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
I do not want to weary the reader with what can only be suggestions. I
am certain, however, that this vital factor of the home cannot safely
be excluded from the State. Consider any one of the old mediaeval
towns, with its buildings, its cathedral, its churches, its halls, its
homes--all that it contains a splendid witness to the civic life of
its people. Contrast this with what we have been willing to accept as
art in our industrial towns. In the old days the city was in a very
literal sense the home of its citizens, now it is merely a centre of
trade. Is it unfair to connect this with the subjection of women and
the rush of male activities, that has destroyed the need of beauty and
fitness which once was the possession of all? For art you must have
human qualities, and you must have emotion. The time has come when we
are yielding to the new forces, that yet are old. This age will leave
its own track behind it, and those, who are beating out the way now,
must start on the right path--freeing for the service of the future
all the intellectual and emotional forces of women as well as men.
To think boldly, untrammelled by conventions from the past, to search
sedulously for the truth within themselves and follow it fearlessly,
this should be the faith of all those women who love art. Let them
have the courage of their own deep emotions. Let them look forward
into the future, instead of clinging timorously to the stone wall of
their past imitation of men. Then, indeed, woman may be freed--able to
give expression to those creative ideas which are wrapped up with the
elements of her nature. But women must beware of sham emotion and
lachrymose sentimentality. It is her own feelings she must voice, not
the feelings that have been supposed to belong to her. Then, indeed,
the work of women will begin to count. The two things most peculiar
to woman--her pursuing-love of man and her need of a child, will find
their expression in women's art.
It is an appalling commentary on the condition of our thoughts on this
subject that the pregnant woman was but recently considered unfit to
be represented in the statues placed on one of our public buildings.
How convincingly this speaks to women, "Be not ashamed of anything,
but to be ashamed."
III.--_The Affectability of Woman--Its Connection with the Religious
Impulse_
"Religion shares with the sexual impulse the unceasing yearning,
the sentiment of everlastingness, the mystic absorption into the
depths of life, the longing for the coalescence of
individualities in an eternally blessed union, free from earthly
fetters."--IWAN BLOCH.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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