The position of woman: actual and ideal / with preface by Sir Oliver Lodge.

Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The position of woman: actual and ideal / with preface by Sir Oliver Lodge. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    81/192 (page 65)
    large in history. This tendency—the natural growth of an artificial civilization—is only now beginning to receive a check. Perhaps the most inexplicable mystery in the world of material nature is its lavish waste. But why should man, free in the spiritual world, deliberately stifle by conventional and artificial restrictions the price- less power of individual energy in any human being? Might not Society have reached a riper development, human nature a fairer stature, if women, half the race, had not been persistently coerced and repressed ? This, at any rate, history surely proves, that there is certain loss and pos- sible danger in repression, and, further, that the common human qualities in the character or per- sonality of woman—which are independent of the sex functions that differentiate her from man —naturally claim expression; and lastly, that the more frankly Nature has been trusted, and free play given to the individual,the happier and better have been the results both for women themselves and for Society, and ultimately, therefore, for the State, thus enriched by the service contributed by women to the common weal. Through the fullest self-development in each of its members the State attains its highest embodiment. ‘The realiza- tion of this great ideal lies yet in the far future. But mysterious forces—distinct from those secon- dary causes upon which I have touched, and chiefly spiritual in their nature—seem now to be arousing women over the whole world to realize F