III

THE REAL VICTIMS OF “SOCIETY”

I

There is nothing paradoxical in affirming that while no woman before she has reached the age of thirty-five or forty should, if she can avoid it, compete with men in work which the exigencies of civilization (man-made civilization) have adapted to him alone, still, every girl of every class, from the industrial straight up to the plutocratic, should be trained in some congenial vocation during her plastic years.  Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago.  Socialism might solve the problem if it were not for the Socialists.  Certainly no man or body of men has yet arisen with the proper amount of imagination, selflessness, brains and constructive genius, necessary to plan a social order in which all men shall work without overworking and support all women during the best years of the child-bearing and child-rearing span.  If men had been clever enough to make even an imperfect attempt to protect women without independent means from the terrors of life, say by taxing themselves, they would not be pestered to-day with the demand for equal rights, see themselves menaced in nearly all of the remunerative industries and professions, above all by the return of the Matriarchate.

It is Life that has developed the fighting instinct in woman, bred the mental antagonism of sex.  Nature did not implant either.  Nor has she ever wavered a jot from the original mix compounded in her immemorial laboratory.  Man is man and woman is woman to-day, even to the superior length of limb in the male (relative to the trunk) and the greater thickness of hairs in the woman’s eyelashes.  In England women of the leisure class showed during the years of the sports craze a tendency to an unfeminine length of limb, often attaining or surpassing the male average.  But Nature avenged herself by narrowing the pelvis and weakening the reproductive organs.  Free trade drove the old sturdy yeoman into the towns and diminished the stature and muscular power of their descendants, but ten months of trench life and Nature laughed at the weak spot in civilization.  The moment false conditions are removed she claims her own.

Women to-day may prove themselves quite capable of doing, and permanently, the work of men in ammunition and munition factories, but it is patent that when human bipeds first groped their way about the terrifying Earth, she was not equal to the task of leveling forests, killing the beasts that roamed them, hurling spears in savage warfare, and bearing many children for many years.  She played her part in the scheme of things precisely as Nature had meant she should play it:  she cooked, she soothed the warrior upon his return from killing of man or beast, and she brought up her boys to be warriors and her girls to serve them.  There you have Nature and her original plan, a bald and uninteresting plan, but eminently practical for the mere purpose (which is all that concerns her) of keeping the world going.  And so it would be to-day, even in the civilized core, if man had been clever enough to take the cue Nature flung in his face and kept woman where to-day he so ingenuously desires to see her, and before whose deliverance he is as helpless as old Nature herself.