Feminism and Sex-Extinction

by Arabella Kenealy

So far, the good sense alike of women as of men has declared against the innovation; rejecting, by large majorities, all but one of women Parliamentary candidates. It remains to be seen, however, whether men outside the House will later endorse the new departure, by electing members of the other sex to represent them. A thing impossible for one sex to do for the other, of course, seeing that not only do men and women arrive at their different conclusions by wholly different routes, but all questions bear wholly different values for them.

It may be argued that the existence of dual departments of politics, and dual points-of-view is argument for electing representatives of both sexes to The Commons. Not so, however. Each sex is specialist in its own domain. And an aurist wastes time, and most likely blunders, when he applies himself to treat eye-diseases. An oculist wastes time, and probably blunders, when delicate ear-operations are required of him.

Since by his dual constitution, moreover, man possesses, by inheritance from his mother, the quotum of woman-apprehension, foresight, and altruism required to present the woman-bent and view-point in his outlook and conduct of political and civic affairs, woman's personal intervention in these is as superfluous as it would be harmful.

Further, there are two orders of men: An order strictly male in trend and talent, and an order whose mentality is tinctured with a higher than average proportion of womanly conservatism, sympathy and intuition. And these two orders of male—typified, respectively, by the Conservative and the Radical parties—perpetually struggling to secure the measures prompted by their respective orders of mind, and intermittently gaining ascendancy, sustain a poise, or mean, between the unduly conservative and traditional, and the unduly radical and transitional in our political administration.

These two orders of mentality are found again in Youth and Age. All healthy and vigorous-minded young men are radical of bias; hot-headed, precipitate and intolerant of crusted orthodoxy, keen to demolish old institutions and established methods. While maturity makes for conservatism. It knows. And having learned by experience the values of institutions which have become institutions because of their values, it is prudent in its counsels of slow and stable reform, in its distrust of drastic, precipitate change, and, beyond all, in its wise misdoubtings of the world in general as being better than it is, and ripe, accordingly, for the best things.

For the present, there are numberless problems and questions of women's industrial employment, of children's employment, of the industrial supervision of young girls and their moral protection; problems of female drunkenness and prostitution, crimes of children, crimes against infants and children; questions of health, of the education and upbringing of the young, of dress and conduct, and of the general moral purification and the mental elevation of the Race—with all of which women are essentially qualified to deal; and the vital national importance whereof men have proved themselves as incapable of apprehending as they have shown themselves powerless to administer them.

The two classes of national problems, or the two departments into which most of these problems might be advantageously sub-classed, should be recognised as being the functions, respectively, of the one or of the other sex, and should be deputed for consideration to the House of Men or to the House of Women. With the result that in both, every problem of reform would be dealt with by the sex specialised by nature, by sympathy, and by training, best to understand and best to legislate for it.

As with The Lords, either House should have power to question or to reject the conclusions of the other.

We need urgently, indeed, such a House of Women to employ its native wisdom, its intuitive apprehension, and its moral and emotional impulse, and, moreover, to bring its experience and tact to bear upon a hundred-and-one tangled and neglected issues of moral and social reform. In order to remedy evils that have come, from long neglect, to be a cancer, slowly and surely sapping and vitiating our national life and endangering our racial supremacy.