NOT PLASTER SAINTS
Women latch the Men
I wish I knew why so many people think that women are, and must bo, better in the moral sense that men are, writes Edith Shackleton in a London newspaper. Speaking to a gathering of young women the other day, Mrs. Stanley Baldwin said: “I always feel that woman is tho light-bearer in life. A man is made and constituted differently, and we women have got to keep along the spiritual side of life.'’ I have pondered over these statements for a long time, as I have pondered over similar pronouncements from earnest and respected men and women on previous occasions, and I have come to the conclusion that Mrs. Baldwin means that somehow it is harder for men to be good than it is for women, and that women must therefore be the spiritual leaders and take especial care to remain unspotted from the world. 'This idea comforts some women and inflates others into such a condition of moral conceit that thoy are not fit to live with.
To mo it seems pure rubbish, only credible if we were all found under gooseberry bushes and no woman ever had a father and no man a mother. There is no reliable evidence in support of the ethical supremacy of woman. In this, as in minor -things, women are stili, according to Mrs. Poyser, made to match the men. It is true that women do not light as men do* but in tho last war they hated at least as much, and probably a great deal more, than the men on the battlefields, and surely it is for evil thoughts rather than for blows that we get our spiritual bad marks! Many a matron has a delicious sense of being as near an angel as makes no matter because she smiles serenely in a comfortable house, is indulgent to her children, generous to her servants and fond of distributing things she does not need to all the sick and poor within range. But she would be a much better, attempt at an angel if she wero not doing all this with money that her husband has scrambled for in the markets, and the chances are that if she had to fend for herself she would fight tooth and claw to get any advantage for her brood. The convention that women, or at least, wero angels on a moral plane that no man dare hope to reach was highest in the middle of the nineteenth century, when ladies wore being unprecedentedly angelic on the money made in the cotton mills and coal mines, where babies brought from the workhouses were allowed to work until they dropped from fatigue. Contentment with this, theory that women are much “better” than men is a greater puzzle than tho prevalence of the theory itself. I can think of nothing more depressing than the certainty that one was necessarily fathered by a moral inferior, doomod to spiritual mesalliance, and incapable of roaring one’s sons to be as high-mintf-ed as one’s daughters! Domestically enthroned women, safe from financial cares, can easily play angel. It is proper and charming that they should. But are they giving the best encouragement to working girls when they assure them that besides earning a living somehow they must give closer attention to spiritual things than the alleged morally inferior men who work with them? It may be argued that there is greater need for saintliness in women than in men, because women, having all the young children in their caro must do most to mould the characters of both men and women. But if, so far, they have failed utterly to implant spirituality in their sons, the argument rather falls to pieces. We really cannot have it both ways.
Tho notion that, men must spiritually lag behind women has caused a great deal of misery in its time. It almost defeated tho moral campaign of Josephine Butlor. And yot, somehow, it never got women into tho offices of the Church.
On the whole, I think we shall prosently all feel much more decent without it.
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Bibliographic details
Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 7019, 19 September 1929, Page 12
Word Count
689NOT PLASTER SAINTS Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 7019, 19 September 1929, Page 12
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