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by Anthony M. Ludovici In Fads and Fallacies by Joshua Brookes, with Anthony Ludovici and Ellis Barker pp. 227237 Brentano's London 1929 - p. 227 - Her relation to man and to the children he gives her, gratifies so many of woman's deepest longings, that for the human female to wish not to gratify these longings, but to prefer a life of public activity away from motherhood and man, she must have become disillusioned or even nauseated by the way in
Ill-health, on the one hand, and Puritanism, on the other, having made her available men unable to attain to that fiery altitude of passion which alone makes all things pure, woman very naturally began to doubt the desirability of the relationship altogether. When, however, we add to this a steady increase in the horrors of child-bearing due to various causes (not the least of which is the inability of doctors to deal with both parturition and pregnancy on rational lines) so that from the beginning to the end of the relationship, the attractions seem to grow ever less and less, and its distresses ever greater and greater, we cannot wonder that the unexpected should have happened and that to thousands of women of the modern world it seems a truism to say "there is nothing in it." Beside "it," office work,
To this explanation of the roots of Anglo-Saxon Feminism, people will often reply: "But where there is a great excess of women over men, and where hundreds of thousands of women cannot marry, some sort of unmarried career for women is essential, whether or not they happen to be disgusted at the thought of a sexual life." This would be true if Feminism consisted merely of a movement on the part of unmarried female workers to secure and establish their rights and privileges. But it is not, and never was that. The hordes of the Feminists, the bulk of the leaders of modern Feminism, consist of disillusioned, disgruntled and indignant married women, who, knowing the horrors of an embrace with a fish, feel they cannot rest until they have shouted from the house-tops that "there is nothing in it!" and that single blessedness is not only better, but fuller, sweeter, and altogether more desirable for women. These expostulating females who have rushed back vomiting from the connubial alcove, have become not only enemies of men, but of all passion, as the result of their appalling experiences. They know the game is not worth the candle!! They know positively that the Almighty made the most regrettable of all his errors when he devised the abomination known as human reproduction, and they are determined to leave no stone unturned to prevent every young girl from
The English mind, so prone to seek purely economic causes for every social phenomenon, is apt to overlook entirely the deeper non economic causes of the Feminist movement, and by so doing fails to account for many of its most salient features. For instance, the Feminist movement is profoundly tinctured with hostility to the male. Is it supposed that this arises from economic competition? Ask the factory girls, the typists and the girl clerks! It is the working women in factories, in offices and counting houses who compete most vigorously with men and boys. But it is precisely among such women that sex hostility is least acute. Where it is acute is in the idle and professional classes, where the women do not need to work, but whose males are most degenerate, that is to say, most undermined either by ill-health, excessive sport, excessive Puritanism, excessive chivalry, or excessive washing. In fact, the Feminist movement is the creation of a class that, taken as a whole, has hardly felt the economic rivalry of the sexes. It is in the middle and richer classes that men are most bloodless, most fireless, most "gentlemanly," in fact, most exasperating from the standpoint of the passionate and vigorous girl. It is the men of this class who have borne the whole burden of turning the Anglo-Saxon female away from Life as a life-interest. Behold them in their homes and their clubs! They are so well polished and scraped and scented, as to have lost every feature of the animal.
Humour and chivalry they have in abundance, because humour always characterises unconcentrated, passionless people, who are capable of taking nothing seriously, not even their own desires. And they are proud of their humour. Their womenfolk, failing to understand that men who are easily ruled are, in the end, unsatisfactory and unsatisfying mates, encourage them in their pride of humour, because men with humour are easily managed. And thus it comes about that, in this feministic and degenerate Age, humour becomes a national cult in all Anglo-Saxon communities. The chivalry that accompanies it is not the chivalry of old, according to which it was considered honourable to protect and be responsible for one weaker than oneself. It is merely a total renunciation of wilful action in relation to women. If it
The fact that women are unhappy and discontented owing to their fatal association with this type of man, is proved not only by the phenomenon of Feminism itself, with the whole of the female stampede out of the home and away from men, but also by the avidity with which the women of all Anglo-Saxon countries devour the fictional literature of their day. For, in order to satisfy their ungratified longings, this fictional literature depicts a very different type of male from that with which they are accustomed to deal in their every-day life. In it, the reader will usually find a hero who is wilful, strong, passionate and very serious about his desires. As far as her world is concerned, the "Sheikh" man, which is the ideal of the modern flapper, is utterly non existent outside the pages of the novel or novelette which she devours so greedily. Nor would she tolerate for one instant any "sheikh" behaviour on the part of the lover she is able and likely to find
More evidence of the unhappiness of modern women is forthcoming from the experience of the average general practitioner, who, in his daily round, encounters among his female patients, so much morbid depression and irascibility, that there is hardly a doctor in a large Anglo-Saxon city, particularly among the Protestant section, who is not more of a father confessor or professional comforter than a healer or medical adviser. The whole of modern life, with all the excitement and gaiety it offers, is thus only an inadequate substitute for the real joys which these poor women can never experience; and, as a result, they are often starving amid all the appearances of plenty, restless when they have all the apparent requisites for a life of peace, and dissatisfied when, as far as a superficial observer can tell, they are in a position to gratify their smallest whim. In addition to all the misery which arises directly from the inadequacy of the modern male as a sexual mate, however, there is also the misery which
The women, by not understanding their difference, and by not being willing to acknowledge it, have chosen the latter alternative. They wish to preserve society, and therefore since they must transform themselves in order to hope to regulate it successfully, they are doing their utmost to approximate to the male in every way. This process of approximation and assimilation to the male now begins at school, to the great disadvantage of all the young women of the country, and the deleterious sporting activities of the modern girl are but symptoms of this tendency. But seeing that, for count-
No! The remedy ought to have been sought elsewhere. Since the world had grown chaotic and women wretched, through the degeneracy of the male, the obvious remedy, and the only one that could do any good, was to set about regenerating man. By his regeneration, two evils would have been corrected by a single effort (a) woman's discontent and misery would have been relieved, by restoring to her a mate with whom she could be happy, and a mate who would make her proud and not ashamed of being a woman; and (b) modern anarchy and chaos would have been ended by society's recovering her best traditional regulator. But women were too vain to understand or to see that this was the best remedy. For in order to desire the regeneration of man, they must first acknowledge his degeneracy. If, however, they acknowledged this, they placed their own alleged advancement in question. For if man had degenerated, their supposed advance might be but relative after all. While he had gone back they, with the appearance of advancing, had really been standing still. But to acknowledge this is much more wounding to woman's self-esteem than to
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