"Well," said he, readjusting his glasses and going carefully over the mortuary table again, "that does seem to be the fact. If a woman assures her life she beats the company by dying sooner than a man and if she takes an annuity she beats us by living longer than he would. Don't know how it happens, but we charge extra to cover the facts as we find 'em."
Such is masculine logic upon feminine perversity even in death.
Yet men say that they understand us and our needs so much better than we do ourselves that they abandon all of their reasoning, logic, enthusiasm and beliefs on the great fundamental principles of justice, equality, liberty and law the moment their own arguments are applied to women instead of to "labor," the "Irish question" or to any other phase of class legislation as applied between man and man. The fact is simply and only this, that the arrogance of sex power and perversion is now so thoroughly ingrained that man really believes himself to be--by divine right--the human race and that woman is his perquisite. He has no universal language. He thinks in the language of sex. But more than this, and worse than this, he insists upon no one else being allowed to think in the language of humanity, and to translate that thought into action.
THE MORAL RESPONSIBILITY OF WOMAN IN HEREDITY
Read before the World's Congress of Representative Women, Chicago, 1893
Ladies and Gentlemen:--Poets, statesmen, novelists, and artists have for ages untold striven to eclipse each other in the eulogies of motherhood. On the stage nothing is so sure of rapturous applause as is some touching bit of sacrifice which has reached its climax in a mother's love wherein she has yielded all to shield, to protect, or to better the condition of husband or child. From the crude topical songs which advise the son to "Stick to your mother when her hair turns gray," through the various phases of maternal love and devotion or sacrifice in the "Camille" type of thought, on up to the loftiest touches in art and literature, there is alike the effort to celebrate the power, the potentiality and the beauty of motherhood and to stimulate the sentiments of gratitude and love and of admiration for and emulation of the ideal depicted. But through it all, in the building and nurturing of the ideal, there runs--ever and always--the thread of thought that self-sacrifice, self-abnegation, self-effacement, are the grandest attributes of maternity. That in order to be a perfect, an ideal wife and mother, the woman must be sunk, the individual immolated, the ego subjugated. To a degree and in a sense, that is, of course, true. For the willingness to go down to the gates of death; to face its possibility for long, weary months; to know that suffering, and to fear that death, stands as a sure and inevitable host at the end of a long journey--to know this and to be willing to face it for the sake of others is a heroism, a bravery, a self-abnegation so infinitely above and beyond the small heroism of camp or battlefield that comparison is almost sacrilege.