Woman and Womanhood: A Search for PrinciplesSaleeby, C. W. (Caleb Williams)
Science
Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles
Saleeby, C. W. (Caleb Williams)
Eugenics; Women
But it is all very well to treat men as fools, provided that you do not
say so--the case is different with young people, and certainly not less
with girls than with boys. Mr. Kipling, in one of those earlier moments
of insight that sometimes almost persuade us to pardon the brutality
which year by year becomes more than ever the dominant note of his
teaching, once told us of the discomfiture of a member of Parliament, or
person of that kind, who went to a boys' school to lecture about
Patriotism, and who unfurled a Union Jack amid the dead silence of the
disgusted boys. He forgot that, for once, he was speaking to an
intelligent audience, which demands something a little less crude than
the kind of thing which wins elections and makes and unmakes governments
and policies.
There is certainly a lesson here for those who are entrusted with the
supreme responsibility, so immeasurably more political than politics, of
forming the girl's mind for her future destiny. Suggestion is one of the
most powerful things in the world, but we must not forget that inverted
form of it which has been called contra-suggestion. We all know how the
first shoots of religion are destroyed on all sides in young minds by
contra-suggestion. Crude, ill-timed, unsympathetic, excessive, religious
teaching and religious exercises achieve, as scarcely anything else
could, exactly the opposite of that which they seek to attain. Thus it
is not here proposed that we should take any course at home or at
school which should have the result of making motherhood as nauseous to
the girl's mind through contra-suggestion, as it easily could be made if
we did not set to work upon judicious lines.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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