Feminism / by Correa Moylan Walsh.

  • Correa Moylan Walsh
Date:
1917
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Feminism / by Correa Moylan Walsh. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    training are the highest moral qualities of men and women, and minor configurations of their bodies. Somewhat deeper differ- entiations of these sorts have gone on from cycle to cycle of civilisation, as the later have advanced beyond the earlier; and within the cycles, more superficial differentiations proceed as the civilisation rises from its pristine condition toward its culmi- nation.’* But at the culmination the advanced stage of civilisa- tion tends, as we have seen, to bring together and mix up men and women economically and socially, and, as it both leads men to the easier, safer, and more comfortable circumstances which were sooner obtained for women, and reduces the totality of men to a subordination and even subjection in the nexus and com- plexus of a highly developed society and state, somewhat similar to that of the other sex, its effect is much more to make women of men than to make men of women: sternness gives way to mild- ness, and the masculine virtues recede before the feminine, since it is easier to make the hard and strong soft and weak than it is to make the soft and weak hard and strong.1® If some women ape mannishness, they cannot make up for the loss of real man- hood on the part of men, and the country in which this tendency goes the furthest is inevitably exposed as a prey to those in which men have remained men. Now, the whole operation of modern feminism is consciously and purposely to increase this tendency. For women know that they cannot become like real men, and so they would first have men become as much as possible like women, in order that they may then resemble and equal such men. And cupations has called this or that talent into action. There is surely no occasion to go into any deeper or more abtruse reasoning, in order to explain so very simple a phenomenon,” Female Education, Edinburgh Review, Jan., 1810, vol. xv. p. 299 (Mill. Déssertations, iii. 106n.). He overlooked that some deeper reason would yet have to be sought for, to account for people catching up and training differently two half-portions of children who would otherwise grow up undifferentiated. Whately dis- posed of this passage neatly by referring to a difference which increases in after-life: “He [Smith] was ingenious, but often rash and inaccurate. It did not occur to him that when they are all taught together to write, and by the same master, in nine cases out of ten, people will rightly guess which is a_man’s hand and which a woman’s,” Miscellaneous Remains, 187. Cf. Maudsley: ‘‘To my mind it would not be one whit more absurd to affirm that the antlers of the stag, the human beard, and the cock’s comb are effects of education; or that, by putting a girl to the same education as a boy, the female generative organs might be transformed into a male organ,” Body and Mind, New York ed., 35. Perhaps, however, Smith’s error has been matched on the other side by the American editor of A. Walker’s Woman, who wrote (p. 377): “ As long as the little girl prefers her doll and the boy his top, it is useless to talk [as Mrs. Childs did] of the ‘same moral and intellectual condition’ of the sexes”; which has again been outdone, on his own side, recently by Mrs, Schreiner, who attributes our opinions on the distinction of sex, not only to artificial training, but also to artificial difference of dress! Woman and Labour, 165-6, 187-91. 18 Cf. Finck: ‘‘ The history of civilisation has been to make men and women more unlike, physically and mentally,” Romantic Love and Personal Beauty, 175, and so 290, t; 19 Even in Germany about fifty years ago Otto Ludwig noted that “the sex vices of women have now become those of men; our culture is predominatingly romantic and feminine, educating the man to be the tender mate of the woman, not the woman to be the strong, masculine companion of the man,” (quoted from Rosa Mayreder’s Survey of the Woman Problem, Scheffauer’s translation, pp. 90-1).
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