FEMINIST DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE DESTRUCTIVE OF WOMANLY ATTRIBUTES, MORALE AND PROGRESS
"A woman versed in that finest of all fine arts, the beautifying of daily life."
I
In Woman and Labour, Miss Schreiner laments as follows, picturesquely but speciously: "Our spinning-wheels are all broken; in a thousand huge buildings steam-driven looms, guided by a few hundred thousands of hands (often those of men) produce the clothings of half the world; and we dare no longer say, proudly, as of old, that we and we alone clothe our peoples!"
A scene is conjured of brute-men with clubs savagely attacking and destroying hapless women's innocent spinning-wheels, as Mrs. Arkwright ruthlessly destroyed her husband's cherished models. Yet who, regarding the subject dispassionately, sees cause for anything but gladness that modern woman has not still to spin the linen of her household and the garments of its members—for anything but thankfulness for that intelligent male-brain which carried the woman-invention of the needle to its higher adaptations in the weaving and the sewing-machine? Who can justly regret that the taking over by men, in factories, of wholesale brewings and bakings, jam-makings, and so forth, has relieved the other sex of ceaseless drudgeries; and in so relieving it of drudgeries of house-keeping has left it free to develop the higher and the more intellectual arts of home-making?
"Slowly but determinedly, as the old fields of labour close up and are submerged behind us, we demand entrance into the new," Miss Schreiner affirms. And to emphasise our determination, the demand is printed in her book, as I have reproduced it, in Italics.
Losing sight altogether of the inestimable benefits to woman secured by the intervention of men between her and the hardest and the most debasing employments, she further protests, "any attempt to divide the occupations in which male and female intellects and wills should be employed, must be to attempt a purely artificial and arbitrary division."
"Our cry is, We take all labour for our province!"
Nevertheless, clever and intuitive woman as she is, she confesses (now the Italics are mine), "It may be with sexes as with races, the subtlest physical differences between them may have their fine mental correlatives." And yet, oh why, having come upon so promising a vein of truth, did she not follow it to its logical conclusions, and find in it all the answers to her extremist demands, and, with these, the refutations of her Feminist plea and claims?
Men and women are unlike not only in "the subtlest physical differences" which "may have their fine mental correlatives." They are unlike in the most obvious and basic facts of physical constitution and of biological function. And these must inevitably entail mental and temperamental correlatives more intrinsic and farther reaching even than the subtler physical differences she recognises as being possibly modifying factors in psychical aptitude.