I do not want to exaggerate the difficulties and perils which are bound
up in this revolutionary movement, but it is abundantly clear that it
presupposes profound changes in the nature of women and of men. While
man will be asked for more liberalism and be expected to develop his
sense of justice (which has too long lain at the mercy of his erratic
and sentimental generosity), woman will have to modify her outlook. She
is now too often vain, untruthful, disloyal, avaricious, vampiric;
briefly she has the characteristics of the slave. She will have to
slough off these characteristics while she is becoming free, she will
have to justify by her mental ascent the increase in her power.
Feminists are not blind to this, and that is why they lay such stress
upon education and propaganda.
One of the most profound changes will, I think, appear in sex relations.
The "New Woman", as we know her to-day, a woman who is not so new as the
woman who will be born of her, is a very unpleasant product; armed with
a little knowledge, she tends to be dogmatic in her views and offensive
in argument. She tends to hate men, and to look upon Feminism as a
revenge; she adopts mannish ways, tends to shout, to contradict, to
flout principles because they are principles; also she affects a
contempt for marriage which is the natural result of her hatred of man.
The New Woman has not the support of the saner Feminists. Says Ellen
Key, in _The Woman Movement_, "These cerebral, amaternal women must
obviously be accorded the freedom of finding the domestic life, with its
limited but intensive exercise of power, meagre beside the feeling of
power which they enjoy as public personalities, as consummate women of
the world, as talented professionals. But they have not the right to
_falsify life values_ in their own favor so that they themselves shall
represent the highest form of life, the 'human personality', in
comparison with which the 'instinctive feminine' signifies a lower stage
of development, a poorer type of life." If this were the ultimate type,
very few men would be found in the Feminist camp, for the coming of the
New Woman would mean the death of love. If the death of love had to be
the price of woman's emancipation, I, for one, would support the
institution of the zenana and the repression of woman by brute force;
but I do not think we need be anxious.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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