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Page 1
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A WOMAN 9
II. WOMAN'S HERITAGE 31
III. WOMEN IN EDUCATION 57
IV. THE FEMINIZING OF CULTURE 85
V. THE ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE OF WOMEN 107
VI. WOMEN IN INDUSTRY 123
VII. THE MEANING OF POLITICAL LIFE 150
VIII. WOMAN'S RELATION TO POLITICAL LIFE 173
IX. THE MODERN FAMILY 207
X. FAMILY LIFE AS A VOCATION 231
XI. CONCLUSION 251
WOMAN IN MODERN SOCIETY
I
What it Means to be a Woman
If we go back to the earliest forms of life, where the unit is simply a
minute mass of protoplasm surrounded by a cell wall, we find each of
these divisions to be a complete individual. It can feed itself, that
its life may go on to-day; it can fight or run away, that it may be here
to fight to-morrow; and by a process of division it can create a new
life so that its existence may continue across the generations. With
such units it is quite conceivable that life might go on through all
eternity, death following birth, were it not that protoplasm contains
within itself a principle of change. Life and change are synonymous.
And this change moves ever toward a complexity, which we call
development, where cells unite in a larger life, and functions and
organs are specialized. Thus there comes a time when the part split off
carries with it power to eat and digest, to fight or run away, but only
half the power of procreation. This half unit, this incomplete
individual, is either male or female, and from this time on, the epic of
life gathers around the search of these half-lives for their
complements. The force that impels to this search, while at first
valuable only for the perpetuation of the generations, gathers into
itself modifying feeling and desires and, at a later period, ideas and
ideals, which finally, when men and women appear, make it the greatest
of all the shaping forces in life.[1]
[1] The fact that sexual selection does not play the part in organic
evolution which Darwin assigned it does not affect this statement. See
chapter on Sexual Selection in YVES DELAGEE and MARIE GOLDSMITH, _The
Theories of Evolution_, New York: Huebsch, 1912.
Of course, in such a sweeping statement as this, one must include under
sex hunger all the forces that drive men and women to seek each other's
society, rather than that of their own sex. In this sense, it can be
truly said that it gives a motive for our care of offspring, and for
all our other most self-forgetful devotions, our finest altruisms, our
most polished expressions in language, manners and dress. It justifies
labor, ambition, and at times even self-effacement. It underlies nearly
all the lyric expressions in art; furnishes almost the only theme for
that delineation of modern life which we call the novel; and is a main
support for music, painting, statuary and belles-lettres. It gives us
the institution of the family, which is the parent of the state; it is
closely allied to religion; and in our individual lives it lifts us to
the heights of self-realization and happiness, or plunges us down to the
depths of degradation and tragedy.
While this sex hunger belongs equally to men and women, it has come to
be associated with women, until we even speak of them as "the sex."
Hence, when we are discussing women, we are generally discussing the sex
interest common to both men and women, and this disturbs our point of
view. The fact is that sex interest is a common possession, that the
unit in human life, even more than among lower animals, is always a male
and a female bound together by love. Just as a body can function in
sleep or under the influence of a narcotic, for a time seemingly
independent of the mind, so a man or a woman can live for a time in
seeming independence of the opposite sex; but from any biological point
of view, such a separate existence of male and female is only a
transient effort. The half-life must find its mate or, after a few brief
days, it dies, leaving its line extinct. For all the larger purposes of
life, man is but a half-creature, and woman is equally a fragment.
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