Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/150

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CHAPTER XII


THE MAN'S WOMAN: WOMANLY

"A woman capable at all points to bear children, to guard them, to teach them, to turn them out strong and healthy citizens o± the great world, stands at the farthest remove from the finnikin doll or the meek drudge whom man by a kind of false sexual selection has through many centuries evolved as his ideal."—Edward Carpenter.


WHAT new contribution have women to offer the world in return for their emancipation? In the women's movement there is a strong feeling that under the influence of the dominant male, women have had to conform to an ideal not their own, and that this forcible compression of all women into one mould—and that a mould not of their own choosing—has been bad for women, and therefore bad for women's work, and in the end bad for men. In order to come to a clearer view of whether this is so or not, I propose in this chapter and the next to treat of the man's woman and the woman's woman. Everybody would probably agree that there is a very great distinction, and that, taking them in the mass, the qualities which women love and admire in women are not the

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