THE HUMANNESS OF WOMEN
A woman by the river's brim,
A wife and servant is to him—
And she is nothing more.
We have made mistakes, as old as humanity, about the world, and about women.
First, as to the world:
This we have assumed to be a general battlefield for men to struggle in; a place for free competition; full of innumerable persons whose natural mode of life was to struggle, for existence, with one another.
This is the individualist view, and is distinctly masculine.
Males are essentially individualistic—born to vary and compete; and an exclusively masculine world must be individualistic and competitive.
We have been wrong. The new Social Philosophy recognizes Society as an orderly life-form, having its own laws of growth; and that we, as individuals, live only as active parts of Society. Instead of accepting this world of warfare, disease, and crime, of shameful, unnecessary poverty and pain, as natural and right, we now see that all these evils may be removed, and we propose to remove them. Humanity is waking up, is beginning to understand its own nature, is beginning to face a new and a possible problem, instead of the dark enigma of the past.
Second, as to the woman:
Our mistake about her was a very strange one. No one knows yet how or why it was made; yet there it stands; one of the most colossal blunders ever made by mankind. In the face of all creation, where the female is sometimes found quite self-sufficient, often superior, and always equal to the male, our human race set up the "andro-centric theory," holding that man alone is the race type; and that woman was "his female." In what "Mr. Venus" described as "the vicious pride of his youth," our budding humanity distinguished itself by discrediting its mother. "You are a female," said Ancient Man, "and that's all. We are the People!"