Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/163

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THE WOMAN'S WOMAN : A PERSON
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far more attractive than the colourless submissive ideal.

We have been wearied out with talk of the ideal woman, and now there comes a change, but it is more apparent than real. We hear now a good deal about a person called by the name of Normal Woman. Men who have done good work in some particular corner of scientific research have been largely responsible for the respect with which this talk about Normal Woman has been received, but when you come to look at her, you will find that she is merely Ideal Woman dressed up in scientific terms, and that the author of her being is no other than the Old Adam. It often seems to me that the common people, with no notion of general principles or of scientific and philosophic methods, cannot wander so fantastically far from truth and justice and common humanity as your man of science, when his sex-vanity has been hurt or his prerogative of pure egoism has been disturbed. The denunciations of scientific men have, fortunately, been robbed of many of their terrors by the work of women in biology and medicine. It would be only human if scientific women showed traces of their sex in their work, just as men do, but that these are very slight is suggested by the complaint of Sir Almroth Wright, who declared, in his widely read letter to The Times (March 1912), that medical women violated the "modesties and reticences upon which our civilisation has been built up," by putting above these their scientific " desire for