Woman and Womanhood | Page 6

even, as I shall try to show, woman's. But a Eugenic Feminism, for which I try to show the warrant in the study of woman's nature, would indeed be the cause of man, and should enlist the whole heart and head of every man who has them to offer. For here is a principle which benefits men to the whole immeasurable extent involved in decreeing that the best women must be the wives. "The best women for our wives!" is not a bad demand from men's point of view, and it is assuredly the best possible for the sake of the future.
It is claimed, then, for the teaching of this book that, being based upon the evident and unquestionable indications of Nature, it is calculated to serve her end, which is the welfare of the race as a whole, including both sexes. No one will question that the position and happiness and self-realization of women in the modern world would be vastly enhanced by the reforms for which I plead, though some men will not think that game worth the candle. But I have argued that men also will profit; nor can there be any question as to the advantage for children. It is just because our scheme and our objects are natural that they require no support from and lend no warrant to that accursed spirit of sex-antagonism which many well-meaning women now display--doubtless by a natural reflex, because it is the spirit of the worst men everywhere. It is primarily men's desire for sex-dominance that engenders a sex-resentment in women; but the spirit is lamentable, whatever its origin and wherever it be found. It is most lamentable in the bully, the drunkard, the cad, the Mammonist, the satyr, who are everywhere to be found opposing woman and her claims. There is no variety of male blackguardism and bestiality, of vileness and selfishness, of lust and greed, whose representatives' names should not be added to those of the illustrious pro-consuls and elegant peeresses and their following who form Anti-Suffrage Societies. Before we criticise sex-antagonism in women, let us be honest about it in men; and before we sneer at the type of women who most display it, let us realize fully the worthlessness of the types of men who display it. But if this be granted--and I have never heard it granted by the men who deplore sex-antagonism as if only women displayed it--we must none the less recognize that this spirit injures both sexes, and that it is necessarily false, since none can question that Nature devised the sexes for mutual aid to her end. By this first principle sex-antagonism is therefore condemned. This book, written by a man in behalf of womanhood--and therefore in behalf of manhood and childhood--is consistently opposed to all notions of sex-antagonism, or sex-dominance, male or female, or of competing claims between the sexes. Man and woman are complementary halves of the highest thing we know, and just as the men who seek to maintain male dominance are the enemies of mankind, so the women who preach enmity to men, and refusal of wise and humane legislation in their interests because men have framed it, are the enemies of womankind. At the beginning of the "Suffragette" movement in England, I had the pleasure of taking luncheon with the brilliant young lady whose name has been so prominent in this connection; and my lifelong enthusiasm for the "Vote" has been chastened ever since by the recollection of the resentment which she exhibited at every suggestion of or allusion to any legislation in favour of women--notably with reference to infant mortality and to alcoholism--whilst the suffrage was withheld. Substitute "destroyed" or "reversed" for "chastened," and you have a more typical result in quite well-meaning men of sex-antagonism as many "advanced" women now display it.
Further, this book may be regarded as an appeal to those women who are responsible for forming the ideals of girls. The idea of womanhood here set forth on natural grounds is not always represented in the ideals which are now set before the youthful aspirant for work in the woman's cause. It is not argued that the principles of eugenics are to be expounded to the beginner, nor that she is to be re-directed to the nursery. It is not necessarily argued, by any means, that marriage and motherhood are to be set forth as the goal at which every girl is to aim; such a woman as Miss Florence Nightingale was a Foster-Mother of countless thousands, and was only the greatest exemplar in our time of a function which is essentially womanly, but does not involve marriage. I desire nothing less than that girls should be taught that they must marry--any man better than none. I want no more men