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
Indeed, I seem to see that one cannot adequately write a book on
Womanhood without including in it somewhere a statement of what manhood
is and ought to be. Surely one of our duties to girlhood is to teach it
the elemental truths of manhood. Such teaching must recognize the facts
which modern psychology perceives more clearly every day, and it must
combine that knowledge with the eternal truths of morality, which are so
intensely real and practical in the great issues of life, such as this.
The great fact which modern psychology has discovered is that intellect
is less important, and emotion more important than we used to suppose;
that knowledge, as we lately observed, is non-moral, and may be for good
or for evil; that cleverness is merely cleverness, and may serve God or
mammon; that it is the nature of the man or the woman which determines
the influence and the uses of education. A girl should know something of
what I have elsewhere called the transmutation of sex as it shows itself
in the higher as distinguished from the lower types of manhood: she
should know that it is good for a youth to spend his energy in visible
ways and in the light of day; there is the less likelihood that it is
being spent otherwise. She should prefer the man who is visibly active
and who keeps his mind and body moving; she should know, as the school
boy should know, that the capacity to smoke and drink really proves
nothing as regards manhood. Doubtless there is some courage required in
learning to smoke, and so much, but it is not much, is to the smoker's
credit; but for the rest, smoking and drinking are simply forms of
self-indulgence, and though they are doubtless very excusable and are
often practised by splendid men, they are of no virtue in themselves.
Further, they are open to the fundamental objection that they lessen the
measure of a man's self-mastery. Women should set a high standard in
such matters as these.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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