THE POSITION OF WOMEN

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1748, 6 September 1905, Page 25

THE POSITION OF WOMEN

The “position of women” is the subject of three articles in the July “Fortnightly.” Mil’s Mona Oaird, writing on “The Duel of the Sexes,” devotes fourteen pages to a condemnation of the attempts of Mrs Oraigie, Miss Elizabeth Robins, and “Lucas Malet” to decry the “woman’s movement.” The world, says Mrs Mona Caird, “is miserable and tormented because its inhabitants are all more or less like the orthodox mo*then —who has no tenderness but for her own.” We seem to be threatened, she says, “by a movement of thought that would drive the developing race back upon mere instinct, just when it seemed to be on the eve of rising to the level of a more human sentiment.” We are asked to believe that tihe “revolt” of woman is “a part of the great movement that mankind is making towards a finer type of humanity and a higher form of life.” “If Evolution is a fact, and not an ingenious fiction, mankind is actually changing, and, if so, the symbol of things human is not the circle —as Lucas Malet’ says that it is—but the spiral. . . . The wave of reaction no iv sweeping over the world which the authoress thinks will submerge the woman’s claims in the next ten years illustrates—if the symbol of Life be a spiral—'merely the tedious and roundabout line of ascent of that mysterious figure. If we are entering upon an age of Militarism, the woman’s cause, in common with every cause that makes a demand on human intelligence and justice, is likely to suffer. . . . But the ideals of the future do not include Militarism, or even militant commercialism. A thinker here and there is beginning to see that incessant warfare inside and outside the boundaries of his country is not the way to produce a reasonable or a tolerable social life. Their hopes are fixed upon co-operative instead of combative systems, inter naitional as well as national; on the growth of the human consciousness, and therefore of its sympathies; on the development of the Art of Life, that most important and most neglected of all the arts. . . . Some day, when the ‘woman question’ has indeed been submerged, because of our successors it will seem preposterous that any human being should have to plead for human rights, the long duel of the sexes will be laid at last to rest, and man and woman will find themselves free, for the first time, to build the House of Life, specious and splendid, as they alone in liberty and sympathy of spirit can create it. Not till then can it cease to be true that man by bis own fault (as Leopold Lacour proclaims), ‘has not only to tread the rough paths of civilisation alone, but finds at every step his natural ally, his companion by divine right: woman, against him.’ ” Lady Grove, the author of “Social Solecisms,” essays a reply in slix pages to “Lucas Malet’s” conclusions (set forth in fourteen pages of the May “Fortnightly”) as to the origin, progress, and future state of the women’s, movement. In Lady Grove’s opinion, “the view that the object for which each man should work should be merely to maintain his home, is on a par with the view that women should exist for no other purpose than child-bearing and house- Lack-lustre ideals both, she exclaims. “There is no greater joy

on earth, when it is a joy, than the joy of motherhood, but if this and the cares of the housewife were the only means of self-expression open to a woman, I much doubt if even her motherhood itself would! constitute so great a joy.” Lady Grove ranges the whole force of biological research against those who see in women’s subjection to men “a natural state of things,” and recommends to interested Pro*fessor Lester F. Ward’s “treatise on the origin [misprinted organ] and spontaneous development of society,” in which it is maintained that the female it not only the primary and original sex, but, metaphor aside, is the race; the male being, as it were, an - after-

thought of nature. The subjection of women, Lady Grove describes as “a state incidental to racial progress established iin order to- raise the male to a position of equality with the woman,” anil those who desire to maintain this subjection she describes as “in very deed enemies to their own kind; moles crawling in benighted regions of their own making, unconscious of the beauti-

ful world above and around them. They are the fools who whisper in their hearts ‘there is no God!’ ” Who-, she asks, “has not noticed that it is always the least virile and manly amongst the men who are so bent upon-‘keeping women in their proper place’ (what they want, of course, is to keep them out), and the least womanly amongst the women who are willing to abdicate their God-given right of human will in favour of an unlovely subservience to the mere brute strength of the male?” Lady Grove, after contending that “Lucas Malet” has ignored the love of work for its own sake—a love which is instinctive in women as well as in men—concludes:—“The suppression of our natural instinct cannot act beneficially upon another natural instinct, and it is only when the human being has been allowed to develop in the fullest freedom that the true relations of the sex function will assume its proper proportion. ‘Lucas Malet’ talks of the ‘American climate making for the development of nervous energy rather t-h &i that of sex/ It has, perhaps, never occurred to her that the whole human race has become artificially over-sexed, and that this condition, so far from being beneficial to the race, is just one of those things that- this movement will tend to counteract. In Mrs Stetson’s ‘Women and Economics’ this view is very ably and convincingly demonstrated. . . I must insist that when speaking of the oversexed condition of the human race I utterly repudiate, any participation in the belief that a sane, healthy desire for expansion and independence in the woman leads to the absurd views about child-bearing that “Lucas Malet’ seems to think obtain amongst the mass of the would-be emancipated. But neither do I accept President Roosevelt’s views as a doctrine of salvation. There is a. great deal of loose talk about the necessity of large families for the good of a nation. ... Is not the qual-

ity rather than the quantity of children the thing to be aimed at? If, then, by improving women’s status the breed improves, as improve it must, is not this preferable to the ‘plenty’ in their present very mixed* condition ? Has no one sufficient imagination to see in their mind’s eye a race that would be incapable of breeding this mass of ‘undesirable aliens’ who are tossed about from shore to shore, welcome nowhere, and a curse to themselves ?”