Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/189

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SEX-ANTAGONISM : MAN'S PART
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the real world as we know it. Certainly there are some blackguards and some lunatics of both sexes. Certainly there is, and perhaps always has been, some antagonism between the sexes. It is the most constant endeavour and the most firm faith of progressive men and women that this antagonism should cease. We do not believe it to be necessary and we do believe it to be altogether bad. A great deal too much is made of the differences between men and women under civilised conditions. Mr. Heape's bogey-man is depicted as a sort of Saturn devouring his children, regardless of their welfare, desiring woman simply as the instrument of his pleasure, possessing no personal, national or racial love. Woman, on the other hand, is pictured to us as having no personal feelings towards her mate, desiring him only for the purpose of motherhood, and desiring even motherhood so faintly that the least thing will put her off it. It is difficult to have patience with a description so preposterously untrue to ordinary life. And Mr. Heape's recommendations for dealing with this appalling condition are the most extraordinary part of the whole queer affair. For he would have us "rattle into barbarism" with open eyes. According to him, all civilisation, all the united efforts of persons to make a more endurable dwelling-place on earth, all care for the future of the race, is by origin womanly, and yet—and yet—the all-devouring male is to abandon this hardly acquired civilisation, to cease to learn of the woman, and once more