The present tendency toward equalizing the cultural opportunities of man and woman will no doubt persist. Thus the range of woman’s cultural contributions will expand and the excellence of her creative achievement will rise, especially in the fields in which she has so far had but little chance to try her hand. It is to be expected, however, that in the highest ranges of abstract creativeness in philosophy, science, art, music, and perhaps literature, she will fail as she has hitherto failed to equal man. Her concrete-mindedness will ever continue to provide a useful counterpoise to the more imaginative and abstract leanings of her male companion. Her technical talents will shine more brilliantly in a world in which the crafts will again occupy the prominent place which was theirs once before. But her unique contributions will come in the range of the human element.
In this respect, woman’s principal affinity is calculated to bear its choicest fruits in a world better than the one we live in. When formalism recedes from the field of education, as indeed it has already begun to do, and gives room for more individual and psychologically refined processes, woman’s share in education will grow in scope and creativeness. When the family has left behind the agonies of its present readjustments, the reconstruction of a freer and happier family life will largely rest on the shoulders of woman. When prisons will be turned into hospitals and criminals will be treated as patients, woman’s sensitiveness, insight and tact will bring her leadership in this field. When a return of leisure and the reduction of economic pressure will permit a revival of the more intimate forms of social intercourse, woman’s social talents will find new fields to conquer. When the world of nations will sheathe its sword forever—an event toward the realization of which woman will probably contribute more than man—woman, to whom nothing human is foreign, will at last be free to show the world what she can accomplish as the mother of the family of man.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] We need not mention a Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes or Milton. Perhaps these are too far back. Not so Tolstoi, Dostoyevski, Turgenev, Goethe, Heine, Balzac, Maupassant, the Goncourts, Flaubert, Byron, Browning, Shelley, Emerson, Walt Whitman. Where are their equals among women? And coming down to the modern period, when literature is flooded with feminine figures, is there one who can be placed beside Anatole France or d’Annunzio or Proust or Gorki or even Bernard Shaw (not to mention Ibsen)? The feminine names that might be cited in comparison are obvious enough, but would any of them measure up to these—quite? However, let me mention Katherine Mansfield, Edith Wharton, Edna St. Vincent Millay. And I may add Sheila Kaye-Smith, Willa Cather, Selma Lagerlöf and Marguérite Audou.
I realize, of course, that such comparisons, except in a most sweeping statement, are invidious. A better picture could be obtained by juxtaposing, one to one, writers of similar type and literary form—but this is a task for a volume.
Dominant Sexes
By M. Vaerting
M. Vaerting,
one of a group of German anthropologists whose lectures and articles have attracted much attention in Europe; is also part author of “The Dominant Sex,” recently published in the United States.
DOMINANT SEXES