Men who marry are similarly restricted. The bachelor lacks the interests and happiness of the husband and father. The husband and father lacks the personal liberty and the freedom from responsibility enjoyed by the bachelor.
It is women, mainly, who demand both the prerogatives of the married and of the unmarried states. Notwithstanding that it is wholly impossible for them to fulfil the functions of both, because it is impossible for them to possess either the aptitudes or the energies for both.
In view of all that men have attained by devotion of their lives to the civilised achievements which now dignify existence and ennoble faculty, when one sees women more clamorously confident in their bounden right to inherit lightly all that the other sex has so laboriously won than they are reverently grateful for the inestimable human privileges and the treasuries of Art and Mind-wealth available to them by way of these surrendered masculine lives, it seems cause for indignation equal to that aroused by the phlegmatic calm wherewith most men accept as matter-of-course—instead of as matter for reverent gratitude—the gifts of Life and Faculty, to evolve and to transmit which to them, their mothers and all the generations of mothers before them surrendered their lives and their powers.
Recognition of the intrinsic differences, in trend and in function, between the sexes, should go far to dispel misconceptions and points of variance between them. The prevailing notion that the one sex is a sort of muddled version of the other—and not a highly-specialised presentment of an invaluable order of qualities, with inevitable shortcomings in the complementary order of qualities—is greatly to blame for sex-misapprehensions and antagonisms.
II
Feminists anticipate that War-experiences will further and finally eliminate all economic sex-distinctions, by having supplied convincing object-lessons that their sex is able to do, and to do efficiently, all that the other sex can do.
Far from object-lessons in the suitabilities, however, the experience has furnished terrible examples pointing the contrary way. Because although women have shown themselves both willing and efficient in these new capacities, results have proved at what cost to themselves and to life they have done men's work. Apart from a deplorable deterioration in morale, showing both in coarseness and in viciousness, the blight of age which has swooped upon both young and old, as direct consequence of the hardship and strain of masculine employments, robbing them of youth and health and joy and beauty, of repose and higher appeal, and transforming them into the grim, drab, harassed spectres many have become, should be warning enough, in all conscience, of whither Feminism is leading us.
Many of our young women have become so de-sexed and masculinised, indeed, and the neuter state so patent in them, that the individual is described (unkindly) no longer as "She" but as "It."
Dire have been the disillusionment and bitterness among our fighting men, upon returning to the homes and wives or loves they had long dreamed of—to find the wife or love a shattered wreck, or a strenuous, graceless, half-male creature; the home a place of nerve-racking unrest.
It is consoling to know that a number of those who have been de-sexed merely, and not disabled, will continue to find useful and contented outlet for their masculine developments in filling still the places of our fallen heroes. Cruelty lies in the fact, however, that the womanhood of many will have been wrecked quite needlessly; by strain of superfluously strenuous drill and marchings, scoutings, signallings, and other such vain and fruitless imitations of the male.