Women -- Economic conditions; Women -- Employment; Women -- Social and moral questions
years ago, can realise adequately how wholly free from moral and social
problems and social friction such a society can be. It is in studying
such societies that the truth is vividly forced on one, that the key to
half, and more than half, of the phenomena in our own social condition,
can be found only in our rapidly changing conditions necessitating
equally rapid change in our conceptions, ideals, and institutions.)
Thirdly, the unrest and suffering peculiar to our age is caused by
conflict going on within the individual himself. So intensely rapid is
the change which is taking place in our environment and knowledge that
in the course of a single life a man may pass through half a dozen
phases of growth. Born and reared in possession of certain ideas and
manners of action, he or she may, before middle life is reached, have
had occasion repeatedly to modify, enlarge, and alter, or completely
throw aside those traditions. Within the individuality itself of such
persons, goes on, in an intensified form, that very struggle, conflict,
and disco-ordination which is going on in society at large between its
different members and sections; and agonising moments must arise, when
the individual, seeing the necessity for adopting new courses of action,
or for accepting new truths, or conforming to new conditions, will yet
be tortured by the hold of traditional convictions; and the man or woman
who attempts to adapt their life to the new material conditions and to
harmony with the new knowledge, is almost bound at some time to rupture
the continuity of their own psychological existence.
It is these conditions which give rise to the fact so often noticed,
that the art of our age tends persistently to deal with subtle social
problems, religious, political, and sexual, to which the art of the past
holds no parallel; and it is so inevitably, because the artist who would
obey the artistic instinct to portray faithfully the world about him,
must portray that which lies at the core of its life. The “problem”
play, novel, and poem are as inevitable in this age, as it was
inevitable that the artist of the eleventh century should portray
tournaments, physical battles, and chivalry, because they were the
dominant element in the life about him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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