Feminism and Sex-Extinction E-Book

Arabella Kenealy

• Herausgeber: Arabella Kenealy
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Feminism, the extremist—and of late years the predominant cult of the Woman's Movement, is Masculinism.It makes for such training and development in woman, of male characteristics, as shall equip her to compete with the male in every department of life; academic, athletic, professional, political, industrial. And it neither recognises nor admits in her natural aptitudes differing from those of men, and fitting her, accordingly, for different functions in these. It rejects all concessions to her womanhood; even to her mother-function. It repudiates all privileges for her. Boldly it demands a fair field only and no favour; equal rights, political and social, identical education and training, identical economic opportunities and avocations, an identical morale, personal and public.In Woman and Labour, Miss Olive Schreiner sums in a line the Feminist objective: "We take all labour for our province." And this is the text of the Feminist creed; the elimination of sex-differences and the abolition of sex-distinctions in every department of life and activity.

Leseprobe

Arabella Kenealy

Feminism and Sex-Extinction

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Table of contents

FOREWORD

BOOK I

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

BOOK II

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

APPENDIX

FOREWORD

Feminism, the extremist—and of late years the predominant cult of the Woman's Movement, is Masculinism.It makes for such training and development in woman, of male characteristics, as shall equip her to compete with the male in every department of life; academic, athletic, professional, political, industrial. And it neither recognises nor admits in her natural aptitudes differing from those of men, and fitting her, accordingly, for different functions in these. It rejects all concessions to her womanhood; even to her mother-function. It repudiates all privileges for her. Boldly it demands a fair field only and no favour; equal rights, political and social, identical education and training, identical economic opportunities and avocations, an identical morale, personal and public.In Woman and Labour, Miss Olive Schreiner sums in a line the Feminist objective: "We take all labour for our province." And this is the text of the Feminist creed; the elimination of sex-differences and the abolition of sex-distinctions in every department of life and activity.Feminists anticipate—the militant faction with zest—fierce economic encounters between the sexes now that, War ended, our men, having fought their own and woman's battle in the trenches, are returning to reclaim their places in the world of work. Secure in that possession which is "nine-tenths of the law," and armed with their new powers of enfranchisement, it is further anticipated that the usurpers will be able triumphantly to stem the masculine reflux, and to retain, on all hands, their new industrial footing.By showing that, contrary to Feminist doctrine, the division of Labour into two sexes, so to speak, is as natural and is as indispensable to Human Progress as is the division of Life into two sexes, the purpose of this book is to dissuade women from exploiting a world's misfortunes for their own immediate profit, and to reconcile them, in their profounder and more vital interests and in those of the Race, to surrender freely all the essentially masculine employments into which mischance has cast them.Human evolution and progress have resulted absolutely from an opposite trend, in inherence and development, of the two sexes, as regards Life and characteristics, aptitude and avocation. The progressive differentiations and specialisations of vital processes and living forms, whereby human character and faculty have been increasingly advanced to higher powers, reach their most admirable culmination in the complex division of Humanity into two genders; each of which is enabled, by way of such complex specialisation, to promote, to intensify and to dignify its own allotted order of qualities. To oppose and frustrate this natural dispensation, whereby Human development is achieved by the two sexes travelling along diametrically opposite lines of Ascent, is to nullify all that civilisation has secured, and to transform the impulse of Progress into one of Decadence.Nature, marvellously prescient in all her processes, has provided that the sexes, by being constituted wholly different in body, brain and bent, do not normally come into rivalry and antagonism in the fulfilment of their respective life-rôles. Their faculties and functions, being complementary and supplementary (and obviously best applied, therefore, in different departments of Life and of Labour), men and women are naturally dependent upon one another in every human relation; a dispensation which engenders reciprocal trust, affection and comradeship.Feminist doctrine and practice menace these most excellent previsions and provisions of Nature by thrusting personal rivalries, economic competition and general conflict of interests between the sexes.Should any reader find in these pages allusions and passages which, without biological or medical knowledge, may not be wholly clear to him, let him remember that these are addressed to such as have dipped more deeply into the subjects dealt with.The main outlines and implications of the new Hypothesis presented here, of the origin and evolution of Sex, are all that he requires to grasp, in order to follow the argument of the book in its relation to Feminist methods.Arabella Kenealy, L.R.C.P.

BOOK I

WOMAN'S PART IN HUMAN EVOLUTION

CHAPTER I

IMPASSIONED FALLACIES OF FEMINISM

"The sexual love which has its origin in what is external and accidental may easily be turned to hate, a kind of madness that is nourished on discord; but that love, on the other hand, is lasting which has its source in freedom of soul and in the will to bear and bring up children."—Spinoza.

I

There is no subject save that of Religion about which so much impassioned fallacy has been spoken and written as has been spoken and written round the Woman Question.

For more than half a century—since Mill wrote his famous Subjection, indeed—it has become an increasing vogue to regard Woman as a martyr; more or less sainted, more or less crushed and effaced beneath the iron-heeled tyrannies, personal, economic, and political, of the oppressor, Man. And it has been in the spirit of this conviction and in fervid endeavours—indignant and chivalrous on the part of the one sex, and still more indignant and but little less chivalrous on the part of the other—to liberate unhappy victims from a barbarous oppression, that most of the impassioned fallacy has been spoken and written, and doughty deeds done.

At the certain cost, therefore, of being stigmatised as a reactionary (severely qualified), I propose to unmask some of these which I believe to be baseless obsessions, and to present a wholly new—and, I hope, a more veracious and inspiring version of the case between the sexes.

To begin with, I assert boldly that the so-called Subjection of Woman, very far from having been a cruel injustice merely, on the part of man, has served, on the contrary, as a blessing and an inestimable benefit not only to herself but to the Race bound up in her. A blessing often rough and painful in its methods, during epochs when all other methods were both rough and painful, attended, too, by wrongs and cruelties; yet, in the main, operating vastly to her well-being and advancement and, in hers, to those of the Race.

Looking back upon the hard and bloody routes of Evolution whereby the human Races have attained to present-day developments, we see our forbears groping blindly, fighting blindly, advancing blindly; stumbling, falling, picking up again; making new departures only hopelessly to lose the road; making new departures, now to find it and trudge on. In all its painful and laborious phases, a terrible and sordid climb. Yet, nevertheless, in its great annals of Ascent, a noble and a wondrous March of Progress.

And whether we are Religionists or Evolutionists—or are sufficiently broad-minded to be both—the history of Life is seen to have been a history of deathless effort, never ceasing, never waning; renewed with every generation; intensified by every further acquisition of new power, as, with every further recognition of new goals and problems, the ever-increasing Purpose and the ever-increasing perplexity and complexity of The Purpose revealed itself at every step. It becomes increasingly clear, moreover, that Creation, or Creative Evolution (to employ Professor Bergson's phrase), has been the resultant of a progressive aggregation of Atomic Matter about some vast immanent