To institute reform successfully needs a wider spirit. We must face sex problems with biological and historical knowledge. Before we can understand women's present position in society, or even suggest a future, we must examine the place she has filled in the civilisations of the past; we must fix, too, the part the female half of life has played in the evolution of the sexes. Yet an inquiry into facts is only the first stage, and not the final. When we can go on from these facts to their results, and learn the reasons of what we have discovered, we shall become to some extent, at least, prepared. Then, and then only, can we venture to look forward and intelligently suggest whither the present revolution is leading us.
It is to reach this goal that this book is written. It is an attempt to place the woman question in a wider and more decisive light. It is not an investigation of facts alone, but of causes. The gospel it would preach is a gospel of liberation. And that from which woman must be freed is herself—the unsocial self that has been created by a restricted environment. We have seen that woman's social inferiority in the past has been to a great extent a legitimate thing. To all appearances history would have been impossible without it, just as it would have been impossible without an epoch of slavery and war. Physical strength has ruled in the past, and woman was the weaker. The truth is that woman's time had not come, but now her unconscious evolution must give place to a conscious development. Happiness for women! That must imply wholly independent activities, and complete freedom for the exercise of her work of race production. Woman's duty to society is paramount, she is the guardian of the Race-body and Race-soul. But woman must be responsible to herself; no longer must she follow men. The natural growth force needs to be liberated. Woman must be freed as woman; she must die to arise from death a full human being. There is no other solution to the woman question, and there can be no other.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] "Woman and Labour," The Chances of Death, Vol. I. p. 226.
[2] Quoted from The Emancipation of English Women, by W. Lyon Blease, a book which gives an unbiased, and in many respects excellent, account of the struggle of English women to gain freedom from the seventeenth century to the present day.
[3] Strictures, I. 6, Gregory.
[4] The Emancipation of English Women.
[5] For an account of this struggle see Sketch of the Foundation and Development of the London School of Medicine for Women, by Isabel Thorne; also The Emancipation of English Women.
[6] Woman and Economics, Mrs. Stetson, p. 38.