Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/191

Rh women it neglects in favor of what is masculine. It attempts to override the natural distinction of the sexes, and to make women men—in all but virility.

The exact opposite, I believe, is the true line of progress. We are of two sexes: and in healthy diversity of sex, pushed to its utmost, lies the greatest strength of all of us. Make your men virile: make your women womanly. Don't cramp their intelligence: don't compress their waists: don't try to turn them into dolls or dancing girls: but freely and equally develop their feminine idiosyncrasy, physical, moral, intellectual. Let them be healthy in body: let them be sound in mind: if possible (but here I know even the most advanced among them will object), try to preserve them from the tyranny of their own chosen goddess and model, Mrs. Grundy. In one word, emancipate woman (if woman will let you, which is more than doubtful), but leave her woman still, not a dulled and spiritless epicene automaton.

That last, it is to be feared, is the one existing practical result of the higher education of women, up to date. Both in England and America, the women of the cultivated classes are becoming unfit to be wives or mothers. Their sexuality (which lies at the basis of everything) is enfeebled or destroyed. In some cases they eschew marriage altogether—openly refuse and despise it, which surely shows a lamentable weakening of wholesome feminine instincts. In other cases, they marry, though obviously ill adapted to bear the strain of maternity; and in such instances they frequently break down with the birth of their first or second infant. This evil, of course, is destined by natural means to cure itself with time: the families in question will not be represented at all in the second generation, or will be represented only by feeble and futile descendants. In a hundred years, things will have righted themselves; but meanwhile there is a danger that many of the most cultivated and able families of the English-speaking race will have become extinct, through the prime error of supposing that an education which is good for men must necessarily also be good for women.

I said just now that many women at present eschew marriage, and that this shows a weakening of wholesome feminine instinct. Let me hasten to add, for fear of misconception—I mean, of course, if they eschew it for want of the physical impulse which ought to be as present in every healthy woman as in every healthy man. That independent-minded women should hesitate to accept the terms of marriage as they now and here exist, I do not wonder. But if they have it really at heart to alter those terms, to escape from slavery, to widen the basis of the contract between the sexes, to put the wife on a higher and safer footing, most sensible men, I feel sure, will heartily co-operate with them. As a rule,