many of them are ill at ease under the details which the code imposes,
there are few who do not recognize that the existing moral order, of
necessity and by the divine right of prescription, places the woman in
a position ancillary to the man. In the last analysis, according to her
own sense of what is good and beautiful, the woman's life is, and in
theory must be, an expression of the man's life at the second remove.
But in spite of this pervading sense of what is the good and natural
place for the woman, there is also perceptible an incipient development
of sentiment to the effect that this whole arrangement of tutelage and
vicarious life and imputation of merit and demerit is somehow a mistake.
Or, at least, that even if it may be a natural growth and a good
arrangement in its time and place, and in spite of its patent aesthetic
value, still it does not adequately serve the more everyday ends of life
in a modern industrial community. Even that large and substantial body
of well-bred, upper and middle-class women to whose dispassionate,
matronly sense of the traditional proprieties this relation of status
commends itself as fundamentally and eternally right-even these, whose
attitude is conservative, commonly find some slight discrepancy in
detail between things as they are and things as they should be in this
respect. But that less manageable body of modern women who, by force of
youth, education, or temperament, are in some degree out of touch with
the traditions of status received from the barbarian culture, and
in whom there is, perhaps, an undue reversion to the impulse of
self-expression and workmanship--these are touched with a sense of
grievance too vivid to leave them at rest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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