Conclusion

The last two hundred years have revolutionized nearly all of our deepest conceptions concerning the relations of human beings to religion, government, property, and to each other. New knowledge has given us partial control over vast forces of nature; and has so increased our mobility as almost to free us from limitations of space. We have had wonderful visions of the possibilities that lie in intelligent human cooperation, and have begun to realize them in a hundred new forms. In the midst of these compelling changes, women could no more remain undisturbed, within the confines of kitchen and nursery, than men could remain on their little New England farms or cobbling shoes and making tin pans in the petty workshops of a century ago. But meantime the special interests of women have been sadly confused because of the larger changes in which all human relations have been involved in this time of readjustment. Instead of talking of unquiet women to-day, we should talk of an unquiet world.

In the midst of this confusion, most of those who have sought to secure a truer relation of women to the life around them have worked on the lines of minimizing sex differences. It has been felt that the educational, industrial, social and political limitations under which women rested were due to the desire of men to exploit them. Men, being free, had developed for themselves an ideal world of thought and work; and if women wished to be free and happy, they needed only to break down the barriers separating them from this man’s world.

Most of these barriers are now down; but the women who study in universities, teach in the schools, maintain offices as doctors or lawyers, collect news for the press, tend spindles in a factory or sell ribbons at a counter have found that the man’s world is far from ideal and that by entering it they have not escaped the special limitations of their sex. Everywhere the feeling is abroad that, instead of having arrived at a destination, women have embarked on a journey fraught with many uncertainties.

This volume has been written in the belief that men and women alike will achieve greatest freedom and happiness, not by minimizing sex differences, but by frankly recognizing them and using them. If we could reduce men and women to sameness, we should destroy at least half the values of human life. They are not alike; but they are perfectly supplementary. The unit can never be a man nor a woman; it must always be a man and a woman. This means that in all the activities essential to human development men and women must carefully study to find what each can best provide.

Thus we must some day have a Church, not composed exclusively of male priests and women worshipers, not confined to rationalistic appeal nor to ritualistic observance, but expressing the whole range of human aspiration toward the unknown. Rational men and women of feeling must combine with reverent men and intelligent women to create a belief and a service which will express all the longings of humanity toward perfection.

So in government, we must have a state which will be not only just but merciful; which will concern itself not only with militant economics but also with human well-being. If men are more capable in expressing the katabolic needs of aggression and protection, women must furnish the anabolic products of care and conservation. If women must help pay the bills and nurse the wounded, they must first have a voice in determining whether there shall be a war. Men and women must join their qualities in building and caring for cities, and in shaping nations, where they can both live their largest lives.

In education, we must devise institutions which will provide for the special needs of women; and we must have the combined qualities of men and women brought to bear on children of both sexes, and at all ages. The foster parents of the nation’s children must be both men and women. The present attempt to exploit our twenty millions of boys and girls in the interest of a sex will be a crime against humanity when we are intelligent enough to see its real meaning.

The specialization going on in industry means infinite variety if we look at the whole field of activity. Some parts of the world’s work are specially fitted for men; other parts to women. No intelligent division of labor has been attempted in the period since all work was transformed by our modern inventions. Possibly men should do most of the dressmaking, and women should make men’s clothing, but no intelligent man or woman can doubt that most work falls naturally into the hands of one sex or the other. Some day we shall know enough so that there will be little or no industrial competition between men and women.

It is, however, in the family that both men and women must find their deepest supplementary values. Sex antagonism can do much to impoverish and ruin individual lives; but the monogamic and persistent union of lovers, surrounded by their children, will easily survive all the mistakes of a time of transition. In the meantime, those who would uphold the finest family ideals of the past have less cause to fear the militant agitator than they have to fear the idle, parasitic wife, who relies on her legal rights to give her luxuries without labor, position without leadership, and wifehood without the care and responsibility of children.

From the point of view of this book, all the efforts to open the doors of opportunity, through which women can pass into the man’s world, are but preparations for the beginning of a journey. The sooner all such doors are opened the better, for then a great source of dangerous sex antagonism will pass away; and the energy of reformers will be set free to work out the difficult problem of supplementary sex adjustments.

And meantime, sex remains the greatest mystery and the most powerful thing in human life. Its deeper values are lost sight of when men and women are warring over work, wages, and votes, just as the meaning of religion has been lost when priests and laity sought to advance their meanly selfish interests. But in the crises of life it always comes back. When a great ship founders in midocean, and but a third of the people can be saved, there is then no question of woman’s rights. In the darkness of early morning, eager men’s hands place their women in the life-boats and push them off. The poorest peasant woman takes precedence over any man. Almost every woman there would prefer to stay and die with her man; would glory in staying and dying if he might thus be saved; but in her keeping are the generations of the future, and she is weak, therefore the strong gladly stand back and go down to death. The solution of woman’s place in the society of the future must be based on a recognition of the supplementary forces that send women to undesired safety while men die.