WOMEN AND SOCIETY
[Comments are invited on this article which was written many years ago by someone greatly admired by me. -- Vinaire]
The whole future of the race depends upon its attitude toward children; and a race that specializes in women for "menial purposes," or which believes that the contest of the sexes in the spheres of business and politics is a worthier endeavor than the creation of tomorrow's generation, is a race which is dying.
We have, in the woman who is an ambitious rival of the man in his own activities, a woman who is neglecting the most important mission she may have. A society which looks down upon this mission, and in which woman are taught anything but the management of a family, the care of men, and the creation of the future generation, is a society which is on its way out. The historian can peg the point where a society begins its sharpest decline at the instant when women begin to take part, on an equal footing with men, in political and business affairs; since this means that the men are decadent and the women are no longer women. This is not a sermon on the role or position of women: it is a statement of bald and basic fact. When children become unimportant to a society, that society has forfeited its future.
Even beyond the fathering and bearing and rearing of children, a human being does not seem to be complete without a relationship with a member of the opposite sex. This relationship is the vessel where in is nurtured the life force of both individuals, whereby they create the future of the race in body and thought. If man is to rise to greater heights, then woman must rise with him, or even before him. But she must rise as woman and not as today she is being misled into rising - as a man. It is the hideous joke of frustrated, unvirile men to make women over into the travesty of men which men themselves have become.
Men are difficult and troublesome creatures - but valuable. The creative care and handling of men is an artful and beautiful task. Those who would cheat women of their rightful place by making them into men should at last realize that by this action they are destroying not only the women but the men and children as well. This is too great a price to pay for being "modern" or for someone's petty anger or spite against the female sex.
The arts and skills of women, the creation and inspiration of which she is capable and which, here and there in isolated places in our culture, she still manages to effect in spite of the ruin and decay of man's world which spreads around her, must be brought newly and fully into life. These arts and skills and creation and inspiration are her beauty, just as she is the beauty of mankind.
The woman has to some degree become considered less valuable in this society than in other societies and times. She is expected to be in competition with men. Such a thing is nonsense. A woman has as high a plane of activity as man. He cannot compete with her any more than she can compete with him in the fields of structure and vigorous activity. Much of the social maelstrom now in existence has as its hub the failure to recognize the important role of the woman as a woman and the separation of the fields of women and men.
The changes which will come about in the next twenty years need no urging here. But with the recent discoveries in photosynthesis which should secure enough food to feed Man better and at less cost, the importance of birth control dwindles. The morality standards have already changed, no matter what moralist do to try to block the change. And woman, therefore, can be freed of many of her undesirable chains.
In the custody of Man is the current world and its activity and structure. In the charge of the woman is the care of the person of the human being and his children. Almost sole custodian of tomorrow's generation, she is entitled to much more respect than her chattel-period of the past gave her.
It is not, then, any wild Utopian thought that woman can be placed above the level hitherto occupied. And so she must be placed if the childhood of tomorrow's generation is to reach any high standard, if homes are to be peaceful and unharassed and if society is to advance.
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