Women -- Economic conditions; Women -- Employment; Women -- Social and moral questions
The skilled diplomatist or politician, so powerful in his own element,
on board ship during a storm becomes at once of less general value or
consideration than the meanest sailor who can reef a sail or guide a
wheel; and, were we to be reduced again suddenly to a state of nature,
a company of highly civilised men and women would at once, as we have
before remarked, find their social value completely inverted; landed on
a desert shore, unarmed and naked, to encounter wild beasts and savages,
and to combat nature for food, the primitive scale of human values would
at once reassert itself. It would not then be the mighty financier, the
learned judge, or great poet and scholar who would be sought after, but
the thickest-headed navvy who could throw a stone so exactly that he
brought down a bird, and who could in a day raise a wall which would
shelter the group; and the man so powerful that he could surely strike
an enemy or wild beast dead with his club, would at once be objects of
social regard and attain individual eminence, and perhaps dominance. It
would not be the skilled dancer, who in one night in a civilised state
earns her hundreds, nor yet the fragile clinging beauty, but the girl
of the broad back and the strong limb, who could collect wood and carry
water, who would be the much considered and much sought after female in
such a community. Even in the animal world, there is the same inversion
in values, according as the external conditions vary. The lion, while
ruling over every other creature in his primitive wilds, by right of his
untamable ferocity, size, and rapacity, is yet bound to become a prey
to destruction and extermination when he comes into contact with the
new condition brought by man; while the wild dog, so immeasurably
his inferior in size and ferocity, is tamed, survives and multiplies,
exactly because he has been driven by his smaller structure and lesser
physical force to develop those social instincts and those forms of
intelligence which make him amenable to the new condition of life and
valuable in them. The same inversion in the value of qualities may be
traced in the history of human species. The Jews, whose history has been
one long story of oppression at the hands of more muscular, physically
powerful and pugilistic peoples; whom we find first making bricks under
the lash of the Egyptian, and later hanging his harp as an exile among
the willow-trees of Babylon; who, for eighteen hundred years, has been
trampled, tortured, and despised beneath the feet of the more physically
powerful and pugilistic, but not more vital, keen, intelligent, or
persistent races of Europe; has, today, by the slow turning of the
wheel of life, come uppermost. The Egyptian task-master and warrior
have passed; what the Babylonian was we know no more, save for a few mud
tablets and rock inscriptions recording the martial victories; but the
once captive Jew we see today in every city and every street; until at
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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