Women -- Economic conditions; Women -- Employment; Women -- Social and moral questions
If anywhere on earth exists the perfect ideal of that which the modern
woman desires to be--of a labouring and virile womanhood, free, strong,
fearless and tender--it will probably be found imaged in the heart of
the New Man; engendered there by his own highest needs and aspirations;
and nowhere would the most highly developed modern male find an image of
that which forms his ideal of the most fully developed manhood, than in
the ideal of man which haunts the heart of the New Woman.
Those have strangely overlooked some of the most important phenomena
of our modern world, who see in the Woman’s Movement of our day any
emotional movement of the female against the male, of the woman away
from the man.
We have called the Woman’s Movement of our age an endeavour on the part
of women among modern civilised races to find new fields of labour as
the old slip from them, as an attempt to escape from parasitism and an
inactive dependence upon sex function alone; but, viewed from another
side, the Woman’s Movement might not less justly be called a part of
a great movement of the sexes towards each other, a movement towards
common occupations, common interests, common ideals, and towards an
emotional sympathy between the sexes more deeply founded and more
indestructible than any the world has yet seen.
But it may be suggested, and the perception of a certain profound truth
underlies this suggestion; How is it, if there be this close reciprocity
between the lines along which the advanced and typical modern males and
females are developing, that there does exist in our modern societies,
and often among the very classes forming our typically advanced
sections, so much of pain, unrest, and sexual disco-ordination at the
present day?
The reply to this pertinent suggestion is, that the disco-ordination,
struggle, and consequent suffering which undoubtedly do exist when
we regard the world of sexual relationships and ideals in our modern
societies, do not arise in any way from a disco-ordination between the
sexes as such, but are a part of the general upheaval, of the conflict
between old ideals and new; a struggle which is going on in every branch
the human life in our modern societies, and in which the determining
element is not sex, but the point of evolution which the race or the
individual has reached.
It cannot be too often repeated, even at the risk of the most wearisome
reiteration, that our societies are societies in a state of rapid
evolution and change. The continually changing material conditions of
life, with their reaction on the intellectual, emotional, and moral
aspects of human affairs, render our societies the most complex and
probably the most mobile and unsettled which the world has ever seen.
As the result of this rapidity of change and complexity, there must
continually exist a large amount of disco-ordination, and consequently,
of suffering.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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