The Passionate FriendsWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
The Passionate Friends
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Triangles (Interpersonal relations) -- Fiction
"What you call 'social order,' Stephen, all the arrangements seem to me
to be _built_ on subjection to sex even more than they are built (as you
say) on labor subjection. And this is an age of release, you say it is
an age of release for the workers and they know it. And so do the women.
Just as much. 'Wild hopes' indeed! The workers' hopes are nothing to the
women's! It is not only the workers who are saying let us go free,
manage things differently so that we may have our lives relieved from
this intolerable burthen of constant toil, but the women also are saying
let us go free. They are demanding release just as much from their
intolerable endless specialization as females. The tramp on the roads
who won't work, the swindler and the exploiter who contrive not to work,
the strikers who throw down their tools, no longer for twopences and
sixpences as you say but because their way of living is no longer
tolerable to them, and we women, who don't bear children or work or
help; we are all in one movement together. We are part of the General
Strike. I have been a striker all my life. We are doing nothing--by the
hundred thousand. Your old social machine is working without us and in
spite of us, it carries us along with it and we are sand in the
bearings. I'm not a wheel, Stephen, I'm grit. What you say about the
reactionaries and suppressionists who would stifle the complaints of
labor and crush out its struggles to be free, is exactly true about the
reactionaries and suppressionists who would stifle the discussion of the
woman's position and crush out her hopes of emancipation...."
And here is a page of the peculiar doubt that was as characteristic of
her as the quick changes of her eyes. It gives just that pessimistic
touch that tempered her valiant adventurousness, that gave a color at
last to the tragedy of her death....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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