Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
The deliverance of woman must have as its corner-stone
self-support. The first step in this direction must be to explode
the fallacy that marriage is a state of being supported. As men
are most largely the gatherers of money, it is mistakenly assumed
that they are most largely the creators of wealth. The man goes
abroad and gives his daily labor toward earning his board and
clothes; but what he actually receives for his work can neither
be eaten nor worn. It does nothing whatever until he puts it into
his wife's hands, and upon her intelligence, energy and ability
depend how much can be done through the using of it. Not until
her labor in transforming raw material, in cooking, sewing, and
rendering a house habitable, is joined to his, can a man be said
to have really received anything worth having. He begins, she
completes, the making of their joint wealth. Their dependence is
mutual; the position of the one who turns the money into usable
material by her labor being equally important, equally valuable,
with that of him who turned his labor into money; and this must
be fully recognized if woman is ever to come into her true
relation to man. She supports him exactly as he supports her, and
this is equally the case with the wife who herself produces
directly, or the one who gives her time and intelligence to
direct the production of others....
Closely allied to the fallacy that man supports woman is the
fallacy that man protects woman, and has a right to control her
by virtue of this protection. There was a period in the world's
transition from savagery to civilization when mankind had so
little conception of the mutuality of human interests that war
was a perpetual condition of society. Originally women also were
fighters; just as the lioness or tigress is as capable as her
mate of self-defense and protection of her young, so the savage
woman, when necessity required, was equally capable of conducting
warfare in the same cause. But long before men had given up
killing each other for the better business of trading with and
helping each other woman had ceased to be a fighter. She was the
first to see the advantages of peace, both because she was the
earliest manufacturer and trader and because it cost her more in
the production of every soldier than it cost man. Instinct
directed her toward peace long before reason made it possible for
her to explain why she hated war, and she hated it as an
occupation for herself long before it occurred to her to despise
it as an occupation for man. To-day the love of peace and hatred
for war which she is rapidly spreading through the world is the
real protector of woman; she is a self-protector by virtue of
this proclivity, and, as war is equally the enemy of man, here
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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