The climax of civilisation / by Correa Moylan Walsh.

  • Correa Moylan Walsh
Date:
1917
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The climax of civilisation / by Correa Moylan Walsh. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    146/170 (page 132)
    men both in work and in play, with the consequence that women will hardly have more time than men have for the care of children, who, in the well-to-do classes, and in the lower also if the children be kept from employment, will become a nuisance. Things have not gone so far; but already in the most advanced nations and their most advanced classes, ex- tending to the middle, fewer children are produced, as is marked by the fall of the birth-rate. There is even a desire to aid this tendency of the times. In the place of the old dove- tailing of the sexes, with their apportioned relationship to the common offspring, there is an aspiration after equality of the sexes in all things, and a demand that every one, man or woman, shall be recognised only as an individual, as “a human”; wherefore in the present industrial conditions, so long as they last, women are to be admitted into rivalry and competition with men, and in the coming régime of socialism into complete coadjuvancy, copartnership, and companionship. The present inequality, among men, of wealth and of political power, has come altogether from contention, and though of late perhaps mostly, by the shrewd, from acquisition through the use of fraud, yet originally, it is alleged, chiefly from seizure, by the strong, through the use of force. So also the present supremacy of men and subordination of women is owing, it is maintained, only to the greater physical strength of men and their taking advantage of the physical weakness of women, originally to subdue them, and still to keep them in subjection. The future is to be an era of peace and good will, in which nothing shall be permitted to be gained by fraud, and force shall no longer be employed, but over all justice shall reign, which gives to every one his due,— and every one’s due is considered the same, since no one is responsible for the virtues or defects with which nature endows him. If any distinction shall exist, it will be only that of intelligence, in which, it is claimed, women are by nature equal to men. Women, therefore, will have as much to say about the man- agement of the world as men, and weak men as much as strong men, “say” in fact being everything, strength nothing. Only children and idiots will be excluded from the common councils, because of their lack of intelligence. That these dreams are a product of the last hundred years’