Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/20

12 notably in each sex, certain tendencies and standards. Nevertheless it is a thousand pities that the world does not see in all this the natural play of cause and effect—the natural result of an unnatural artificial condition—instead of insisting that men and women are born with inherent virtues and ineradicable vices, the special and particular heritage of sex.

It is a pity, for example, that the word manly should be held to connote a certain well-defined type of man, and the word womanly a certain special type of woman—those possessing the qualities which are thoughtlessly grouped under that head in each case. Every man is manly and every woman is womanly. A man is manly in proportion as he responds to that element in woman which is different from anything he possesses. A woman is womanly to the extent that she is permeated with sex-sensitiveness. In every other respect, in the world of morals, men are as women and women are as men, or at least there is no reason why they should not be so; that is, they share, though in proportions varying as infinitely as the stars, the virtues and the vices; they are equally human.

The world has many men whose tenderness is more than the tenderness of the most loving of mothers. The immortality of the world's