Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/21

Rh greatest spiritual leaders rests more upon their divine tenderness than upon their astounding courage. And the world has known many women of exalted courage and wonderful physical strength, whose great gifts of this sort in no wise detracted from their charm as the tender mothers of little children.

Feminism does not seek the extinction of strength and courage in men, nor of beauty and softness and tenderness in women, but the recognition that these fine and lovely qualities are the heritage of men and women alike—human qualities which all human beings have in germ, and which all human beings are entitled to cultivate and to use without question or reproof.

The chief purpose of feminists through all the years, and at the present time, is the achievement of freedom for womanhood and its equality of opportunity with manhood. Or, perhaps this would be more correctly expressed if one were to say that the object of feminism is to make female human beings as free as male human beings, and both as free as it is possible for the individual to be in a complex society like that of the present. For the intelligent feminist realises two things: first, that in a highly-organised and finely-evolved human society, the individual freedom must necessarily, in the general interests, be restricted in a measure. When life was simple,