Nothing can ever overcome that one enormous sex superiority, that even
the male child is born closer to his mother than to his father.
No one, staring at that frightful female privilege, can quite
believe in the equality of the sexes. Here and there we read
of a girl brought up like a tom-boy; but every boy is brought up
like a tame girl. The flesh and spirit of femininity surround
him from the first like the four walls of a house; and even
the vaguest or most brutal man has been womanized by being born.
Man that is born of a woman has short days and full of misery;
but nobody can picture the obscenity and bestial tragedy that would
belong to such a monster as man that was born of a man.
* * *
XI
THE QUEEN AND THE SUFFRAGETTES
But, indeed, with this educational matter I must of necessity embroil
myself later. The fourth section of discussion is supposed to be
about the child, but I think it will be mostly about the mother.
In this place I have systematically insisted on the large part
of life that is governed, not by man with his vote, but by woman
with her voice, or more often, with her horrible silence.
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