Feminism - Women and Memory Forum

ERRONEOUS FIRST PRINCIPLE 59
be regarded as a fool. Our feminists, therefore, are not really
following the example of the breeders of animals or the horticulturists
; for among these no such fools are found.
The reason offered by Professor Dewey and the rest of the
feminists for the discrepancy between the sexes in the human species,
as due to repression of the one by the other,— a reason
never employed for explaining the discrepancies, often more
marked, between the sexes in other species,— is a mere conjecture
of a bare possibility, which has not even likelihood in its
favour. No sound and conclusive argument has ever yet been
adduced in support of it. Yet the feminists would proceed as if
they had proved it — and as if they had proved the conclusion
drawn from it about the reverse process. They assume this, and
then leave to their opponents to disprove it. Thus, for an actual,
which they call an apparent, difference, attested by all the ages,
they would throw the burden of proof upon the side which holds
that this is natural and will continue ; '^ and any failure on the
part of an opponent in some minor matter is taken as proof of
their own infallibleness.*' Sometimes they affect frankness by
admitting that women still have to prove by their accomplishment
their equality with men ; but then it is serenely assumed that they
will do so, and the argument proceeds as if it were already done.*'
Thus the experience they rely on is not that of the past, but that
of the future ! Or they — the women among them — take refuge
in saying that men cannot know woman's nature as well as women
can, forgetting that the question is a comparison between the
natures of men and women, in which men from the one side are
as capable of judging as are women from the other. But generally
opprobrium is resorted to, and whatever is advanced by
their opponents is denounced as " old," " antiquated," " threadbare,"
" worn-out," " conventional," " prejudiced," or " supersti-
85 An example has already been presented by Wendell Phillips, above, p. son.
86 Curious logic of this sort is shown by Rheta Childe Dorr in an article in The
New York Times, Sept. 19, 1915, in which Leta Stetter HoUingworth, whose investigations
are under review, is described as " searching for an explanation of the inferior
position of women " and for a " proof frather a disproof] of their inferiority," and as
concluding that no definitive explanation has been given, and because a prevalent
theory [of the greater variability of the male] appears, in the case of man, not to
have been by certain experiments proved, therefore " the superiority [of men] has not
been proved " ; whereupon all past experience is thrown to the winds, the opposite position
(that women are equal to men) is treated as proved, and women are called upon to
be " confident that nothing in nature stands in the way of the solution " of their
problem of freeing " the latent genius," which lies in them " perhaps as abundantly
as in men, "without robbing the world of its mothers." ,„,,.,
87 A good specimen of this may be seen exhibited in Gertrude S. Martin s article
on The Education of Women and Sex Equality in The Annals of the American Academy
of Political and Social Science, Nov., 1914, p. 43. Similarly Lily Braun says that
women are eminently suited for social and chariteble work, and if they have not yet
taken the leadership therein, " it is for me beyond doubt " that they will, Die
Frauenfrage, 207.