CRITIQUING THE NEW WOMAN

CRITIQUE OF THE NEW WOMAN

Excerpted from "The New Woman" by Sheila Kaye-Smith, Living Age, November 5, 1929, p. 356.

Woman now has very nearly the same political and educational advantages as man, but you cannot be much impressed by the use she has made of them. Politics have surely never been more treacherous or commercial than they are in those Utopian days, when woman has the vote, and education seems to have persuaded some women to think that their highest aim in life is to produce a feeble imitation of their brothers. Marriage is going out of fashion as a vocation, and a great deal of nonsense is talked about men and women working together side by side and being independent of each other. I have even heard it said in praise of the modern woman that she does not look upon marriage as her aim in life, but looks forward to entering a profession and earning her living independently of male support.

To me this schoolgirlish contempt of natural emotions is just as bad as early Victorian prudery. If a woman does not look forward to marriage as the central hope of her life it means either that she intends to pursue her love affairs anti-socially, or, worse still, that she does not mean to have any at all….

[E]conomic reasons urge women into professions for which they are physically and temperamentally unfitted, and conditions for the male worker are made worse still by the consequent lowering of standards both in work and wages. Surely the war ought to have taught us that most professions are unsuited to women, both for physical and for temperamental reasons. They stepped into the men's places and did their best, but they were not, generally speaking, successful. Those who worked under or with women in the war can testify to the nervous instability-- showing itself in ill-temper, injustice, and petty tyranny-- to which even the most charming and capable women succumbed after long hours of taxing and responsible work. A woman's nervous energy was meant to be consumed by other things. Of course, I am not saying that all professions are unsuited to women, but in these days of her recovered freedom she has shown a strange lack of discrimination. Woman is at her best in the more decorative ways of life-- in the production and distribution of beautiful necessities, or in those professions most akin to motherhood, the care and education of children, or medical attendance of her own sex. Her brain power and nervous energy are essentially different from a man's, and she makes a mistake when she tries to use them in the same way. It is partly due to her confusion of equality with identity. To prove herself man's equal, as she always has been, she has paid him an unnecessary compliment of imitation, and she will never establish herself fully in popular opinion as his equal until she realizes that her equality lies in her difference. She is man's mate and completion, not his competitor, and her development lies along parallel, not similar, lines. If she merely tries to follow in his footsteps it will lead to much stumbling and weariness, and perhaps at last to the terrible tragedy of Eve's growing old.