One may well suggest that insistence is necessary, for never, it may be
supposed, in the history of civilization was there so widespread or so
effective a tendency to declare that, in point of fact, there are no
differences between men and women except that, as Plato declared, woman
is in all respects simply a weaker and inferior kind of man. Great
writer though Plato was, what he did not know of biology was eminently
worth knowing, and his teaching regarding womanhood and the conditions
of motherhood in the ideal city is more fantastically and ludicrously
absurd than anything that can be quoted, I verily believe, from any
writer of equal eminence. If, indeed, the teaching of Plato were
correct, there would be no purpose in this book. If a girl is
practically a boy, we are right in bringing up our girls to be boys. If
a woman is only a weaker and inferior kind of man, those
women--themselves, as a rule, the nearest approach to any evidence for
this view--who deny the weakness and inferiority and insist upon the
identity, are justified. Their error and that of their supporters is
twofold.
In the first place, they err because, being themselves, as we shall
afterwards have reason to see, of an aberrant type, they judge women and
womanhood by themselves, and especially by their abnormal psychological
tendencies--notably the tendency to look upon motherhood much as the
lower type of man looks upon fatherhood.
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