8
must be womanly, she was not unreasonably sick to death of it, stifled by unmitigated womanliness. By a not unnatural reaction, she sought relief in what seemed the easiest exit—in trying to be manly; she sought salvation in hard collars and billy-cock hats. Considering the extravagance and inconvenience of the feminine dress of the day, small blame to her if she did. I am ashamed to remember now that a certain superficial ugliness in the first beginnings of the movement blinded me for a time to its essential soundness. It was at this date that, had your Anti-Suffrage Society existed, I might have joined it.
The danger, never serious, of any tendency to "ape the man" is over and past. The most militant of Suffragists[1] never now aims at being masculine. Rather, by a swing of the pendulum we are back in an inverse form of the old initial error, the over-emphasis of sex. Woman, not man, now insists over-loudly on her own womanhood, and in this hubbub of man and woman the still small voice of humanity is apt to be unheard. This new emphasis of sex seems to me as ugly and perhaps coarser than the old error. Still, we are bound to remember that perfect sanity can never fairly be demanded from those in bondage or in pain.
The woman question seems, then, somehow to hinge on the balance between sex and humanity. Between the two there seems some sort of rivalry, some antinomy.
But is this possible? Is there really any conflict, any dissonance? And if so, how may we hope for its resolution?
- ↑ I cannot bring myself to use the ugly diminutive now current.
