How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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heifers, to be used by men in bargaining for greater flocks and more grazing ground for them. At various times in the history of human culture, women have rebelled with greater or less success against the imposition of a man-made slavery. But so long as the essential economic situation remained unchanged ; so long as women were not equal to men in the production of the world’s goods, women had little chance of real emancipation. True, the microscope, that first great emancipator of women, proved conclusively that women were the equivalent of men, that nature had divided their toil, that neither male nor female was more important in nature’s scheme, that both contributed equally to the production of the new-born child. But it was the machine that initiated the final emancipa¬ tion of women, because the more complicated the machine, the more women were capable of competing with men in the production of the world’s goods. We can really date the emancipation of women from the nineteenth century, therefore, and despite the obstacles placed in the way of this emancipation by men desiring to retain their age-old prerogatives, that emancipation marches on, until to-day only a few fastnesses in the fortress of man’s ego remain to be conquered by women. When we look at our animal neighbours we find their sexual life highly cooperative. Such a thing as a conflict between stag and doe is unknown, however much two stags may compete for a doe’s favours. Competition between the sexes is definitely a product of the over¬ growth and over-function of man’s brain. Sexual competi¬ tion is a distinctly human vice, a product of man’s mistaken interpretation of his place in nature, a result of a profound inferiority complex which leads him to seek a scapegoat for his own shortcomings. Historians of the future will no doubt refer to the present age as the epoch of the death struggle between patriarchy and some new form of marriage based on sexual cooperation. Our age will be known as the age of the disintegration of the patriarchal family, as it exists to-day.