Let the masculine reader honestly read these two paragraphs (which I do
not put forward as literature). The first will pain him; the second will
hurt him more. That men should be slaughtered--how hateful! That girls
should be slaughtered--it is unbearable. Here, I submit, is part of
woman's opposition to war, of the exaggerated idea people have of her
humanitarian attitude. I will not press the point that as a savage she
may like blood better than man; I will confine myself to suggesting that
a large portion of her opposition to war comes out of a sexual
consciousness; it seems horrible to her that young men should be killed,
just as horrible as my paragraph on the dead girls may seem to the male
reader.
Some men have seen women as barbarous and dangerous only, have based
their attitude upon the words of Thomas Otway: "She betrayed the
Capitol, lost Mark Antony to the world, laid old Troy in ashes." This is
absurd; if man cannot resist the temptation of woman, he can surely
claim no greater nobility. Mark Antony "lost" Cleopatra by wretched
suicide as much as she "lost" him. If because of Helen old Troy was laid
in ashes, at least another woman, guiltless Andromache, paid the price.
To represent woman so, to suggest that there were only two people in
Eden, Adam and the Serpent, is as ridiculous as making a woman into a
goddess. It is the hope of the future that woman shall be realized as
neither diabolical nor divine, but as merely human.
6
We must recognize that the emotional quality in woman is not a
characteristic of sex; it is merely the exaggeration of a human
characteristic. For instance, it is currently said that women make
trouble on committees. They do; I have sat with women on committees and
will do it again as seldom as possible: their frequent inability to
understand an obvious syllogism, their passion for side issues, their
generalizations, and their particularism whenever emotion is aroused,
make committee work very difficult. But every committee has its male
member who cannot escape from his egotism or from his own conversation.
What woman does man does, only he does it less. The difference is one of
degree, not of quality.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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