Feminism - Women and Memory Forum

130 FEMINISM
ceives; in short, the male is active, the female passive. So is it,
in varying extent, throughout both the vegetable and animal kingdoms,
with the fewest exceptions among the latter.*^ So is it
likewise in the human species,** also with but few exceptions from
among backward peoples left behind in out-of-the-way corners of
the earth,*^— not to forget some worn-out peoples, degraded
from their days of greatness.** Always is it such peoples, and
in nature the exceptions, our feminists set up as their models.
Among all great peoples it is otherwise. They follow the dictates
of nature. The man takes, the woman gives herself.*^ The key
seeks the lock, not the lock the key. Wherefore it is better for
this custom to continue, and for women to wait till they are asked.
There is some truth in the old-fashioned statement of Mrs. Harriet
Beecher Stowe, when she wrote of " the disgust which man
feels when she, whom God made to be sought, degrades herself
to seek." **
A still more important consideration is it, that when these conditions
are brought about, it will hardly be necessary for the
woman who wants a child— for few are supposed to want more
than one in this way — to marry at all; or if she does, she can
so quickly get rid of her husband that it would be a matter of
indifference whether she went through the ceremony or not. Children
may be as " natural " as they were in the primitive times,
when human beings approximated to brutes, and with as little
need of artificial legitimation as they were among the polygamous
Egyptians ; *° for if a man's children by other women are
on the same footing with those by his wife, are not those women
as good as his wives? Legitimacy, indeed, is hardly more an
object of solicitude for the feminists than for the socialists, of the
thorough-going type. The stigma of illegitimacy seems to their
tender sensibilities an injustice to the innocent offspring.^" not-
43 Among some birds (the turnix, phaleropus, cassowary, emeu) the females, larger
and stronger than the males, are said to pursue the males, fight with one another for
them, and then leave to them the incubation,
44 " To man," said Clement of Alexandria, " has been assigned activity, to woman
passivity," Paedagogus, III. 3. This is " the normal condition," according to Ward,
Dynamic Sociology, i. 609. Similarly W. I. Thomas, Sex and Society, 17, 28, 55, 229.
45 Such as the Garos of Assam, the Kasis of Bengal, the Kafirs of Natal, the Ainos
of Japan, the Tarrahumari Indians of northern Mexico, the Moquls of New Mexico,
some tribes in Oregon, the Paraguayans, and in the Torres Islands and New Guinea.
46 Yet it is probably not desired that our women should ever reach the degree
of immodesty attained by the Roman women under the ejnpire, denounced by Seneca:
" Libidine nee maribus quidem cedunt, pati natae. Dii illas deaeque male perdant!
adeo perversum commentae genus impudicitiae, viros ineunt," Epist, 95 § 21. In the
degenerate days of Greece, Plutarch describes the courtship and final seizure of a
youth by a rich widow, Amatorius, cc. 2, 10.
47 Even Grant Allen's heroine, to be described in the next chapter, did so, The
Woman Who Did, 56, 72, cf, 46.
48 Pink and White Tyranny, 269.
49 Cf. Diodorus, I. 80, § 3. See also Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, XXIII, v. and
vi., about the absence of bastardy among polygamous peoples.
60 See, e.g., Carpenter, Lovf'^ Cornvng of Age, ii6.