Feminism and Sex-Extinction

by Arabella Kenealy

In a number of women, the Feminist and the Femininist (Ultra-Feminine) types alternate in the same person. In place of being stably and permanently centred in the woman-side of them, with the masculine to steady and intelligise, such persons act and re-act, in more or less violent pendulum-swing, between their two orders of impulse. Thus we get women, intellectual, progressive, strenuous, engrossed for part of their time in serious, perhaps in public avocations—and then plunging, in violent recoil, into social frivolities; vanities, dissipations, pranks, intrigues, excesses.

Men, too, act between extremes. In far less degree, however. Life demands from most of them over-accentuation and concentration of their male-abilities, in physical and mental specialisations. And in reaction, they plunge into follies and vices. But the more virile keep their heads, and preserve a certain stability and conformity in their aberrations. While effeminate men, it is mainly who lapse into vicious excess.

Since woman supplies the inspiration and the morale of life, however, and since her momentous function of motherhood empowers her to make or to mar the Race whereof she is creatrix, a nation has a greater claim upon its women, and has, at the same time, more reason and more right to restrict their liberty of action, and to direct their bent, than it has in the case of its men. Its survival and its downfall tremble in the scales of Life which woman holds. To compensate her for such restriction and limitation of her scope, obviously it owes her privileges, personal and economic. And a subconscious recognition of this fact has been, doubtless, the source of such privileges as she now enjoys.

There have always been, as history shows, women in whom, from faulty heredity or culture, or from stress of circumstance, the Male-traits have been abnormally developed; virile-brained, stout-hearted, muscular chieftainesses, chatelaines, abbesses, matrons; or (in less agreeable guise) amazons, shrews and viragoes. But always such were recognised as being abnormal, and for the most part as being repellant. It was not sought to manufacture them. It is only of late years that Mannishness has become a serious Cult.

And now a dangerous thing has happened. Because where formerly symptoms of Feminism attacked individuals only—and these mainly the mature and eccentric—now the young and the normal are being indoctrinated wholesale. Young girls taken during the malleable phases of growth and development, and forcibly shaped to masculine modes, become more or less irretrievably male of trait and bent; losing all power to recover the womanly normal.

While on the other hand, there are assembling to-day, in an opposite ever-increasing and menacing camp, those others for whom Feminism, with its extremist, exacting, self-reliant codes and modes, has no appeal; the pretty mindless, the idle frivolous, the pleasure-seeker, the freakish and the conscienceless—in a word, the Ultra-Feminines; in whom the woman-failings are unfortunately more conspicuous than are the woman-virtues. Between these two extremes stand (and stand so far in gratifying number) the natural, admirably-balanced, noble and invaluable Moderates—normal women content to be normal women, and to fulfil the destined rôle of such. And these are the saving grace of nations.

Apart from these, the sex is ever further and more dangerously separating into the two extremist camps; the Mannish and strenuous, and the Over-Feminised and purposeless, more or less idle and frivolous, selfishly absorbed in clothes, in luxury and pleasures; exacting masculine tribute in mind and kind, with but little return in affection or ministry.

In place, accordingly, of that fine normal poise of the Contrasting Man and Woman-Traits—which is the way of Evolution and of Progress—there is being substituted in the sex this degenerative segregation of its Traits in two wholly opposite, and equally lopsided types. And of these, the purposeful and strenuous, all the while making for masculine standards, are all the while further discarding the beauty, the emotions, the delicacy and morale of true woman; while the mindless and vain, the attractive and charming, are more and more divorcing themselves from purpose, from seriousness, from noble endeavour and usefulness.

And since rights accorded to women are shared by all, every new privilege Feminists win for the sex in the sweat of their assiduous brows—liberty, latchkeys and general latitude—the Ultra-Feminines snatch, and apply to frivolous and profitless, or to demoralising ends; licence, extravagances, vices.

The Ultra-Feminine, for the most part shallow and mindless (although many clever women belong to this order), absorbed in complacent culture of her oftentimes alluring personality, enhancing it, attiring it, developing its charm and graces, eager of homage and of tribute, is example of that Parasitism Miss Schreiner condemns in the sex; example of qualities normally making for beauty, but from loss of balance, owing to warp, hereditary or of misdirection, morbidly feeding upon themselves.