Page:The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage.djvu/164

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CORRECTIVES FOR DISCONTENT
161

tion that human beings ought to be assigned, without distinction of sex, to each and every function which would come within the range of their individual capacities, instead of being assigned as they are at present: men to one function, and women to another.

Here again women ought to have been safeguarded by education. She ought to have been taught that even when an individual woman comes up to the average of man this does not abrogate the disqualification which attaches to a difference of sex. Nor yet—as every one who recognises that we live in a world which conducts itself by generalisations will see—does it abrogate the disqualification of belonging to an inferior intellectual caste.

The present system of feminine education is blameworthy not only in the respect that it fails to draw attention to these disqualifications and to teach woman where she stands; it is even more blameworthy in that it fails to convey to the girl who is growing up any conception of that absolutely elementary form of morality