When anti-feminist men prophesy that men will love their mothers,
sisters, wives, and daughters less when pitted against them as political
opponents or competitors, they prophesy certainly in many cases the
truth. Politics have already estranged fathers from sons, brothers from
brothers. But this demonstrates only either that the personal feelings
were weaker than the political passions or that these latter have
destroyed the attributes which made the personality lovable. But if men
are really able to love and women remain lovable, even as political
personalities, then a man will not cease to love a woman, even if she
votes for a different congressional candidate! Such prophecies have not
been verified in other spheres from which men sought to intimidate women
by similar warnings. For woman retains her power over man. if she
retains her womanly charm, created out of peace, harmony, and kindness.
Not that _of which_ a woman speaks, not that _for which_ she works,
determines man’s feeling and conduct; but _how_ she does it. A woman may
charm a man by a political speech, and drive him away by her table talk.
A poor working woman can, without a word, induce the same man to give
her his seat in a street car who the next minute can be brutal to an
assuming and incapable fellow workwoman. In a word, what a woman makes
of her rights and what they make of her—that alone determines the
measure of veneration, sympathy, love, which she may expect from a man.
That women have lost their equilibrium cannot be denied. How could it be
otherwise? Not only have they in the last half century experienced,
together with man, Naturalism and the New Romantic movement,
Neo-Kantianism, the Higher Criticism, Bismarck and Bebel, Darwin and
Spencer, Wagner and Nietzsche, Ibsen and Tolstoi, Haeckel and von
Hartmann, and still many, many more, but they themselves in dizzy haste
have been hurled out of their position in society, protected by the
family, which they had occupied for centuries. It is obvious that at the
present moment the spiritual mobility of women must be greater than
their harmony; that the raw culture material which they possess must be
richer than that which they can utilise; their life experiences more
significant than their art of life. The modern woman must appear for the
present less symmetrical, more uncertain, than man’s ideal woman in
earlier times. But enduring cultural progress cannot be measured by
comparison with the ideal figures of the poetry or of the life of
earlier times. It must be estimated according to the _average type_ in a
certain period. And the average woman of our time is, in the fullest
significance of the word, more full of vitality and adaptability, more
individually developed, more beneficial socially, than the average woman
of fifty years ago. With the freedom of movement the social feeling has
increased; with the participation in universal human culture, the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account