Is this degradation an inevitable outcome of the animating principle at
the heart of the process whereby sentient beings have thus far been
transformed from beasts into citizens? We are forced to answer "Yes."
Otherwise, why has the relative degradation of woman deepened
universally with the progress of civilization? If Westermarck is right,
it would seem that the lowest foundations of highly developed society
have always consisted of the bodies and souls of women. If such be the
historic fact, it may seem strange that only in our day, but now the
world over, is heard the wail of women crying to be freed. Perhaps the
reason, however, that we for the first time hear the wail is because
never before had the fissures grown wide enough to allow the fainter,
but more piteous, sighs to escape.
The fact, too, of which there is no doubt, that at last in our age even
women are beginning to be revered as responsible moral and spiritual
agents may be a sign that the Day of the Foundations is come, that the
age of civilization is nearing its close, and that a new era, animated
by a fresh principle of human co-ordination, is at hand. There is at
least evidence that many women are asking: "Are the products of
civilization worth the price which we women have been compelled to pay,
in order that they may exist? Is our subjection justifiable?" In reply,
the men who entertain an innate contempt for woman answer, "Yes"; those
who are moved by the extreme opposite of sentiment have arrived at the
bitter, though chivalrous, thought, "Better the non-existence of the
human race than the continued sacrifice of its womankind"; while even
the sons of the golden mean in judgment go so far as to say that not
only the already acquired benefits of civilization, but finer ones and
more abundant, can from now on be attained by some other process, which
will involve no degradation either to workingman or to woman, and which
in structural principle and human effects will differ as much from
civilization as civilization itself differed from the barbarism and
savagery which preceded it.
My own judgment is, that civilization is nearing its close. Four or
five deadly blows were dealt out to it by four or five events which
happened in the middle of the fifteenth century after Christ, and it
has been staggering ever since. In that century, certain things
occurred which produced the very opposite effect upon the masses of
mankind to that produced by the wonderful thing which had happened ten
thousand years ago and by its occurrence had changed radically the
relation of men and women to the community and to the physical universe
in which they lived. What was begun in the fifteenth century by the
events that took place then, and what was continued as a destructive
process until recently, is, in my judgment, being finished now through
a constructive process which has been set up by certain other
things--some ten or twenty--which have happened since the beginning of
the present century.