This FreedomHutchinson, A. S. M. (Arthur Stuart-Menteth)
General
This Freedom
Hutchinson, A. S. M. (Arthur Stuart-Menteth)
Marriage -- Fiction; Women -- Social and moral questions -- Fiction
Such things! It is to be seen that now there were bursting into blossom
out of bud within that Rosalie those seeds planted in her by the
extraordinary ideas of her childhood. About men. First and always
predominating, about men as compared with women--their wonder, their
power, their importance, their infinite superiority; then about men in
their relations with women--their rather grand and noisy ways that made
Rosalie blink; their interfering presence that spoilt lessons and spoilt
walks; those sinister attributes of theirs, arising somehow out of their
freedom to do as they liked in the world, that somehow left the world
very hard for women. Grotesque ideas, but masterful ideas, masterfully
shaping the child mind wherein they germinated; burrowing in clutchy
roots; pressing up in strong young saplings. Agreed the child is father
of the man, but much more the girl is mother of the woman. It is the
man’s part to sow and ride away; conception is the woman’s office and
that which she receives she tends to cherish and incorporate within her.
Of her body that function is her glory; of her mind it is her millstone.
Man always rides away, a tent dweller and an Arab, with a horse and with
the plains about him; woman is a dweller in a city with a wall, a house
dweller, storing her possessions about her in her house, abiding with
them, not to be sundered from them.
So with that Rosalie. Those childhood ideas of hers were grotesque ideas
but she had received them into her house and they remained with her,
shorn of their grotesqueness, as garish furniture may be upholstered
in a new pattern, but tincturing her life as the appointments of a
room will influence the mood of one that sits therein. Father owned the
world--all males had proprietorship in the world under father--all
men were worshipful and giants and genii. That was the established
perception and those its earliest images. The perception remained,
deepening, changing only in hue, as a viscid liquid solidifies and
darkens in a vessel over the fire. It remained, persisted. Time but
steadied the focus as the wise oculist, seeking for his patient the
perfect image, drops lenses in the frame through which the vision
chart is viewed. In a little the perfect image is found. There was that
Rosalie, come to maidenhood, come to the dizzy edge of leaving school,
with the perfect image of her persistent obsession; with the belief no
longer that men were magicians having the world for their washpot and
women for their footstool, but unquestionably that they “had a better
time” than women and that they secured this “better time” by virtue of
their independence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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