The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎627v] (145/239)

114
THE POSITION OF WOMEN.
trary, they felt that they had been assisting at a religious and
patriotic rite, and their gait, it is safe to assume, was majestic !
But it is not only opponents who do not fully realise the astonish
ing unfairness of the popular view ; there are many supporters of
“ women’s rights ” who contend for these only on the apologetic
ground that they would always be used with admirable wisdom and
virtue, which, of course, is open to question.
Those advocates are rare who make the claim on the funda
mental principle that for members of a civilised community any
thing short of the possession of full human rights is, per se, a
grievous wrong.
It is Condorcet who says, “ Either no creature of the human
race has veritable rights or all have the same. ...”
This is the extreme and logical form of the doctrine of personal
rights as opposed to the rule-of-thumb views of society, which
recognises rights here and refuses them there, according to the
hazard of current opinion. The right to choose her ” mission ” for
herself is still denied to the woman ; others undertake to choose it
for her, being apparently in the counsels of Providence or Nature.
Yet now we have loud complaints that this erring being, in spite of
Providence or Nature, it would appear, regards the life of incessant
childbearing with aversion, and in some cases shrinks from the
function altogether. This is instructive, for it was but yesterday
that the barest whisper of such an idea would have been met with
horrified incredulity and the sentiment stigmatised as ” pose,” or
as an odious and solitary example of ” morbid ” temperament.
Never was it suspected that the ordinary state of the maternal
sentiment was morbid in a truer sense, since it had attained its
enormous strength from the overstrained conditions of the
woman’s life through countless centuries; from the perpetual
stimulation and encouragement of the maternal emotions and the
equally unwearied discouragement and denial of all other activities
and aspirations. This, according to modern biologists, is the
history of all over-strong tendencies. But the conditions that
produced this state of the impulse which John Stuart Mill de
scribes as ” inflamed into a disease,” are partially breaking down.
Hinc Mae lachrymae.
This letting in of light into the dark places of the woman’s life
has allowed her to face her own hidden feelings—suppressed how
many a time in frightened self-reproach—and has called forth ad
missions and declarations that are terrifying all who imagined that
they fully understood the essence of the woman’s nature and what
Providence intended for her—and who did not?
But these admissions are in both directions showing a curious