Arabella Kenealy
Feminism and Sex-Extinction
Published by Good Press, 2021
EAN 4057664608949
Table of Contents
FOREWORD
Feminism, the extremist—and of late years the predominant cult of the Woman's Movement, is Masculinism.
It makes for such training and development in woman, of male characteristics, as shall equip her to compete with the male in every department of life; academic, athletic, professional, political, industrial. And it neither recognises nor admits in her natural aptitudes differing from those of men, and fitting her, accordingly, for different functions in these. It rejects all concessions to her womanhood; even to her mother-function. It repudiates all privileges for her. Boldly it demands a fair field only and no favour; equal rights, political and social, identical education and training, identical economic opportunities and avocations, an identical morale, personal and public.
In Woman and Labour, Miss Olive Schreiner sums in a line the Feminist objective: "We take all labour for our province." And this is the text of the Feminist creed; the elimination of sex-differences and the abolition of sex-distinctions in every department of life and activity.
Feminists anticipate—the militant faction with zest—fierce economic encounters between the sexes now that, War ended, our men, having fought their own and woman's battle in the trenches, are returning to reclaim their places in the world of work. Secure in that possession which is "nine-tenths of the law," and armed with their new powers of enfranchisement, it is further anticipated that the usurpers will be able triumphantly to stem the masculine reflux, and to retain, on all hands, their new industrial footing.
By showing that, contrary to Feminist doctrine, the division of Labour into two sexes, so to speak, is as natural and is as indispensable to Human Progress as is the division of Life into two sexes, the purpose of this book is to dissuade women from exploiting a world's misfortunes for their own immediate profit, and to reconcile them, in their profounder and more vital interests and in those of the Race, to surrender freely all the essentially masculine employments into which mischance has cast them.
Human evolution and progress have resulted absolutely from an opposite trend, in inherence and development, of the two sexes, as regards Life and characteristics, aptitude and avocation. The progressive differentiations and specialisations of vital processes and living forms, whereby human character and faculty have been increasingly advanced to higher powers, reach their most admirable culmination in the complex division of Humanity into two genders; each of which is enabled, by way of such complex specialisation, to promote, to intensify and to dignify its own allotted order of qualities. To oppose and frustrate this natural dispensation, whereby Human development is achieved by the two sexes travelling along diametrically opposite lines of Ascent, is to nullify all that civilisation has secured, and to transform the impulse of Progress into one of Decadence.
Nature, marvellously prescient in all her processes, has provided that the sexes, by being constituted wholly different in body, brain and bent, do not normally come into rivalry and antagonism in the fulfilment of their respective life-rôles. Their faculties and functions, being complementary and supplementary (and obviously best applied, therefore, in different departments of Life and of Labour), men and women are naturally dependent upon one another in every human relation; a dispensation which engenders reciprocal trust, affection and comradeship.
Feminist doctrine and practice menace these most excellent previsions and provisions of Nature by thrusting personal rivalries, economic competition and general conflict of interests between the sexes.
Should any reader find in these pages allusions and passages which, without biological or medical knowledge, may not be wholly clear to him, let him remember that these are addressed to such as have dipped more deeply into the subjects dealt with.
The main outlines and implications of the new Hypothesis presented here, of the origin and evolution of Sex, are all that he requires to grasp, in order to follow the argument of the book in its relation to Feminist methods.
Arabella Kenealy, L.R.C.P.
BOOK I
WOMAN'S PART IN HUMAN EVOLUTION
CHAPTER I
IMPASSIONED FALLACIES OF FEMINISM
"The sexual love which has its origin in what is external and accidental may easily be turned to hate, a kind of madness that is nourished on discord; but that love, on the other hand, is lasting which has its source in freedom of soul