THE CASE AGAINST FEMINISM.* Wn.EN we find a writer of
ability barking furiously not so much up the wrong tree as up a medium sized bush we are apt to forget his possibly important discovery of the bush in the vehemence of our denial of the existence of tho tree. Dr. Arabella Kenealy states the case against " suffragetism" and against the masculinization of women with considerable vigour and unquestionably with considerable truth, but it is so fatally easy to pick holes both in her logic and in her facts that the reader will probably find it difficult to do justice to the truth of her ideas.
Dr. Kenealy, taking as an analogy the well-known facts of the development of male characteristics in females after the atrophy or in the absence of the normal sex organs—for example, the growth of antlers on barren does and their development of male teeth and the squaring of the jaw and deepening of the voice in some elderly women—holds that the development of the male characteristics of brain and muscle in young women will impair what she believes to be their higher functions. Not only will it impair their maternal efficiency, but it detracts from the refinement, the beauty, the civilization which she holds it is the female function to preserve.
She makes an interesting analysis of the male and female characteristics which co-exist in all men and in all women. It is the part of the male characteristic to acquire and preserve the means of living, to harvest the fruits, but that of the female to make use of them. It has long been a • Feminism and Sez Extinction. By Dr. Arabella Kenealy. London : Fleshes Jnwln. Res. set.]
commonplace that the painter, the poet and the musician have Something more feminine in them than the soldier and the administrator, and this Dr. Kenealy holds to be no figure of speech, but to imply that in such men there has been a greater inheritance of the maternal characteristics. In women with executive awthetic faculties she holds there is a slight male preponderance ; but when women take up the pursuits of politics, war and industry, she holds that they are developing the "lower " male side of their natures to the total extinction of the higher grade female faculties. The mescu- linization of women is degeneration, she holds. What in fine, she seems to say, is the good of both sexes being so concerned with the means of living that they trouble themselves not at all with - the end to which those means were directed ?
Had she left her argument at this, there would have been a good deal to say for it ; but she is, unfortunately, not content with a moderate statement and must go on to glorify the early Victorian woman with her highly developed* femininity and to abuse up hill and down dale the woman of to-day.
We review below a novel of 1850 called A Lost Love, which has been reprinted, and which shosis how unnatural, how cruel, was the stunting, moral and physical, of the " eman- cipation " of women from all work. It is a pity that Dr. Arabella. Kenealy cannot exhort her sex to be womanly without demanding that they be womanish.
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