" How much simpler our problems would be if there were some
means of distinguishing children who will grow up into men of this type,
and carefully refraining from teaching them to read or write! Make the
State, indeed!--they can make nothing but fools of themselves, and
without women's assistance could not even reproduce their folly. Of
course the retort to all this nonsense is that neither sex ever yet
created anything without the other. Every human act and achievement is
the product of both sexes. When some friend of the past assures us that
women should not vote because they cannot bear arms, he is of course
reminded that women bear the soldiers. It is true and it is
unanswerable. In just the same way, when Mrs. Gilman wishes women to be
economically independent of men, whom she considers as animals
distinguished by their destructive energy, brutality and intense sex
vanity, she is simply ignoring half the truth. Let either sex try to run
the earth alone till Halley's comet returns, and what would be left for
it to see? Of all follies uttered on this subject, and they are many,
the cry, each sex for itself, is the wickedest and worst.
The reader may well declare that such criticism is easy, but of little
worth unless it be accompanied by some kind of constructive proposals
for the amelioration of present conditions. Nothing is destroyed until
it is replaced. If the present economic conditions of women involve the
most hideous wickedness and cruelty and injure the entire progress of
mankind, as they assuredly do, and if they therefore must be destroyed,
we must have something to replace them with; and if Mrs.
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