Femina, A Work for Every Woman — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Femina, A Work for Every Woman
John Stuart Mill · en
The time to commence to train mothers is from the moment they are born.
The minds of parents should be disabused of the false delicacy about
this aspect of a girl, and while no one expects daily lectures to be
given to children or young girls upon the responsibilities which await
them, such information should not be studiously avoided. I insist that
this important fact should not be lost sight of, motherhood is the
ultimatum of feminine existence.
Mistaken conceptions of woman’s education, in pinning girls to a life
of close mental application, is often productive of uterine disease, by
lowering the tone of the nervous system; while others who are ambitious
to acquire a professional education in later life, fall by the wayside
as hopeless invalids.
I do not disparage her capacity to study with equal proficiency the
arts and sciences, often with more ardor and closer application, than
her male colleagues, but she is simply striving to accomplish that
which the men can and do willingly accomplish for her, while at the
same time she is neglecting the education of those qualities which are
the sole inheritance of her sex, and which man could not usurp if he
would.
This class of uterine diseases develops in a few years into melancholy,
which closes the windows of the soul to the sunlight of hope, and
gradually drags the sufferer into a decline, that nothing but an entire
change in the habits and thoughts of the patient will ameliorate or
cure.
I would have our girls as independent of our boys as the latter are of
our girls. I would have it understood that each, in their specialty for
which God and nature has ordained them, is as honorable and important
in the social and industrial conditions of mankind as the other. I
would give woman the right, and deem it her privilege, to frankly and
unrestrainedly profess her fondness or desire to marry the man who she
believes would make her a desirable husband, because woman’s intuition
transcends man’s reason.
A reform in this direction would, indeed, elevate the woman to man’s
estate, where she belongs. A little less sentiment and more sense is a
wholesome panacea for some of the abuses of the marital contract.
I fully subscribe to the view that a woman shall at all times receive
the same wages for her mental and physical labor that men receive for
the same work, but I am entirely opposed to that modern tendency and
false social philosophy which is constantly striving to make a man
out of a woman. There is something so grossly absurd and unnatural in
this artificial readjustment of the natural duties of the sexes, in
their industrial and social relations, that it has degenerated in many
instances into fanaticism.