Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/39

 desire and strive for beyond all others, and these are knowledge and scope. The women's movement is one to open the doors of the world to women: that they may know the nature of their own bodies (to every mother her workshop), and the bodies of men, their mates, not according to the teaching of the schools and churches, but in the light of modern science; that they may have in their ranks women who know the condition of law and medicine and affairs; that the mind and character of women shall be enabled to play upon these matters with knowledge, and shall present to the world the complementary view to that given by the mind and character of men.

In so far as the deepest needs of men and women are one, men suffer as well as women from the ignorance or degradation of women; a stream cannot rise higher than its source, and men are the sons of women. In so far as the bodies and minds, the lives and experiences of men and women differ, in so far do both men and women suffer, if the specifically feminine character is unillumined by science, the specifically feminine activity hampered and checked by external law or economic necessity.

In this striving for knowledge and scope the women are in sympathy with the spirit of the time. Scientific men have abandoned the invention of worlds and have betaken themselves to the study of the world presented to them, in most matters except those in which sex plays a part. Here there are still some who talk about "Ideal Woman," or