“There were some results that were not anticipated, that followed from the practical operation of the “option of sex.” One was the very rapid elevation, almost deification of women. As there was now but one woman to three men her value and importance rose in the inverse ratio; and it became the habit to say that women were worth three times as much as men. They were in fact worth a good deal more than that, for they soon perceived that they held the key of power and the destiny of the race and were able to construct the conditions of life to suit their own whims and caprices. They became in fact the ruling sex. They demanded for themselves and easily obtained all the easy and profitable positions in business and official life, and remanded men to those least desirable. The wholesome civil service principles that had become pretty well settled in the law, thought, and practice of the country were now habitually evaded or openly set aside in favor of the sex. Nothing they asked for was denied them and hardly anything was good enough for them. In your day the women in America were extravagantly petted and coddled, but the attention and reverence they received then was nothing compared with the adulation and servility that has of late been rendered to them. Such a condition of things could not fail to encourage tyranny and arrogance, and to create them where they had not been before. Sentiment and favoritism became the controlling forces and business principles were ignored.
“There were three candidates for every woman’s hand, two of whom were bound to be disappointed, and so one-half the population—two-thirds of the masculine part—were doomed to a life of single misery. They did not accept the situation with fortitude or resignation. There was no end to quarreling and personal antagonisms and violence between rivals, and there arose what there had not been for several generations, and that was a “dangerous class.” It became unsafe for married people of either sex to appear on the streets unguarded. The “social evil” that in your day was so sore a question had long since under the conditions of universal matrimony, died out, and had practically ceased for a century and a half, now came again into existence in a more virulent form than ever. All classes felt the relaxation of the former restraints, and immorality became frightfully prevalent. Divorce which had become almost obsolete, now came to be an every day occurrence, not often, however, upon the complaint of the comparatively helpless husband, but upon that of the fickle wife who had succumbed to the superior attractions of a newer affinity. Divorce was now practically in the hands of the wife, and she dismissed her husband when he failed to please her, or when a more eligible mate presented himself. All women of course were not like that, but they all had the power to be, and a frightfully large proportion of them were.”
“The wise men of our race,” said I, “especially those of ancient times have generally regarded women as being not merely inferior to men physically and mentally, but as being essentially depraved and incapable of being good except under the stimulation and wise and pious discipline and example of men. Does the state of society you have described to me bear out this opinion? It seems that the women have broken loose from the wholesome restraints that were imposed on them in the former constitution of society in which men were supreme; and like a runaway team they are about to smash the wagon and dash out their own brains.”
“No,” he replied, “the state of affairs I have described does not at all confirm the opinion of the old blockheads you call your wise men. If they had been really wise they would have known that both women and men are created, formed, moulded and finished by their environment. Now woman constitutes a part of the environment of man and man constitutes a part, but in old times he constituted a relatively much larger part of the environment of woman. So it might be said, that if man was better than woman, it was because her influence on him was better or at least less harmful than his influence on her.
“But the fact is that under equal conditions the influence that each exerts on the other is equal, and they are mutually benefitted. The nearest to a golden age your race has ever come was during the one hundred years from the middle of the 20th to the middle of the 21st century, and that is the period of the most complete equality of the sexes in all respects—numbers, liberty, similarity of occupations and equal duties and responsibilities, and the total ignoring and rejection of the notion of any difference of ‘spheres’ for the activities of the two. The reciprocal and essentially exclusive functions involved are peculiar to each, but these do not essentially, and at the present, do not really interfere in any of the active employments people choose to engage in.”
“Nursing the children is essentially the woman’s business is it not?” I inquired.
“Not at all,” he answered. “Mammary glands belong to the male as well as the female.”
“Functionless ones,” said I.
“Only functionless,” he replied, “because they are not used. In your day there were occasional cases of well developed male mammae and professional male wet nurses, now they are common and it is doubtful if there are as many female as male nurses. There are and always were women who could not nurse their children, and these are more numerous now than ever. It is simply because there are other things they prefer to do, and so the accommodating function suppresses itself just as it did in the male because he for ages suppressed its use. So you see that even in nursing and rearing the children there is no exclusive female “sphere” any more than a male “sphere.” In the golden age I have just spoken of there was greater harmony and happiness than ever before, one of the essential conditions of which was the almost perfect equality of the sexes. But the termination of this golden age and the beginning of the social anarchy that commenced about the middle of the 21st century was traceable chiefly to the disparity in numbers between the sexes brought about by the operation of the “Option of Sex.” If we are to charge it to the corrupt influence of one sex on the other it was the corrupt assault of the unavoidably unmarried of the male sex on the institution of wedlock. If the women were willful arrogant and naughty, it was only because there were men about them in the proportion of three to one—for which they were not to blame—nor the men either, but the limited capacity of this globe, and nobody was to blame for that. Thus whatever they are or do in either sex is traceable to their environment.”
“Well,” said I, “since there has been such a failure, I am glad after all that my day was ended long before these evil times came. But what is to become of the race now! Will they discover a way to hold their own?”