Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/225

Rh it is important to note, till the "woman's-rights' movement" sprung up, have all been in one direction—the direction of increasing differentiation. The distinction between men's work and women's work has been increased, not diminished. The barbarian and the semi-civilized nation allowed women to carry heavy burdens, to tug at the oar, to wield the spade, the hoe, the mattock, in the fields, and even to labor in mines. In our higher civilization such tasks are limited to man, and, as we have already remarked, to abnormal "mannish" women. The movement we are considering, in so far as it aims at breaking down the natural barriers between the duties of the two sexes, is palpably retrograde. If advancement toward perfection is reached by differentiation, anti-differentiation—if we may use the expression—whether structural or functional, must be a return to a lower condition. If the first and plainest step in the division of labor is to be abandoned, how can others be maintained?

It has been already pointed out in the Quarterly Journal of Science that among vertebrate animals the social unit of which nations are put together is the family, whether that be monogamous or polygamous. A community of rooks is made up of an assemblage of married couples. A tribe of baboons consists of a number of males, each one having his wives and offspring. Now the "woman's-rights' movement" not merely runs counter to Nature in the respects we have already shown, but it is open to the charge of seeking to destroy family life and to constitute society of individuals—of atoms instead of molecules. In so doing it tends toward the condition of things prevalent in certain insect-communities. But there the mass of the nation, and especially its working and fighting members, is composed of what are commonly called neuters. Of such an arrangement no trace prevails among vertebrate animals, and we do not therefore see how their example can afford us any practical precedent.

We have, therefore, in fine, full ground for maintaining that the "woman's-rights' movement" is an attempt to rear, by a process of "unnatural selection," a race of monstrosities—hostile alike to men, to normal women, to human society, and to the future development of our race. We know that the modern "honorary secretary" is always ready to exclaim, "Let heaven and earth perish, so my crotchet may be realized!" But we would bid him ask himself whether the end is worth the means.—Quarterly Journal of Science.