Women -- Economic conditions; Women -- Employment; Women -- Social and moral questions
she feels; large ills of which they form but an off-shoot; beyond the
small good which she seeks to effect, lies, she believes, a great and
universal beatitude to be attained; beyond the little struggle of today,
lies the larger struggle of the centuries, in which neither she alone
nor her sex alone are concerned, but all mankind.
That such should be the mental attitude of the average woman taking part
in the readjustive sexual movement of today; that so often on the public
platform and in literature adduces merely secondary arguments, and
is wholly unable logically to give an account of the great propelling
conditions behind it, is sometimes taken as an indication of the
inefficiency, and probably the ultimate failure, of the movement in
which she takes part. But in truth, that is not so. It is rather
an indication which shows how healthy, and deeply implanted in the
substance of human life, are the roots of this movement; and it places
it in a line with all those vast controlling movements which have in the
course of the ages reorganised human life.
For those great movements which have permanently modified the condition
of humanity have never taken their rise amid the chopped logic of
schools; they have never drawn their vitality from a series of purely
intellectual and abstract inductions. They have arisen always through
the action of widely spread material and spiritual conditions, creating
widespread human needs; which, pressing upon the isolated individuals,
awakens at last continuous, if often vague and uncertain, social
movement in a given direction. Mere intellectual comprehension may
guide, retard, or accelerate the great human movements; it has never
created them. It may even be questioned whether those very leaders, who
have superficially appeared to create and organise great and successful
social movements, have themselves, in most cases, perhaps in any, fully
understood in all their complexity the movements they themselves have
appeared to rule. They have been, rather, themselves permeated by the
great common need; and being possessed of more will, passion, intensity,
or intellect, they have been able to give voice to that which in
others was dumb, and conscious direction to that which in others was
unconscious desire: they have been but the foremost crest of a great
wave of human necessity: they have not themselves created the wave which
bears themselves, and humanity, onwards. The artificial social movements
which have had their origin in the arbitrary will of individuals, guided
with however much determination and reason, have of necessity proved
ephemeral and abortive. An Alexander might will to weld a Greece and
an Asia into one; a Napoleon might resolve to create of a diversified
Europe one consolidated state; and by dint of skill and determination
they might for a moment appear to be accomplishing that which they
desired; but the constraining individual will being withdrawn, the
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