Women -- Economic conditions; Women -- Employment; Women -- Social and moral questions
Secondly, it arises from the fact that individuals of the same human
society, not adapting themselves at the same rate to the new conditions,
or being exposed to them in different degrees, a wide and almost
unparalleled dissimilarity has today arisen between the different
individuals composing our societies; where, side by side with men and
women who have rapidly adapted or are so successfully seeking to adapt
themselves to the new conditions of knowledge and new conditions of
life, that, were they to reappear in future ages in more co-ordinated
societies, they might perhaps hardly appear wholly antiquated, are to be
found men and women whose social, religious, and moral ideals would not
constitute them out of harmony if returned to the primitive camps of the
remote forbears of the human race; while, between these extreme classes
lies that large mass of persons in an intermediate state of development.
This diversity is bound to cause friction and suffering in the
interactions of the members of our societies; more especially, as the
individuals composing each type are not sorted out into classes and
families, but are found scattered through all classes and grades in our
societies. (One of the women holding the most advanced and modern view
of the relation of woman to life whom we have met was the wife of a
Northamptonshire shoemaker; herself engaged in making her living by the
sewing of the uppers of men’s boots.) Persons bound by the closest ties
of blood or social contiguity and compelled to a continual intercourse,
are often those most widely dissevered in their amount of adaptation
to the new conditions of life; and the amount of social friction and
consequent human suffering arising from this fact is so subtle and
almost incalculable, that perhaps it is impossible adequately to portray
it in dry didactic language: it is only truly describable in the medium
of art, where actual concrete individuals are shown acting and reacting
on each other--as in the novel or the drama. We are like a company of
chess-men, not sorted out in kinds, pawns together, kings and queens
together, and knights and rooks together, but simply thrown at haphazard
into a box, and jumbled side by side. In the stationary societies, where
all individuals were permeated by the same political, religious, moral,
and social ideas; and where each class had its own hereditary and fixed
traditions of action and manners, this cause of friction and suffering
had of necessity no existence; individual differences and discord might
be occasioned by personal greeds, ambitions, and selfishnesses, but
not by conflicting conceptions of right and wrong, of the desirable and
undesirable, in all branches of human life. (Only those who have been
thrown into contact with a stationary and homogeneous society such
as that of primitive African tribes before coming in contact with
Europeans; or such as the up-country Boers of South Africa were twenty
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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