Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes
9781465654243
313 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
As I set out to write yet another book on Woman, I find it necessary first to decide whether the primary interest should rest in the eternal instincts, passions and typical character of womanhood, or in women’s actions and characters as affected by the unusual conditions of the time in which my work is undertaken. It is a decision by no means so simple as it would seem. Always the realisation of what is immediately before us tends by its vivid nearness to give an over-estimation of its significance. But to read life in this way is to understand very little. Something must be done to clear our vision so that we may take a wider view. The present, after all, is but the day at which the past and the future meet. Yet there are times when some overwhelming event so sharply changes the present as to obscure all the shining wonder of life. And at no period in history has this been more true than it has been in Europe in the last two years. Nowhere and never in the world can there have been a period of deeper or more rapid change. War came upon us without warning, like a thunderbolt from a clear sky; and in a day the outlook of life was changed. Now, this thought of surprising and quick-coming change brings me to something it is necessary for me to say. My book should have been begun many months back, at the very beginning of the war. But here I have to make a confession. The war caused in my mind a confusion that for some time left me extremely uncertain upon many things about which hitherto I have been sure. It has been a war of miracles in so far as it has made real much that seemed outside the world of possibility. Our sluggard imaginations have been stirred by an appeal that has aroused many primitive emotions. I recall the opening sentence in the last book that I wrote on Woman. “The twentieth century is the age of Woman. Some day, it may be, it will be looked back upon as the golden age—the dawn, some say, of feminine civilisation.” Now, as I read this statement, which, when I wrote it, I felt to be true, it appears so wrong as to be almost ridiculous. That sort of dream is over. What a fantastic picture it was that Suffrage militancy made for itself before the outbreak of the war. We pictured a golden age which was to come with the self-assertion of women; an age in which most of those problems that have vexed mankind from the dawn of history were to be solved automatically by a series of quick penny-in-the-slot reforms, that would follow on the splendour and superiority of woman’s rule. Militants, aflame for the reformation of man, discussed prostitution, the White Slave traffic, and all sex problems with a zeal that was partly pathological and partly the result of a Utopian dream.
