The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays: 1909Bierce, Ambrose
Philosophy
The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays: 1909
Bierce, Ambrose
Essays
Employers seldom fail, and never for long, to get all the workmen they
need. The field, then, into which women have put their sickles was
already overcrowded with reapers. Whatever employment women have
obtained has been got by displacing men--who would otherwise be
supporting women. Where is the general advantage? We may shout "high
tariff," "combination of capital," "demonetization of silver," and what
not, but if searching for the cause of augmented poverty and crime,
"industrial discontent," and the tramp evil, instead of dogmatically
expounding it, we should take some account of this enormous, sudden
addition to the number of workers seeking work. If any one thinks that
within the brief period of a generation the visible supply of labor can
be enormously augmented without profoundly affecting the stability of
things and disastrously touching the interests of wage-workers, let no
rude voice dispel his dream of such maleficent agencies as his slumbrous
understanding may joy to affirm. And let our Widows of Ashur unlung
themselves in advocacy of quack remedies for evils for which they
themselves are cause; it remains true that when the contention of two
lions for one bone is exacerbated by the accession of a lioness the
squabble is not composable by stirring up some bears in the cage
adjacent.
Indubitably a woman is under no obligation to sacrifice herself to the
good of her sex by refusing needed employment in the hope that it
may fall to a man gifted with dependent women. Nevertheless our
congratulations are more intelligent when bestowed upon her individual
head than when sifted into the hair of all Eve's daughters. This is
a world of complexities, in which the lines of interest are so
intertangled as frequently to transgress that of sex; and one ambitious
to help but half the race may profitably know that every effort to that
end provokes a counterbalancing mischief. The "enlargement of woman's
opportunities" has benefited individual women. It has not benefited the
sex as a whole, and has distinctly damaged the race. The mind that can
not discern a score of great and irreparable general evils distinctly
traceable to "emancipation of woman" is as impregnable to the light as a
toad in a rock.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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