Woman and Womanhood | Page 4

a demand to be denied, whilst at the same time we grant the right of every man and of every woman to opportunities for the best development of the self; whatever that self may be--including even the aberrant and epicene self of those imperfectly constituted women whose adherence to the woman's cause so seriously handicaps it.
But it is one thing to say people should have what is best for them, and another that whatever they want is best for them. If it is not best for them it is not right, any more than if they were children asking for more green apples. Women have great needs of which they are at present unjustly deprived; and they are fully entitled to ask for everything which is needed for the satisfaction of those needs; but nothing is more certain than that, at present, many of them do not know what they should ask for. Not to know what is good for us is a common human failing; to have it pointed out is always tiresome, and to have this pointed out to women by any man is intolerable. But the question is not whether a man points it out, presuming to tell women what is good for them, but whether in this matter he is right--in common with the overwhelming multitude of the dead of both sexes.
As has been hinted, the issue is much more momentous than any could have realized even so late as fifty years ago. It is only in our own time that we are learning the measure of the natural differences between individuals, it is only lately that we have come to see that races cannot rise by the transmission of acquired characters from parents to offspring, since such transmission does not occur, and it is only within the last few years that the relative potency of heredity over education, of nature over nurture, has been demonstrated. Not one in thousands knows how cogent this demonstration is, nor how absolutely conclusive is the case for the eugenic principle in the light of our modern knowledge. At whatever cost, we see, who have ascertained the facts, that we must be eugenic.
This argument was set forth in full in the predecessors of this book, which in its turn is devoted to the interests of women as individuals. But before we proceed, it is plainly necessary to answer the critic who might urge that the separate questions of the individual and the race cannot be discussed in this mixed fashion. The argument may be that if we are to discuss the character and development and rights of women as individuals, we must stick to our last. Any woman may question the eugenic criterion or say that it has nothing to do with her case. She claims certain rights and has certain needs; she is not so sure, perhaps, about the facts of heredity, and in any case she is sure that individuals--such as herself, for instance--are ends in themselves. She neither desires to be sacrificed to the race, nor does she admit that any individual should be so sacrificed. She is tired of hearing that women must make sacrifices for the sake of the community and its future; and the statement of this proposition in its new eugenic form, which asserts that, at all costs, the finest women must be mothers, and the mothers must be the finest women, is no more satisfactory to her than the crude creed of the Kaiser that children, cooking and church are the proper concerns of women. She claims to be an individual, as much as any man is, as much as any individual of either sex whom we hope to produce in the future by our eugenics, and she has the same personal claim to be an end in and for herself as they will have whom we seek to create. Her sex has always been sacrificed to the present or to the immediate needs of the future as represented by infancy and childhood; and there is no special attractiveness in the prospect of exchanging a military tyranny for a eugenic tyranny: "plus ?a change, plus c'est la m��me chose."
One cannot say whether this will be accepted as a fair statement of the woman's case at the present time, but I have endeavoured to state it fairly and would reply to it that its claims are unquestionable and that we must grant unreservedly the equal right of every woman to the same consideration and recognition and opportunity as an individual, an end in and for herself, whatever the future may ask for, as we grant to men.
But I seek to show in the following pages that, in reality, there is no antagonism between the claims of the future and the present, the race