I
WOMAN'S SECRET[1]
With all the sense of partisanship that the Women's Movement in England may arouse in certain natures, there is one occasional feature of it (a feature far more infrequent than has been alleged) that some of us deprecate. It is the assumption that men have consciously and deliberately initiated all the injustices from which women suffer. To assume this is at once to suppose men more powerful than they have ever been, and more wrong-headed.
So far as I know them, the great majority of the women leaders in reform, share a sense of painful wincing when they hear women talking as if all men were in a conscious conspiracy against the other sex.
Realising our own imperfections, a sense of something very like shame descends upon us on those occasions when we are asked to listen to pleas that would make out all women to be Angels of Light and all men Princes of Darkness.
Looking as far into the matter as we are able, we find the chief difference between ourselves and men to lie in the fact that men are expected to struggle against adverse circumstance, whereas they have made it our chief virtue not to struggle.
- ↑ Originally published by the Garden City Press, Letchworth, Eng.
1
