"We may outrun,
By violent swiftness, that which we run at,
And lose by over-running."
Shakespeare.
I
How now, in detail, does the Feminist creed lend itself to the biological developments and indications of Nature described in the last chapter?
Unfortunately, as already intimated, it ignores, violently combats at every turn, and only too frequently wholly frustrates them.
Feminist leaders have shown themselves deplorably indifferent alike to biological and to sociological law. Losing sight of the truth that the intrinsic and eternal function of Humanity is Parenthood—and more particularly Motherhood—they have made, all along the line, not for the true emancipation of woman but for her commercialisation, merely.
The economic viewpoint has obsessed them wholly. Not to free woman from disabilities under which her womanhood, her wifehood, and her motherhood were suffering, but to convert her powers into industrial and marketable commodities has been the aim. That higher ideals are bound up with economics, is true. The rights of honest self-support and adequate wage, leading to kindlier, healthier and happier life-conditions, are, by improving constitution and character, important assets on the side of Evolution. But by far the most urgent and important consideration in economics, as these affect women, is the fundamental biological principle that, because their greatest of all values lie in their evolutionary and racial endowments, rather than in their concrete and commercial efficiencies, the sex requires and is entitled to such more lenient and privileged social and industrial adjustments as admit of due quota of its vital resources, physical and mental, remaining conserved in the potential. In place of these being differentiated and expended to the degree natural to man, and exacted of him by his prescribed rôle in progress.
In direct and violent opposition to Nature, the Feminist system does everything possible, however, to frustrate that normal phase of arrest along lines of concrete development whereon the higher evolution of woman—and in woman, of the Race—depends. Just at the age when Nature locks the door upon her constitutional resources, for the purpose of evolving these to higher organisation, the schools and industries do a strenuous best to keep the door forcibly open, and to wrest the resources from the storehouse of potential. With a view to fitting woman to compete with the male, in whom such arrest of individuation, in the racial interests, is occurring to vastly less degree.