第120章 THE FOURTH(5)

Their form remains just what it was when woman was esteemed a pretty, desirable, and incidentally a child-producing, chattel.

Against these time-honoured ideas the new spirit of womanhood struggles in shame, astonishment, bitterness, and tears....

I confess myself altogether feminist.I have no doubts in the matter.I want this coddling and browbeating of women to cease.Iwant to see women come in, free and fearless, to a full participation in the collective purpose of mankind.Women, I am convinced, are as fine as men; they can be as wise as men; they are capable of far greater devotion than men.I want to see them citizens, with a marriage law framed primarily for them and for their protection and the good of the race, and not for men's satisfactions.I want to see them bearing and rearing good children in the State as a generously rewarded public duty and service, choosing their husbands freely and discerningly, and in no way enslaved by or subordinated to the men they have chosen.The social consciousness of women seems to me an unworked, an almost untouched mine of wealth for the constructive purpose of the world.I want to change the respective values of the family group altogether, and make the home indeed the women's kingdom and the mother the owner and responsible guardian of her children.

It is no use pretending that this is not novel and revolutionary; it is.The Endowment of Motherhood implies a new method of social organization, a rearrangement of the social unit, untried in human expericnce--as untried as electric traction was or flying in 1800.

Of course, it may work out to modify men's ideas of marriage profoundly.To me that is a secondary consideration.I do not believe that particular assertion myself, because I am convinced that a practical monogamy is a psychological necessity to the mass of civilised people.But even if I did believe it I should still keep to my present line, because it is the only line that will prevent a highly organised civilisation from ending in biological decay.The public Endowment of Motherhood is the only possible way which will ensure the permanently developing civilised state at which all constructive minds are aiming.A point is reached in the life-history of a civilisation when either this reconstruction must be effected or the quality and MORALE of the population prove insufficient for the needs of the developing organisation.It is not so much moral decadence that will destroy us as moral inadaptability.The old code fails under the new needs.The only alternative to this profound reconstruction is a decay in human quality and social collapse.Either this unprecedented rearrangement must be achieved by our civilisation, or it must presently come upon a phase of disorder and crumble and perish, as Rome perished, as France declines, as the strain of the Pilgrim Fathers dwindles out of America.Whatever hope there may be in the attempt therefore, there is no alternative to the attempt.

6

I wanted political success now dearly enough, but not at the price of constructive realities.These questions were no doubt monstrously dangerous in the political world; there wasn't a politician alive who didn't look scared at the mention of "The Family," but if raising these issues were essential to the social reconstructions on which my life was set, that did not matter.It only implied that I should take them up with deliberate caution.

There was no release because of risk or difficulty.