The Truth About WomanHartley, C. Gasquoine (Catherine Gasquoine)
History
The Truth About Woman
Hartley, C. Gasquoine (Catherine Gasquoine)
Women; Women -- History; Women -- Social and moral questions
The struggle for the Suffrage has intensified many problems which it
will take all the intellectual and emotional energy of both men and
women to solve. Up till now there has been little more than a fight
for mere rights against male monopolies. In the near future this
struggle must lead to a realisation of the duties of woman, founded on
a level-headed facing of the physiological realities of her nature. It
is a complete disregard of sexualogical difficulties which renders so
superficial and unconvincing much of the talk which proceeds from the
"Woman's Rights" platform. All efforts made to understand the sex
problem, which is the woman question, must be based on the full
knowledge of the physical capacity of woman and the effect that her
emancipation will have on her function of race production. All effort
ought to be directed towards the future welfare and happiness of the
children who are to follow us. This is the goal of woman's struggle
for progress, it is the sole end worthy of it.
To assume as Schopenhauer and so many others have done, down to Sir
Almroth Wright's recent hysterical wail in _The Times_, that woman, on
account of her womanhood is incapable of intellectual or social
development, paying her sole debt of Nature in bearing and caring for
children, is really to state a belief in decay for humankind. Any
stigma attached to women is really a stigma attached to their
potentiality as mothers, and we can only remove it by beginning with
the emancipation of the actual mother. No sharp cleavage can be made
between qualities that are good and masculine on the one side, and all
that is feminine on the other. The view is entirely erroneous. How,
for instance, can ignorance and weakness constitute at once the
perfection of womankind, and the imperfection of mankind? The matter
is not so simple. Man must fall with woman, and rise with her.
My first purpose is to make this clear.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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