Women -- Employment -- United States; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women in politics -- United States
Under the simpler forms of civilization that have prevailed in the past,
it was comparatively easy to find the complement for any particular man
or woman. With physical sympathy and desire, little more was needed than
common race and the same general social position. With simple
personalities even the marriage of convenience was apt to prove happy.
But, to-day, not only have men become infinitely more complex and
self-conscious than formerly, but women have ceased to be a general
class; and, in becoming individuals, they have developed wide ranges of
individual needs. Instead of fitting at the two or three points of
physical desire, race and social position, a man or woman, to live
strongly and well in this close union of body and soul, must fit each
other at many points. To the older sympathies must be added a common
attitude toward religion, education, artistic tastes, social ambitions,
industrial aptitudes, and a score of other living sympathies, if the
days are to pass in happiness, and each is to maintain his fair share of
the life of the new unit. Physical desire still remains the paramount
thing, but these other sympathies tend to strengthen it, or their
absence may weaken and ultimately destroy it. It is comparatively easy
for a person to find a complement to two or three of his, or her,
qualities; it is very difficult for a person to find fulfilment for a
score of his personal needs in another personality.
In earlier times, too, the individual reached such maturity as he or she
was to attain much earlier than now, when education has become a
life-long process. Once united, there was comparatively little danger
that passing years would develop latent tastes that might prove
dissimilar. To-day, complete union at twenty may mean many oppositions
at forty, if each half of the unit goes on developing its powers. And we
must add to this individual complexity and slower development of the
present-day men and women the intense self-consciousness of modern times
which makes it impossible for us to forget our conditions and go on
living in a world once significant and true but now empty or false.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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