Zona Gale

“ But now, what if this book did express a new revolt against the woman's new point of view, against "feminism"? It is plainly not a new revolt, but what if it were? Just as certain intellectuals have, in the speed of their progress, again reached a taste for monarchy, so other intellectuals, young and scornful of aspiration, may prick along through their flair for freedom in life and love, and arrive at this identical Victorian conclusion, that the sole self expression for women is love. ”

“ It seems ungracious to say about a book which has been prepared with so much care, and especially for an American reviewer to say it, that Dr. Lombroso is fighting from the back of a dead dragon, while before her, in such a book as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Woman and Economics," comes the sun, "a mile high and shining." ”

“ But if a woman cannot be guided by her reasoning power, by what can she be guided? I think by the same things that both men and women have instinctively set up as guides, namely, examples, traditions, ideals, and authoritative commands. ”

“ Woman, who is weak and timid, wants to feel protected, and she imagines that the domineering man will use his authority and his force to protect her. Under the present system, which considers reciprocal independence the roof of love, one gets to the point where the members of the family do not care what the others do or think and where woman feels abandoned and ends by becoming corrupted. ”

“ The feminine conception of love as devotion, esteem, admiration is the corner stone of the family, for it is this which renders affection firm and lasting, a thing it could not be if the woman's ideal corresponded with that of the man. ”

“ The young college intellectuals have their eyes open to feminism, ten out of ten of them are feminists, but in the terrible malaise of the world, they may turn against feminism as democrats turn against democracy, as certain Americans turn against the Americanism of constitutional rights. ”

“ On the Wisconsin prairie lived an old man who at family prayers began asking in 1860 for the liberation of the slaves, never changing, to the day of his death in the '80's, the form of his after-breakfast petition: "O God, set free the colored men and women of Thy South." ”

“ It is because she sees things as they are that the highest type of woman knows how to distinguish real genius from spurious genius, fundamentally good ideas from those which merely appear good. . . . The highest type of woman sees life as it is, but most of those around her do not. ”

“ Perhaps a sign of health, such as is in the present-day fashion of the young intellectuals of using the word "noble" as a term of opprobrium. Any intimation of idealism, any hint of belief in marriage (of course they marry, but to say that they believe in it is another matter) , any toleration for the past is met by the warning: "Don't be noble." ”

“ And this is not a mere expression of ennui at the complacence of another, at any personal admissions of nobility. It is a vast self-conscious tolerance of our "nobility" itself, of racial and religious nobilities, the dicta of whose banner-bearers have for so long borne no relation whatever to actual behavior. ”

“ Woman does not think nor does she meditate except when she suffers or sees other people suffer, or when she loves or wants to be loved. The highest type of woman cannot see life as it is, nor can she love without suffering. ”

“ One focuses upon the book the eye of desire not to know its contents, with which we have so long been familiar, but to know what it means that anybody should be writing an anti-feminist book now; to know whether this is a new revolt of the intellectuals, or whether it is an echoed cry of the woman of our American South who wrote to an anti-suffragist in the North: "We are against suffrage. ”

“ In short her superiority consists in a sort of general and harmonious development of heart and mind which enables her to temper morality with beauty, justice with kindness, abstraction with reality and to harmonize the chaotic progress which springs from man's abstract genius with the various differences and tendencies inherent in every country. ”

“ With the mutual exclusiveness in this statement of a very natural desire it is impossible to cope at all, and one presses on: "My object is to try to determine women's aptitudes, aspirations, qualities, and defects and point to the conclusions which society would draw from these premises." ”

“ One is tempted to say: "A woman of Italy, hard by Algiers, by Morocco, and even by Turkey, to whom the anima della donna is assuredly in a dulcimer and her destiny waiting beyond a lattice." But remembering the feminists of Turkey and of Egypt, one looks deeper because of them, and learns, in the epistle dedicatory and in the preface, that the object of the book is twofold. ”

“ The anti-feminist as anti-feminist doesn't matter, never will matter again; but the youthful feminist as anti-feminist, riding a backwash, will matter rather more; just as it matters enormously that this same group, in Europe and America, have since the war announced their freedom to cut the dykes. ”