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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 74

III

III.

Nature assigns different and distinct spheres to men and women.

There is much similarity between the sexes and there is also much dissimilarity. In certain respects men and women are equal, and in others they are unequal. The sphere which Nature assigns to men, and that which she assigns to women, meet and mingle largely, and have much in common; but there is much that belongs exclusively to the one sex and much that belongs exclusively to the other. Men and women are quite equal in respect of their natural fights as human beings; but they are far from being alike: just as England and Scotch and Irish here are perfectly equal, while they are very far from being alike. And it is on this unlikeness between men and women, not on any inequality between them, that we rest what we take to be a very strong argument against the admission of women into Parliament.

If we were asked to point out the distinctive characteristics of the two spheres which Nature assigns to the sexes, and to indicate clearly what pursuits and employments were appropriate to men and what to women, we confess we could do so only vaguely. Trying, however, to differentiate the spheres, we would say that generally the sphere for men to live and labour in was outside, and that for women inside—to the one belonged the more public life abroad, to the other the more private life at home. Men have to earn the income, and women to administer it in connection with the home. Men have to do the roughest and hardest work : women have also not a little arduous work to do, but we expect what they do to be associated with tact, taste, and refinement. At our stage of civilisa- page 6 tion about half or more of the different kinds of work to be done in the world might be done with equal propriety either by men or by women, being about equally suitable to both. But there are certain kinds of work or employments for which men seem to be specially fitted. Women seem to be specially fitted to be nurses, cooks, dressmakers, comforters, and diffusers of moral and refining influences, and men are specially fitted to be agriculturists, miners, soldiers, sailors, policemen, butchers, members of the prizering and members of Parliament.

The foregoing answer to the question asked above may be supplemented by a few other considerations.

Women's lot on earth, their main business, is connected with marriage, the home, and the rearing of children. This is the destiny of nineteen out of twenty of all adult women. In connection with their homes and the up-bringing of children, they receive their best and most complete culture. There they fulfil their true destiny, and there, no doubt, they find their chief earthly happiness. At the same time, there are vast numbers of unmarried women and childless widows, whose life is necessarily more isolated and solitary. To them our advancing civilisation is opening numerous doors of employment till lately monopolised by men. But, much as we may sympathise with these, we cannot, for their sakes, alter the current of our civilization or attempt to turn it backwards. The family is the primary, the fundamental, the most important institution of oar civilisation. It must be upheld at all costs while we do our best for those who are partly outside of it. In the family or home lies woman's chief business on earth; while the outside, the public world, is the chief sphere of man's life and labour. Since civilisation began, there has always been, and there will always continue to be, this distinction between the respective spheres of men and women in life. It is impossible to retain our civilisation if we abolish all distinction in their pursuits and avocations—if we are to have males and females side by side tilling the fields, working the mines, fighting battles, manning ships, apprehending criminals, legislating in Parliament, executing criminals, doing the same kind of work everywhere.

At the present time, two very diverse courses are open to communities : either to hold on firmly and wisely in the course along which the civilised world has been advancing for thousands of years, or to remove and level all distinctions in the spheres allotted by law and custom and common sense to men and women respectively. page 7 taking the former course, we are on the line of progress; taking the better, we are simply retrograding in the direction of savagery. And when we have reached the savage state (for out of savagery we same and back to it we may return), we shall find that one ineffaceable distinction still remains, the distinction of greater and less physical strength, which must end in men being masters and tyrants, and women being their abject slaves. Make women professional politicians and legislators, and we are indeed on the down grade.