Women -- Employment -- United States; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women in politics -- United States
The last two hundred years have revolutionized nearly all of our deepest
conceptions concerning the relations of human beings to religion,
government, property, and to each other. New knowledge has given us
partial control over vast forces of nature; and has so increased our
mobility as almost to free us from limitations of space. We have had
wonderful visions of the possibilities that lie in intelligent human
cooperation, and have begun to realize them in a hundred new forms. In
the midst of these compelling changes, women could no more remain
undisturbed, within the confines of kitchen and nursery, than men could
remain on their little New England farms or cobbling shoes and making
tin pans in the petty workshops of a century ago. But meantime the
special interests of women have been sadly confused because of the
larger changes in which all human relations have been involved in this
time of readjustment. Instead of talking of unquiet women to-day, we
should talk of an unquiet world.
In the midst of this confusion, most of those who have sought to secure
a truer relation of women to the life around them have worked on the
lines of minimizing sex differences. It has been felt that the
educational, industrial, social and political limitations under which
women rested were due to the desire of men to exploit them. Men, being
free, had developed for themselves an ideal world of thought and work;
and if women wished to be free and happy, they needed only to break down
the barriers separating them from this man's world.
Most of these barriers are now down; but the women who study in
universities, teach in the schools, maintain offices as doctors or
lawyers, collect news for the press, tend spindles in a factory or sell
ribbons at a counter have found that the man's world is far from ideal
and that by entering it they have not escaped the special limitations of
their sex. Everywhere the feeling is abroad that, instead of having
arrived at a destination, women have embarked on a journey fraught with
many uncertainties.
This volume has been written in the belief that men and women alike will
achieve greatest freedom and happiness, not by minimizing sex
differences, but by frankly recognizing them and using them. If we could
reduce men and women to sameness, we should destroy at least half the
values of human life. They are not alike; but they are perfectly
supplementary. The unit can never be a man nor a woman; it must always
be a man and a woman. This means that in all the activities essential to
human development men and women must carefully study to find what each
can best provide.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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