hood, it is doubtful whether he would approve of her, although she embodied his theory.[1]
Here, also, Mr. Allen misinterprets the women reformers of England. He states that they "openly refuse and despise marriage." Some may; some write very bitterly of men. But this refusal is for themselves, or for the class to which they belong—reformers. In this they do not differ from a large number of religious or political enthusiasts of both sexes, in every age, who claim that their "cause" is superior to individual rights or duties. Who is the woman in England who maintains such doctrine for the majority of her sex? One of the ablest advocates for women, Emily Pfeiffer,[2] writes to her countrymen:
"You do not well to rest your hope
On natures of a narrower scope,
And leave the souls which, like your own,
Aspire, to find their way alone—
To go down childless to their graves,
The while you get your sons of slaves."
Though men have greatly outgrown tyranny of thought and action, there is still alive much masculine arrogance. With many it is entirely unconscious; it probably is so with Mr. Allen when he calls a literary or scientific education "mannish." I do not know of any purely mannish training except that received by the monks of La Trappe, and that which fits men to be soldiers, sailors, blacksmiths, or workmen whose physical force is a necessity to their calling. A college or university education, although in past years given exclusively to men, was never supposed to fit them for any essentially masculine occupation, not even to become the fathers of the future race. It was preliminary to a professional or literary career, and intended to develop the powers of mind. And mind—emphasize as we will the physical differences of the body that goes with it—has no discoverable gender. The lavish way in which the epithet of "masculine" or "feminine" has been applied to particular minds is utterly destructive of precision of thought. Vigorous minds are called masculine and those of the namby-pamby, sentimental sort are dubbed feminine. This classification may be historically justifiable by the slight appearance women have made in the literary and scientific world,
- ↑ In college days I knew a young lady medical student who illustrated this doctrine. She openly proclaimed that she studied medicine for the purpose of fitting herself to become a wife and mother. She enlarged her waist, wore most ungraceful garments, broached her pet idea on social occasions, and was the bête noire of her companions. Perhaps she was Mr. Allen's ideal of an emancipated woman. Her fellow-students thought she had missed the inheritance of womanly instinct, or that some secondary male characteristic had cropped out in her. At last accounts she had not put her precepts into practice.
- ↑ "A Rhyme for the Time," "Contemporary Review."
