Feminism is a declaration of sex war, Edna Kenton proclaims. Yet the
havoc involved in this might well give advanced women pause. Miss
Tarbell (_The Uneasy Woman_, _The American Magazine_, January, 1912)
does not believe that “Man is a conscious tyrant, holding woman an
unwilling captive--cutting her off from the things in life that really
matter--education, freedom of speech, the ballot.” She asks:
Is man the calculating tyrant the modern uneasy woman charges?... Is
not man a victim as well as she--caught in the same trap? Moreover,
is woman never a tyrant? That a man’s life may not be altogether
satisfactory, she declines to believe. The uneasy woman has always
taken it for granted that man is happier than woman.
Mrs. Rogers recognizes that man, not woman, is the idealist. The
unselfishness of woman, beyond her willingness to sacrifice herself for
her offspring, is poetic license. She is often unselfish; so is man.
In a small material way it may be worth noticing that the amount of
ordinary life insurance in this country, nearly all of which is paid
for by men for the benefit of women, is thirteen times the amount of
the national debt. Man and woman have been happy together, or miserable
together. There have been times when a man pounded his wife, but she in
turn pounded the children, and he in his turn was pounded by men higher
than he in the social scale. With an improvement in manners and morals,
man ceased submitting to pounding on the one side, and inflicting it
on the other. When force was the rule in all social relations, both
suffered from it. Since force ceased to be the rule, woman has had very
much the better of man; for she cares less about his comfort than he
does about hers; and while he will give up a good deal for the sake of
peace, there is little that she will not give up peace for the sake of.
“It is the perseverance which conquers,” says Thackeray, “the daily
return to the object desired. Take my advice, my dear sir, when you
see your womankind resolute about a matter, give up at once and have a
quiet life.”
The common interests of men and women, subserved by co-operation and
certain to be destroyed by competition, should avert sex war. The bonds
of matrimony, which gall so many women, are mainly restraints upon
men, and protections of women. Their dissolution would be cheerfully
submitted to by very many men, but it ought not to be necessary to
refer to the condition women would find themselves in after a few
years. The condition of the greater part of the women who have achieved
economic independence in the mills and shops is not such as to commend
economic independence to all the others, disregarding for a moment the
certain destruction of the domestic life, the home, and the family,
that would result from the universal economic independence of married
women.
The answer to both Feminist and Socialist is that of The Lords of Their
Hands, in Kipling’s, _An Imperial Rescript_. They were on the point
of signing the pact which would put an end to all struggle in the
industrial world--
When--the laugh of a blue-eyed maiden rang clear through the
council hall,
And each one heard Her laughing, as each one saw Her plain--
Saidie, Mimi, or Olga, Gretchen, or Mary Jane.
After several delegates had expressed themselves energetically in
regard to their plans for themselves and the Eternal Feminine, who was
untouched by the Feminist movement--