WHAT IS WOMANLY?
(1911)
The title of my lecture has, I hope, sent a good many of you here—the women of my audience, I mean—in a very bristling and combative frame of mind, ready to resent any laying down of the law on my part as to what is or what is not "womanly." I hope, that is to say, that you are not prepared to have the terms of your womanliness dictated to you by a man—or, for that matter, by a woman either.
For who can know either the extent or the direction of woman's social effectiveness until she has secured full right of way—a right of way equal to man's—in all directions of mental and physical activity, or, to put it in one word, the right to experiment?
There are, I have no doubt, many things which women might take it into their heads to do, which one would not think womanly at their first performance, but which one would think womanly when one saw their results at long range. No rule of conduct can be set up as an abstract right or wrong; we must form our ethics on our social results; and in the world's moral progress the really effective results have generally come by shock of attack
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