Page:"Homo Sum" being a letter to an anti-suffragist from an anthropologist.djvu/10

6 in life which nature has already made quite adequately prominent. We intend to urge her to be refined, we are in peril of inviting her to be coarse.

The moral and social danger of dividing the "humane" virtues into two groups, manly and womanly, is evident. Until quite recent years a boy was often brought up to feel that so long as he was strong, brave and honourable, he might leave gentleness, patience, modesty to his sister. To her, so long as she was gentle, tactful, modest, much latitude was allowed in the matter of physical cowardice and petty moral shifts. Both were the losers by this artificial division of moral industry. The whole convention rested on a rather complex confusion of thought, which cannot here be completely unravelled. The virtues supposed to be womanly are in the main the virtues generated by subordinate social position. Such are gentleness and the inevitable "tact." They are the weapons of the weaker, physically or socially, of the man or the woman who dare not either strike out or speak out; they are virtues practised by the conquered, by the slave in rude societies, in politer states by the governess and the companion, but also by the private secretary and the tutor; they are virtues not specially characteristic of the average duchess. In a word they are the outcome not of sex but of status.

The attempt, then, to confine man or woman within the limits of sex, to judge of right or wrong for them by a sex standard, is, I think, dangerous and disastrous to the individual, dangerous and disastrous to the society of which he or she is a unit. This is felt and acknowledged about man. We do not incessantly say to a man, "Be male, your manhood is in danger." Such