United States or Yemen ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Fortunately the suffragists, as distinct from the feminists, had a perfectly concrete objective, and a very simple one. What the vote symbolizes is not simple, as the ablest advocates and the ablest opponents knew. But the right to vote is a simple and familiar right.
Do not fancy that the feminists, the problems and the disputes they excite in modern society, are something quite new and peculiar to us; these are only special forms of a phenomenon more general, the growing influence that woman exercises on society, as civilisation, culture, and wealth steadily increase. Here, too, the history of Rome is luminously clear.
I have written upon this question in its bearings upon the women of France more fully in another chapter; but it may be stated here that such important feminists as Madame Vérone, the eminent avocat, and Mlle.
The feminists, he adds, "base themselves on Weininger's theory, according to which the male principle may be found in woman, and the female principle in man." Unfortunately, George does not make clear what he means by "principle," so his theory, if he has one, is impossible to appraise in biological terms.
And the illegitimate child stands equal with the legitimate provided the father acknowledges the child or has been "judicially ordered or decreed to contribute" to the child's support. Men are feminists.
If women were not so important as Nature has made them, none of this would matter. To insist upon it is only to insist upon the importance of the sex. The remarkable fact, which seems to me to make this protest and the forthcoming pages so necessary, is that the leading feminists do not recognize the all-importance of their sex in this regard.
That spirit of democracy is so strong, indeed, that the enfranchised women of California give intelligent guidance to the feminists of a whole nation; public opinion is so enlightened that it sets a pace for the rest of the country and labor is so progressive that it is a revelation to the visiting sociologist.
They would no longer accentuate their ugliness with that unlovely honesty of the feminist which has been quite as distressing as the impossible Victorian lack of honesty and everlasting concealment of vital things. They would no longer be feminists or ladies, but gentlewomen who sew their own seam, who neither struggle unseen nor flaunt their emotions in the face of sex psychologists.
Valentine Thompson, already known as one of the most active of the younger feminists, and distinctly the most brilliant, established a weekly newspaper which she called La Vie Feminine. The little journal had a twofold purpose: to offer every sort of news and encouragement to the by-no-means-flourishing party and to give advice, assistance, and situations to women out of work. Mlle.
Although no one disputed her intelligence a social asset in France, odd as that may appear to Americans she was generally put down as a mere femme du monde, self-indulgent, pleasure-loving, dependent what our more strident feminists call parasitic. It is doubtful if she belonged to charitable organizations, although, generous by nature, it is safe to say that she gave freely.
Word Of The Day