“Though the first scratchings of art in the cave-men’s dwellings were, most likely, the work of a man, who gave him the æsthetic basis of his artistic sense? Arguing from what we know—his mother.
“And why did his mother cultivate this sense more than his father?
“If you had seen his father tearing through forests after, and sometimes in front of, infuriated wild beasts, while his mother kept cave and looked after the children, you would have a complete and pictorial answer to that question.
“Even the weariness of the chase is disastrous to the æsthetic sense. Look at all the hunting men and women you know, if you doubt what I say.
“So, then, without any transcendental talk about ‘souls’ being organic or inorganic, we may say, arguing common-sensically, that women have developed one of the most distinguishing ‘womanly’ attributes, not because she is a woman, but because she is a human being, and the conditions under which she has always lived have tended toward that development.
“Again—the love of a mother for her offspring, the one attribute of all attributes most distinctly and profoundly ‘womanly’: is it different in kind or essence from the love of a father for his offspring? Surely not, but it is more complex, more intimate, and more tender and more lovable, simply because the conditions under which it has grown have been more favourable to the development of this complexity, intimacy, and tenderness.
“It is the same beautiful thing, but more peculiarly cultivated, and it has grown in complexity while the man has been hunting, or trading, or fighting the world in some other way.
“Go through the whole category of those attributes whose superior development makes woman the flower of the earth. You will find not one which has developed on its own account owing to some mysterious chemistry of being peculiar to Woman,—all have developed from the common soil of humanity, owing to the superior conditions for their development in women.
“And the chief of those conditions has been Protection. The old conditions come up again. The man when he was hunting and killing beasts for his wife and children, and fighting for their existence, never imagined that he was by his labours founding Art and Poetry. He was. He was giving their germs conditions to grow in. Love, tenderness, gentleness, affection, morality: all were there in the cave with the woman. She suckled them with her children; she trained them in their growth with kisses—and slaps. They were the man’s no less than the woman’s, common to both their natures, but he left them in the cave with her to take care of, while he went hunting.
“Conditions have made woman what she is: the best and most beautiful thing in the world. And now Feminists want to change those conditions, just as Socialists want to change the conditions affecting man.