Page:Woman and her possibilities.djvu/19

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HER POSSIBILITIES
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the Prince of Peace: "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace, but a sword."

Again: "If the social movement, through which the most advanced women of our day are attempting to bring themselves into co-ordination with the new conditions of life, removes them immeasurably from certain types of the primitive male; the same movement equally removes the new male from the old female. The sexual tragedy of modern life lies, not in the fact that woman as such is tending to differ fundamentally from man as such; but that, in the unassorted confusion of our modern life, it is continually the modified type of man or woman who is thrown into the closest personal relations with the antiquated type of the opposite sex; that between father and daughter, mother and son, brother and sister, husband and wife, may sometimes be found to intervene not merely years, but even centuries of social evolution." Probably the most tragic unions are those between men of the old order and women of the new—and the majority of the new order women are not found among the younger generation.

Mrs. Gilman, in her book "The Man-Made World," takes a somewhat different standpoint and applies herself to a novel task. This she states thus: "Assuming the Gynaecocentric Theory to be the true one—that the female is the race type, and the male, originally but a sex type, reached a later equality with the female, and, in the human race, became her master for a considerable historic period—this book gives a series of studies of the effect upon our human development of this unprecedented dominance of the male, showing it to be by no means an unmixed good. It grants to men, to-day, a high pre-eminence over women in human develop-