Eugenics; Sexual ethics; Women -- Social and moral questions
life that it becomes possible for the individual to develop his own
peculiar nature. The society of the future is a reasonable anarchy
founded on a broad basis of Collectivism.
It is not our object here to point out how widely these tendencies
affect men, but it is worth while to indicate some of their bearings on
the condition of women. While genuine productive industries have been
taken out of the hands of women who work under the old conditions, an
increasingly burdensome weight of unnecessary duties has been laid upon
them. Under the old communistic system, when a large number of families
lived together in one great house, the women combined to perform their
household duties, the cooking being done at a common fire. They had
grown up together from childhood, and combination could be effected
without friction. It is the result of the later system that the woman
has to perform all the necessary household duties in the most wasteful
manner, with least division of labour; while she has, in addition, to
perform a great amount of unnecessary work, in obedience to traditional
or conventional habits, which make it impossible even to perform the
simple act of dusting the rooms of a small house in less than perhaps an
hour and a half. She has probably also to accomplish, if she happens to
belong to the middle or upper classes, an idle round of so-called
"social duties." She tries to escape, when she can afford it, by
adopting the apparently simple expedient of paying other people to
perform these necessary and unnecessary household duties, but this
expedient fails; the "social duties" increase in the same ratio as the
servants increase and the task of overseeing these latter itself proves
formidable. It is quite impossible for any person under these conditions
to lead a reasonable and wholesome human life. A healthy life is more
difficult to attain for the woman of the ordinary household than for the
worker in a mine, for he at least, when the work of his set is over, has
two-thirds of the twenty-four hours to himself. The woman is bound by a
thousand Lilliputian threads from which there seems no escape. She often
makes frantic efforts to escape, but the combined strength of the
threads generally proves too strong. There can be no doubt that the
present household system is doomed; the higher standard of intelligence
demanded from women, the growth of interest in the problems of domestic
economy, the movement for association of labour, the revolt against the
survivals of barbaric complication in living--all these, which are
symptoms of a great economic revolution, indicate, the approach of a new
period.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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