Woman : $b a vindicationLudovici, Anthony M. (Anthony Mario)
Philosophy
Woman : $b a vindication
Ludovici, Anthony M. (Anthony Mario)
Sex; Women
In men of the Herbert Spencer, Nietzsche, St. Francis of Assisi, John
the Baptist type, the social instinct was so strong that it completely
mastered and sacrificed the other two instincts. Their reproductive
instinct was suppressed and snubbed, and women were scouted by them,
while they considered their self-preservative instinct only in so far
as it assisted them in continuing and prolonging the exercise of their
social instinct. The will in these men resided in their leading social
instinct. It was that which determined their conduct.
In the coward, the anarchist, the deserter, the ambitious upstart
bent only on self-aggrandisement and security, in the unscrupulous
plutocrat, the self-preservative instinct is so strong that woman and
society are sacrificed or ignored, whenever any emergency or dilemma
occurs in which it becomes necessary to sacrifice them for the sake of
self-preservation. Such men’s wills reside entirely in the thought of
their own survival and security, and are determined exclusively by the
self-preservative instinct.
If, now, we ask what is Woman’s will, by what instinct is it
determined?—we are in a position to say at once: Woman’s will, owing to
the very correlation of her bodily parts and the important place the
organs and business of Life’s multiplication hold in her constitution,
is at least likely to have a strong bias or predisposition in favour
of being determined by her reproductive instinct. For the latter is
clearly very strongly implanted in her. The two sources from which
alone instinct can arise, and from which this particular instinct can
draw its strength, are present within her; they are undeniably her
idiosyncracy, and they are: (1) Racial memory (her women ancestors for
millions of generations, with the same organs as she possesses, having
performed all the functions of conception, parturition, and the rearing
of children more or less successfully, otherwise she herself would not
be there) and (2) the correlation of bodily parts (her body having
the full equipment for reproduction, which must crave the exercise of
its functions and suggest its use, if that equipment be healthy and
well-formed).
You may suggest that the same holds good of man. As a matter of fact,
it does not. Because in man there is some doubt, some uncertainty as
to the bias, as to the prejudice, suggested by his bodily parts. If
in man the organs concerned with Life’s multiplication held the same
predominant place as they do in woman, the same would certainly hold
good of him. But it is obvious that this is not the case. The case is
rather the reverse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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