Page:Fraud of Feminism.djvu/140

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THE FRAUD OF FEMINISM

has for his problem to get over the obvious incompatibility of the truth he has himself abundantly demonstrated in the course of his book, that the woman-type, in every respect, physiological and psychological, approaches the child-type, while the man-type, in its proper progress towards maturity, increasingly diverges from it. The obvious implication of this fact is surely plain, on the principle of the development of the individual being a shorthand reproduction of the evolution of the species, or, to express it in scientific phraseology, of ontogeny being the abbreviated recapitulation of the stages presented by philogeny. If we proceed on this well-accredited and otherwise universally accepted principle of biology, the inference is clear enough—to wit, that woman is, as Herbert Spencer and others have pointed out, simply "undeveloped man"—in other words, that Woman represents a lower stage of evolution than Man. Now this would obviously not at all suit the book of Mr Ellis's Feminism. Explained away it has to be in some fashion or other. So our author is driven to the daring expedient of throwing overboard one of the best established generalisations of modern biology, and boldly declaring that the principle contained therein is reversed (we suppose "for this occasion only") in the case of Man. In this way he is enabled to postulate a theory consoling to the Feminist soul, which affirms that adult man