isa-normaladvance-1914-00116

Description:	116THE NORMAL ADVANCEwoman of today known as the feministic move¬ ment. Caesar is eternally right when he said of Cassius:Let me have men about me that are fat  Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o nights  Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look, He thinks too much such men are dangerous.Yes, and such women too—to Caesars.Do not confuse this movement with the suf¬ frage movement, wThich is really only an in¬ finitesimal fraction of the whole. The feminis¬ tic movement is much broader, much deeper and more fundamental than any legal status.Following close upon her breaking into the educational world, early in the nineteenth cen¬ tury, came that great revolutionary social force, the invention and widespread use of machinery —the inauguration into the industrial world of what is called the factory system. This wrought a revolution in mans world, and it, all but disrupted, the old order called womans sphere. Let Olive Schreiner in her Woman and Labor sum up for us its effect on womans work and life. Our spinning wheels are all broken in a thousand huge buildings steam- driven looms guided by a few hundred thou¬ sands of hands (often those of men) produce the clothings of half the world and we dare no longer say, proudly, as of old, that we and we alone clothe our peoples.Our hoes and grindstones passed from us long ago, when the plowman and the miller took our place, but for a time we kept fast possession of the kneading trough and the brewing vat. To¬ day steam often shapes our bread, and the loaves are set down at our very door—it may be by a man-driven motor car. The history of our household drinkswe know no longer we merely see them set before us on the table. Day by day modern prepared and factory-produced viands take a larger place in the dietary of rich and poor, till the workingmans wife places before her household little that is of her own preparation while among thewealthier classes, so far has domestic change gone, that men are not unfrequently found la¬ boring in our houses and kitchens, and even standing behind our chairs to do all but actually place the morsel of food between our feminine lips. • * * In every direction the ancient saw that it was exclusively womans sphere to prepare viands of her household, has become, in proportion as civilization has perfected it¬ self, an antiquated lie.Looking round, then, with the uttermost im¬ partiality we can command on the entire field of womans ancient and traditional labor, we find that fully three-fourths of it have shrunk away forever, and that the remaining fourth still tends to shrink. • It is this great fact, so often and so completely overlooked, which lies as a propelling force behind that vast and rest¬ less Womans Movement which marks our day. It is this fact, whether clearly and in¬ tellectually grasped, or, as is more often the case, vaguely and painfully felt, which awakes in the hearts of the ablest modern European women their passionate, and at times what would seem almost incoherent, cry for new forms of labor and new fields for the exercise of their powers. Thrown into logical form our demand is this: We do not ask that the wheels of time should reverse themselves, or the stream of life flow backward. We do not ask that ever ancient spinning wheels be resuscitated and placed in our hands. * * * We do not de¬ mand that society shall immediately reconstruct itself that every woman may again be a child- bearer (deep and over-mastering as lies the hun¬ ger for motherhood in every virile womans heart) neither do we demand that the chil¬ dren whom we bear shall again be put exclu¬ sively into our hands to train. This we know cannot be. The past material conditions of life have gone, forever no will of man can recall them, but this is our demand: We demand that, in that strange new world that is arising alike upon the man and the woman, where nothing
Source:	http://indstate.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/isuarchive/id/32568
Collection:	Indiana State University Archives

Further information on this record can be found at its source.