MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON T is a curious fact that although women have now enjoyed political power for over twenty years they have not yet ecided to what political function they are best adapted. I am of referring, of course, to those fierce mothers of the revolution ho still wear next to their skin the hair-shirt of woman's suffer- g throughout the ages, and who still feel, in the manner of ire, that the oppression of centuries absolves them from all co- perative thought. I am not referring to those foolish virgins ho believe that the two sexes are in some way similar to each her and who waste much valuable time in the role of male personators. Still less am I referring to those egoists ho flaunt and twitter like parakeets upon the platforms public life. I am referring to those many admirable 'omen who have taken the suffrage not as a victory or an adven- re, but as a very grave responsibility, and who in the last venty years, both within Parliament and outside it, have done uch splendid work in many ways. It would be admitted that in e present House of Commons there are women (such as Ellen itlkinson and Florence Horsburgh on the Government side, and leartor Rathbone as an independent) who have made a specifi- ally feminine contribution. They have contributed a peculiarly eminine brand of zeal, sympathy, courage and intuition. Yet yen they might wince at my use of the word " feminine," upposing that I have used it as a term of half-dispraise, whereas in fact have used it to suggest that there is some specific quality hich women can contribute and which men cannot contribute. or surely we should now have reached the stage when sex- valry should be as out of date as the wars of religion, and when ensible people should be agreed that men and women should ecome complementary to each other and should abandon all olish competition. Let me quote what was written by one the wisest women I have ever known. In A Room of One's am Virginia Woolf (nearly thirteen years ago) wrote as follows: All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality ; l this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong the private-school stage of human existence." It is surely me that we should at least begin to think about the differenti- ion of function between men and women ; and that we should nk of it as a joint and complementary effort and not in terms taking sides. * * *
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