And to ascertain the essential reason of this present inferiority we need hardly go beyond the ground facts of difference between men and women already mentioned:
Women are not physically as strong as men.
From these ground facts, readily admitted by all, the reason for the present inferiority of women’s position emerges clear and unmistakable. Women are weaker than men. They are weaker because they are not in general built so strongly; because they have to bear and to rear children; because they are unarmed. There is no getting away from it, they are weaker; and one cannot doubt for a moment that their inferior position is due to this weakness. But—so runs an immemorial argument—however equal their opportunities might be, women will never be as strong as men! Why then, for sentimental reasons, disturb the present order of things, why equalize those opportunities? This is the plea which was used before married women were allowed separate property, before the decision in “Regina _versus_ Jackson,” which forbade a husband to hold his wife prisoner. The argument, in fact, of expediency and force.
Now there are no finer statements of the case for the full emancipation of women than Mill’s “Subjection of Women,” and Miss Jane Harrison’s essay entitled “Homo Sum.” The reasonings in the former work are too well-known, but to the main thesis of “Homo Sum” allusion must here be made. The most common, perhaps most telling, plea against raising the social and political status of women to a level with that of men is this: Men and women _are already equal_, but in separate spheres of activity. The difference between their physical conformation and functions underlies everything in the lives of both. The province and supremacy of women are in the home; the province and supremacy of men in the State. Why seek to alter what Nature has ordained? A plea, in fact, which glorifies sex _qua_ sex.
But the writer of “Homo Sum” is at pains to show that “the splendid and vital instinct of sex,” with all its “singular power of interpenetrating and reinforcing other energies,” is in essence egoistic, exclusive, anti-social; and that, besides and beyond being men and women, we are all human beings. “The whole women’s movement,” the writer says, “is just the learning of that lesson. It is not an attempt to arrogate man’s prerogative of manhood; it is not even an attempt to assert and emphasize woman’s privilege of womanhood; it is simply the demand that in the life of woman, as in the life of man, space and liberty shall be found for a thing bigger than either manhood or womanhood—for humanity.”