"The vast majority of women have never paid special attention to art or to science, and regard such occupations merely as higher branches of manual labour, or if they profess a certain devotion to such subjects, it is chiefly as a mode of attracting a particular person or group of persons of the opposite sex.) Apart from these, a close investigation shows that women really interested in intellectual matters are sexually intermediate forms.
If it be the case that the desire for freedom and equality with man occurs only in masculine women, the inductive conclusion follows that the female principle is not conscious of a necessity for emancipation ; and the argument becomes stronger if we remember that it is based on an examination of the accounts of individual cases and not on psychical investigation of an " abstract woman."
If we now look at the question of emancipation from the point of view of hygiene (not morality) there is no doubt as to the harm in it. The undesirability of emancipation lies in the excitement and agitation involved. It induces women who have no real original capacity but undoubted imitative powers to attempt to study or write, from various motives, such as vanity or the desire to attract admirers. Whilst it cannot be denied that there are a good many women with a real craving for emancipation and for higher education, these set the fashion and are followed by a host of others who get up a ridiculous agitation to convince themselves of the reality of their views. And many otherwise estimable and worthy wives use the cry to assert themselves against their husbands, whilst daughters take it as a method of rebelling against maternal authority. The practical outcome of the whole matter would be as follows ; it being remembered that the issues are too mutable for the establishment of uniform rules or laws. Let there be the freest scope given to, and the fewest hindrances put in the way of all women with masculine dispositions who feel a psychical necessity to devote themselves to masculine occupations and are physically fit to undertake them. But the idea of making an emancipation party, of aiming at a social revolution, must be abandoned. Away with the whole "woman's movement," with its unnaturalness and artificiality and its fundamental errors.
