But the complete personality is only that man or woman who has cultivated and exercised the strength which he or she as a human being possessed without having neutralised thereby the characteristic of sex. It is tragic when nature herself creates deviations from normal sexuality, but criminal when the ideas of the time weaken sound instincts and inculcate unsound ones. It is not woman nature but the denatured woman who is beginning to grow through the ultra-feminism which looks down upon woman’s normal sexual duty as only a low, animal function.
That sound men abominate this tendency is justifiable. On the other hand, it is unwarrantable to confuse a variation of feminism with the woman movement in its entirety, a movement which includes in itself a great earnest desire to work for the welfare of both mothers and children. As a manifestation of womanliness in its most complete, perfect form, many men still elect the woman whose entire life-content consists in the cult of her own beauty, a cult whose attendant phenomenon is the æsthetic culture which raises the temple about the altar. Under this perfect and apparently inspired form there is, however, rarely anything to be found of that which the man seeks: the longing and the power of true womanhood to give happiness by erotic and motherly devotion. Such women, like those cerebral women engrossed by their studies and their work, allow a real love to pass them by; men are only sacrificial servants of the cult, and the high priest is chosen not upon the ground of motives of feeling. This type is said to be more common in America than in Europe. But it existed thousands of years ago on the Tiber as well as on the Nile. That Cleopatra in the language of feminism now speaks of the “right of the personality,” and means thereby her right to represent no other value in life than that of the white peacock and the black orchid—the value of rarity—that does not make her a “product of the woman movement.”
But certain men characterise a woman thus, if they have been deceived in her: a psychology which equals in value that of the feminist when she speaks of man as the “oppressor,” the “corrupter,”—without noting that the world is full of poor men corrupted or tormented by women! Amid such mutual accusations, just or unjust—whereby gifted men maintain generalisations about “woman’s” being which are quite as ingenuous as those which silly women propose about “man’s” being—the sexes, in the days of the woman movement, have been almost as much alienated from each other as drawn together. The estrangement has taken place in the erotic field and through labour competition; the reconciliation has been effected—leaving out coëducation—by common industry and the social activity of both sexes.
The middle-class women of Europe have still so little share in the control of production that one cannot determine whether or not they have even awakened to the understanding that the fundamental condition of a universal life-enhancing issue of the woman movement must be new social conditions. One cannot yet predicate anything at all in regard to their desires to promote more humane labour conditions and a more just distribution of profit. Under the system now prevailing they must, like men, either conform to it or be destroyed economically. It is even so in public offices and similar fields of labour. Just as so many young men do, at the beginning of their career, a great number of women attempt to abolish the abuses and mitigate the formalism. But they meet such obstacles that, like the young men, they are obliged to abandon the effort; or they are compelled to give up the position whereby they win their scanty bread.
In this way, principally, the work of women in the sphere of charitable activity has given to men the opportunity for a correct valuation of the social working power of woman. Men have then in a wider sphere than that of the family circle, so often overlooked by them, learned to appreciate feminine enthusiasm and capacity for organisation, energy and devotion, initiative and endurance. Innumerable men—from the soldiers up, who in the hospitals of the Crimea literally kissed Florence Nightingale’s shadow on the floor of the hospital ward—have learned in the last half century that life has become more kindly for them since social motherliness has obtained for itself a certain elbow-room. The more women lose their present fear of appearing, in coöperation with men, “womanly” impulsive, savage in face of injustice and cruelty, the more will they signify in that joint work where, at least to-day, they still have a more fortunate hand—the hand of the mother.
And since a single fact is more convincing than a thousand words, so the facts gained in the social activity of woman have won, in later years, many men supporters of woman suffrage. The arguments derived from abstract right—however obvious they may be for every tax-paying, law-abiding woman—go to the rear to make way for the argument of “social utility.”
Not only women themselves but men also refer now to what women have accomplished when they are allowed to work in the service of society; they point to the reforms which were retarded or bungled because women had no immediate influence there where appropriations were granted and laws were enacted.
Especially significant for the reconciliation of the sexes is the joint social work of young people. The temperance cause or the education of the masses or socialism now brings together a host of young men and girls, who learn thereby that the social as well as the private life of labour gains in strength and wealth if men and women participate in it together.
The men who fear political life for woman are, however, right. Just as this life has injured the best qualities in the manhood of many men, so will it impair the womanhood of many women. Neither the spiritual personality of woman nor of man, nor even their secondary physical sex characteristics can withstand the influences of their private milieu, of their private labour conditions. Why should women better resist the influences of the public life? When the man is compelled, in political work for the state, to neglect in the highest degree the foundation of the state—the home—how should women be able to do otherwise than the same thing? The political work of both can benefit the home in general but their own home must always suffer for it, for a time at least. Women will learn, as so many men have already learned, that the fresh enthusiasm, the unexhausted optimism with which they entered the political life soon vanish before party pressure, general prejudice, opportunism, and the demands of compromise. And just as now so many men for these reasons withdraw from Parliament, many women will do likewise when they learn that what they can accomplish there with the characteristics peculiar to them, is so insignificant that it does not compensate for the injury which ensues because these characteristics are missing in the home.