Controversialists on both sides, and even some
of the first rank, are content to accept this absurd position.
The one party seeks to prove that woman is man's equal because Rosa
Bonheur and Lady Butler have painted, Sappho and George Eliot have
written, and so forth; in other words, that woman is man's equal because
she can do what he can do: any capacities of hers which he does not
share being tacitly regarded as beside the point or insubstantial.
The other party has little difficulty in showing that, in point of fact,
men do things admittedly worth doing of which women are on the whole
incapable; and then triumphantly, but with logic of the order which this
party would probably call "feminine," it is assumed that woman is not
man's equal because she cannot do the things he does. That she does
things vastly better and infinitely more important which he cannot do at
all, is not a point to be considered; the baseless basis of the whole
silly controversy being the exquisite assumption, to which the women's
party have the folly to assent, that only the things which are common in
some degree to both sexes shall be taken into account, and those
peculiar to one shall be ignored.
It is my most solemn conviction that the cause of woman, which is the
cause of man, and the cause of the unborn, is by nothing more gravely
and unnecessarily prejudiced and delayed than by this doctrine of
sex-identity.
Pages:
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73