Page:Olive Malmberg Johnson - Woman and the Socialist Movement (1908).djvu/37

 Rh ersole, who says: "I do not sympathize with such of my sex—alas, far too many of us—who selfishly enshroud themselves in a self-pitying cloak of martyrdom and who, by some strange hallucination, imagine the whole world is arrayed against them. For them I entertain nothing but pity. They are invalids, mentally, morally and physically. Thank God, each succeeding generation sees fewer of these undesirables who seem to have been born to make their own and their friends' lives unhappy. They live paradoxically, for they are happiest when most unhappy."

In the progress of evolution the female has been the unfortunate sex. Woman has been selected for faculties good for the community, the nation and the general advance of the race in the struggle for existence, but which at the same time happened to be less in her favor as an individual being. In class society she has been additionally held back by property laws and sexual degradation. But for all that there is not the woman alive, unless she is utterly blinded by prejudices, who will not admit that woman's best friend is man and that her worst enemy is woman herself. Every man admires, and enjoys the society of the intellectual, progressive woman. The average woman, however, holds herself aloof from man's talk, man's views, man's interests and man's society in the full and broad and intellectual sense. If man treats woman as half a child and engages with her in petty, senseless tattle that he never would use among men, it is because woman herself invites it and would be infinitely bored by broad, healthy, vigorous "man talk" on the topics of the day or the interests of the world. It does not take the broad-minded man very many minutes to detect the broad-minded woman who has an interest in, and an understanding of, the world and its topics of interest.

The woman can never reach the level upon which man stands by making a row upon him. It will take vigorous work, unlimited patience, resistless endurance, and the healthy influence of several generations of energetic, educated, broad-minded mothers.