Women -- Employment -- United States; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women in politics -- United States
Women alone, whether individually or in groups, tend to develop certain
hard, dry, arid qualities of mind and heart, or they become emotional
and unbalanced. Losing a sense of large significances, they become
overcareful, saving, sometimes penurious, while in matters of feeling
they lavish sentiment and sympathy on unimportant pets and movements.
Men, when alone, become selfish, coarse, and reckless; their judgments
become extravagant and their pursuits remorseless.
Thus it is certainly true that men and women supplement each other in
the subjective as in the objective life. Man creates, woman conserves;
man composes, woman interprets; man generalizes, woman particularizes;
man seeks beauty, woman embodies beauty; man thinks more than he feels,
woman feels more than she thinks. For new spiritual birth, as for
physical birth, men and women must supplement each other.
To be a woman then, is to be for twenty-five years a girl and then a
young woman, capable of feeding and protecting herself, possessed of
preparing and conserving powers superior to her brothers. After that,
for twenty-five years, she is a human being primarily devoted to
romanticism, finding her largest fulfilment only in wifehood and
motherhood, direct or vicarious; in the last twenty-five years, she
should be a wise woman, of ripe experience, carrying over her gathered
training and powers to the service of the group. All this time she is,
like the man, an incomplete creature, realizing her greatest power and
her greatest service only when working in loving association with the
man of her choice.
II
Woman's Heritage
So thoroughly have modern men fastened their attention upon the problems
of the immediate present, that one feels driven to justify oneself in
taking up an historical investigation of any subject presented in a
popular manner. And yet it takes little argument to show that what we
shall be depends in large measure on what we are; and that what we are
rests back on what we have been. In anything we try to think or feel or
do, we quickly reach a limit; and this limit is determined by the
original quality of our nervous system plus the training it has
received. For here is the curious fact about this instrument of thought
and feeling which at once takes it away from comparison with mechanical
instruments. Whatever it does, becomes a part of itself, and then helps
to determine what it will do the next time and how it will do it. With
the making easy of mental operations through repetition, and with the
formation of associations based on our choices, it may be truly said
that we become whatever we habitually think and feel and do.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account