Mother Earth Magazine |
 |
|
|
FEMINISM IN AMERICA
By R. A. P.
The idea of feminism is one which has of late been so persistently dinned into the ears of the American that the unwary may be led to believe that it embodies a program of freedom for women. As a matter of fact, our American feminists are the exponents of a new slavery. Though the very basis of this idea is, obviously, founded upon the bisexual character of the human race, these ardent ladies are the bitterest and most uprighteous opponent of those very functions that seem most adequately to indicate such bisexuality. These functions are, we may conclude from the opinions of the eminent Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman -- widely heralded as "our leading American feminist"-- a wicked and immoral afterthought, pushed into the foreground of consciousness by the lechery of men. For in all her highly moral and edifying tales of "white slavery," cruel seduction and sinister grape-juice rapine, you cannot escape the continuous harping upon the universal, omnipresent sexual victimization of virtuous females by some low, vulgar male -- who is usually, however, brought to "justice" by some highly efficient feminist -- in one case the detective mama of the mammalian male himself! All sexual activity must be sanctified by law and sterilized by respectability. In the name of "humanism" the American feminist would prevent and in every way increase the inhibitions to sexual expression.
Such prudery and hypocrisy could bloom and flourish only in the soil of American "culture." They present a curious contrast to the attitude of the earlier feminists of Europe, with whom we may or may not agree, but who had, at least, the honesty and frankness to realize and to point out that the freedom of women must mean initially the freedom of their bodies. So strong this conviction has been that in the Woman's Congress of 1905, as in practically all of their writings, these women claimed, the right of abortion and advocated the abolition of all punishment for abortion except when performed against the will of the pregnant woman herself. Such activity was of importance and value because it tended to
|
