The Beginning and the End

The aim of the modern woman is to equal man not in rights alone, but also in personality, in thought, and in cultural production; to rise from her present condition, which confines her within the circle of existential needs, to a higher condition in which the ideal human life becomes possible for her — the life of creative activity.

But the woman of today — everywhere — still groans under the nightmare of long generations of enslavement. Those who look to the past to draw from it the means of woman's emancipation are mistaken, for the laws of yesterday and its realities alike conspire to hem woman in and to curtail her freedom. Today people's view of woman, in their conscious minds and their unconscious alike, is still the view of the ancients, who considered her a sex midway between the child and the man, a machine for childbearing and for the service of the stronger sex in the form of husband and son, possessed of a narrow, limited world that extends no further than amusing the man and doting on the children. This nightmare forms a powerful barrier preventing her equality with the other sex, however far she may go in learning and culture, because it weakens her confidence in herself and drives her to believe in her own weakness.

One of the merits of the curricula of instruction in the countries from which we take our own is that they make no distinction between boy and girl, but demand of both the same efforts and the same examinations for obtaining the same diplomas. This utopian equality on the school bench collides with a contrary current outside the school — at home and in society — which strikes the girl in her faith and demolishes her hopes and her dreams.

Yet among the women of today there are those who listen to souls filled with faith, ahead of their age in thought, looking toward a new age and a new freedom; and, after the example of Joan of Arc, such a woman hears voices strange to her surroundings calling to her and saying: "Win your freedom! And here is the way to it:

"First, a profession. Every woman and every man must arm themselves with a profession. Whoever has no profession is a defenseless parasite. Likewise the woman without a profession is a defenseless parasite. We are in an age of upheavals and rapid transformations, in the face of which nothing stands firm but self-reliance. In olden times there were privileged classes among men whose members relied on their privileges and regarded parasitism as a natural thing. But modern times have taught people, more than before, that conditions do not last and that privileges are liable to vanish.

"Second, culture that continues throughout life. The cultured person has many marks: among them physical exercise; among them moral discipline and refusal to be led by emotion; among them soundness of taste and an understanding of the secrets of beauty. Perhaps the most important of them is the continuity of intellectual culture, which means a continuing aptitude for study and reading and for taking in what is new. It likewise means an independent capacity for judgment and selection, and that the cultured person should have his own world and his personal thinking, so that he is not swept along by the current of public opinion, is not drawn into vulgarity, and is not led unconsciously to conform to his surroundings; rather, after the example of Descartes, he doubts what is around him and resists illusions and falsehoods."

I still remember a saying of Professor Bianchi at an annual celebration for those finishing at the university: People have agreed to call this celebration "Commencement" — that is, the beginning of life and of struggle. In my opinion this celebration means, for many of you, certain death and the end of struggle, the laying down of arms, the turning away from all moral, intellectual, or spiritual growth, submission to the influences of one's surroundings, and a return to the traditions of the ancestors and their ways of living, working, and thinking.

And if the young man is exposed to such a decline, the young woman is exposed to it still more, because the traditions that bind her to the past would confine her being to the biological functions, or what we call the vegetative life. It is no easy thing for a girl, after leaving school, to escape the reactionary influence with which family and society surround her, and to resist the temptation of the easy vegetative life built upon surrender and slackness.

But despite all this we want to be optimists, and to believe in the slow natural evolution that raises woman's mentality, her inclinations, and her aims, and shows her in a real and tangible way that the human life is better than the vegetative life — while knowing that new and unlooked-for circumstances may come which will compel woman to evolve swiftly, accomplishing in a brief moment what we accomplish in centuries: "And a thousand years in Thy sight, O Lord, are but as yesterday when it is past."