#56581 Divine purpose of women
Moderator: Marduk
Re: #56581 Divine purpose of women
What a weird coincidence! It's neat you can compare your past and present opinions on this so easily.
Re: #56581 Divine purpose of women
That speech would have been heinous in 1860. How much more in 2010!
Re: #56581 Divine purpose of women
This article published 100 years ago today sums up my feelings towards this odious, ridiculous line of thought. (Rebecca West is awesome. Worth a Wikipedia read.)
No longer are love and grace and charm to be the unforced, unconscious flowerings of the soul. The female infant, inspired by the consciousness that “the essence of her value lies in her capacity to propagate the species,” is to march towards them from her cradle with an almost Prussian thoroughness and determination. At an early age she is to learn to withhold herself from all intellectual passion, lest she should fail to be “a beautiful, easily comprehended piece of nature,” in which “a man may wash himself as in a cool wave, find peace as in a silent forest.” ... Meanwhile society is to help her towards this “enhancement of her life-values” by pulling itself to pieces with a panting urgency. “The chances of marriage might be increased by a shortening of the university course,” says Ellen Key, and one is inclined to applaud her silence on the subject of the resulting diminution in efficiency of teachers and doctors when one perceives how fervently she believes that a woman’s personality is as dust by the roadside if she misses love. “Of what avail for women to speak at ethical congresses,” she asks, “if they are unable to save even one man from the misery of being a mere fragment, if they are unable to bring harmonious unity into his life?” But if she does succeed in decorating the male existence with abstract nouns, how great is her glory!