permit them to converse in open day
with the friends of their husbands and brothers, the conservative
and judicious Turk or Algerine of the period, if he could be
brought even to consider such a horrible proposition, would point
out that the sphere of woman was to make home happy by those
gentle insipidities which education would destroy; that by
participating in conversation with men they would debase their
natures, and men would thereby lose that ameliorating influence
which still leaves them unfit to associate with women. He would
point out that "nature" had determined that women should be
secluded; that their sphere was to raise and educate the
man-child, and that any change would be a violation of the divine
law which, in the opinion of all conservative men, ordains the
present but never the future.
So in civilized countries when it was proposed that women should
own their own property, that they should have the earnings of
their own labor, there were not wanting those who were sure that
such a proposition could work only evil to women, and that
continually. It would destroy the family, discordant interests
would provoke dispute, and the only real safety for woman was in
the headship of man; not that man wanted superiority for any
selfish reason, but to preserve intact the family relation for
woman's good. To-day a woman's property belongs to herself; her
earnings are her own; she has been emancipated beyond the wildest
hopes of any reformer of twenty-five years ago. Almost every
vocation is open to her. She is proving her usefulness in spheres
which the "nature" worshiped by the conservative of the last
generation absolutely forbade her to enter. Notwithstanding all
these changes the family circle remains unbroken, the man-child
gets as well educated as before, and the ameliorating influence
of woman has become only the more marked.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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