Having all the equipment for Life’s most important business, it will not appear hard to believe that Woman is positive. Life through her says “Yea” to itself. In fact when Woman says “Yea” to Life, it is simply Life itself accepting itself as such. All women’s apparent negativism is either only skin deep, or else it is the outcome of bodily sickness or degeneracy. The mere fact that in all periods of decline Woman has always come to the fore, the historical fact that Feminism is undeniably a phenomenon of male degeneration—the swan-song of male-constructed societies—shows how inevitably Life itself comes forward at the last moment in order to try to rescue itself when it feels all else is failing. But it comes forward in a form that cannot lead to salvation. Because, although Woman is equipped for carrying on Life’s business, she is not equipped for ordering it. You cannot be a thing and above it, or out of it, at the same time. The part is not greater than the whole. And, as Woman is immersed in Life, she has not the duality of vision that is necessary for placing and ordering Life. She knows, because she feels, when Life is going to pieces; she knows when Life has been outraged, when hostility to Life is working havoc with Life’s material; but she can only ascertain the fact, she can only protest against the fact; she cannot remedy it. To remind me that modern women—or the most far-seeing among them—organized a powerful agitation to obtain the Parliamentary vote, is simply to point to a proof of what I say. The Parliamentary vote is essentially a male invention. It is essentially a male idea. It is not an idea of Life. In fact, three-quarters of the harm that has come to Life might be ascribed to this very Parliamentary vote, and the Democracy it implies; and yet, when Woman in her agony casts about her for a remedy for Life’s sickness, she can do nothing more than lay hold of this futile and dangerous male invention, and seek salvation through it. It is her cry of protest, however, that is interesting as a symptom, as a warning. And all those who have ears to hear, know it is the cry of Life itself, agitating for reform. But, as the feeling is unconscious with Woman, and as she is not equipped for the task of standing outside Life and ordering it, the remedies she advocates must be suspected and rejected just as earnestly as her cry of warning must be respected and observed. FOOTNOTES: [15] See Arabella Kenealy in _Feminism and Sex-Extinction_ (pp. 211-12): “That all women do not marry—cannot marry, indeed, because of their preponderance in number over the other sex—is no reason for dissembling the truth that in wifehood and motherhood lie women’s most vital and valuable rôles. Nor is it a warrant for training the whole sex as though none were destined to fulfil this, their natural and noblest, if not always their happiest, vocation.”