Conclusion : Part 2

Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles
by C. W. Saleeby, M.D.

(Page 23 of 23)

And just as woman is mediate between man and the future, so man is mediate between woman and the present. Woman is the more immediate environment, the special providence, so to say, of childhood; and man, in a rightly constituted society, is the special providence, the more immediate environment of woman, standing between her and inanimate Nature, guarding her, taking thought for her, feeding her, using his special masculine qualities for her - that is to say, in the long run, for the future of the race; this indeed being the purpose for which Nature has contrived all individuals of both genders. If we prefer such phrases, we may say that the future or the children are parasitic upon woman, and that woman is "parasitic upon the male," which is one woman's way of putting it. Or we may say that these are the natural and therefore divine relations of the various forms in which human life is cast, and that our business is to make them more effective, more provident and freer from the factors which in all ages have tended to injure them.

Fourthly, we have everywhere seen cause to condemn gender-antagonism, and it is my hope that no page or line or word of this book can be accused of illustrating or justifying or inciting to or even attempting to palliate either form of this wholly abominable spirit of the pit. If such places there be, there assuredly is misdirection and falsity. This spirit is one of the great enemies of mankind. As aroused in women against men, it has done and is doing no little harm; as exhibited by men against the righteous claims of women, it is one of the supremely malign forces of history. Wherever and however displayed, it is false to the first and most essential facts of life, from the moment of the evolution of gender, hundreds of millions of years ago, until our own time.

All who display it, however excellent their intentions, are enemies of mankind; all who work upon it for their own ends, political and personal, without feeling it, are beneath disgust. These are things true and necessary to be said, though they should not deter us from sympathizing with the unhappy individuals, not a few, whose lives have been blasted by individuals of the other gender, and who show the natural but tragic tendency to make their private injury cause for resentment against one-half of mankind. Surveying the pages that are past, I am almost inclined to regret that, the plan of the book notwithstanding, a special chapter was not devoted to Gender-Antagonism and to a demonstration on biological grounds of its wickedness and pestilence wherever it be found, and whatever plausible case for it may anywhere be made.

If the sound of hope is not heard as the ground-tone of these chapters, let it ring through all else at the end. I am an optimist because I am an evolutionist, and because I believe, as every one of those whom I call eugenicists must, that the best is yet to be. The dawn is breaking for womanhood, and therefore for all mankind. If we are asked to express in one phrase the reason why this hope is justified, it is because the long struggle between two antithetic conceptions of human society is reaching a definite issue.

These radically opposed ideas may for convenience be called the organic and the internecine. The internecine conception of society forever sets nation against nation, race against race, class against class, gender against gender, individual against individual, on the ground that the interest of one must be the injury of the other. It is false. no, more, for man living his life on this earth as he must and will, it is the Great Lie.

And it is being found out. Even international trade and commerce, from which such a service could scarcely have been expected, are here contributing to philosophy. Our fathers talked of the comity of nations; we are beginning to discover their interdependence. The coming of that discovery is one of the few really new things under the sun. Not so very long ago, when mankind was far less numerous, such interdependence of nations did not exist; they were self-sufficient, just as the patriarchal family was self-sufficient still further ago.

But the interdependence of the genders is so far from being a new fact that it is as old as the evolution of gender, and the decadence and disappearance of parthenogenesis or reproduction from the female gender alone. Once bi-parental reproduction becomes necessary for the continuance of the race, both genders sink with either, and neither can swim but with both. Yet so far are we from realizing this most ancient of facts today that, on both sides of the woman question, wonderful to relate, are to be found controversialists who are seeking to deny this continuous lesson of so many million ages. The reader may take his choice of folly between them. On the one hand, there are the feminists who seek to do without man, - except for the minimum physiological purpose. The women are to sustain the present and create the future simultaneously, and man is to be reduced, apparently, to the function of the drone. Therefore Mrs. Gilman in "Women and Economics." Over against her and those who think with her are to be set the men, and women too, who tell us that "men made the State," - a sufficiently shameful admission - and that women have no business with these things. Do not their mothers blush for such; to have travailed so much, and to have achieved so little?

Fortunately, however, the greater number of those who think and determine the deeds of the mass are beginning, though the dawn is yet very faint, to perceive that this truth of the interdependence of the genders, which is part of the greater truth that mankind is an organic whole, is not only much truer than ever today, but is vital to our salvation; and save us it will. In so far as we are keeping women inferior to men, we must raise them; in so far as we are keeping men, in other and certainly no less important respects, inferior to women, we must raise them. The future needs and will obtain the utmost of the highest of both genders. Therefore only "springs the crowning race of human kind": wherein, as we hasten to the dust, living for a day, yet for ever, our eyes prophetic may behold the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection.

Press of J. J. Little & Ives Co., New York.
Copyright 1911 by Mitchell Kennerley.