CHAPTER XXVIII
THE EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN
I have just digested a most interesting book by M. Novicow, entitled 'L'Affranchisement de la Femme.' This is a very serious subject, and I feel sure that I need not apologize for treating it with all the earnestness of which I am capable.
In a society organized in conformity with the nature of things, woman will be brought up, from infancy, with the same object in view as man—that is to say, in order to learn how to live by her work. And so it should be, since work is the universal law of biology. Every living creature, from the invisible microbe to the most powerful animal, works unceasingly to assure its existence. Work being the law of Nature, to remain idle is to resist that law and to be immoral.
Woman must become an independent economic unity. There is nothing revolutionary in this; on the contrary, it is a most conservative idea. The leisure class does not represent one-thousandth part of society, and 999 out of every 1,000 women have, or should have, to work to support themselves or help to support their families.
From time immemorial women have worked in families, in manufactures, offices, in the fields, either as mistresses of houses, as helps, or as servants.
If woman has to be recognised as an independent economic unity, her education should enable her to earn her living, and, whether she gets married or not, she ought always to be ready to support herself without the help of man. Knowledge of every description should be placed at her disposal by the State, as well as at the disposal of man.
This is not all. Not only should she receive an education enabling her to make a livelihood, but also one enabling her to direct her steps in life in the right direction. She should be told the mysteries of life, and the rôle she is called upon to play in life. In our times the ideal young girl is the one who knows nothing. This ideal is absolutely false, and creates the greatest source of danger in existence that stares women in the face. This ideal was created by the monstrous selfishness of man, who reserved to himself the satisfaction, the pleasure (only a rake's pleasure) of teaching her in one moment what, little by little, without shock, she should learn without astonishment.
It is innocence that disarms women and hands them over, defenceless, to the most odious and revolting attempts to corrupt them. When we suppose nowadays that a girl knows too much of the mysteries of love, we think she is depraved; but degradation does not come from the knowledge of certain things—it comes from the mysterious and unhealthy way in which that knowledge is sometimes imparted.
If she were told openly, in full daylight, all she should know of the rôle Nature has given her to play, she would not be depraved.