Hypatia: Woman and Knowledge

Dora Russell

Sep 2020 · Library of Alexandria

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A feature of modern life is that matrimonial quarrels, like modern war, are carried on on a large scale, involving not individuals, nor even small groups of individuals, but both sexes and whole classes of society. In the past, Jason and Medea, neither of them quite an exemplary character, measured their strength against one another as individuals; and, though each voiced the wrongs and the naked brutality of their sex, it did not occur to either to seek in politics or in social reform a solution or a compromise. Jason, indeed, as the reactionary face to face with a turbulent and insurgent female, called to his aid the powers of kingship and the StateÑto suppress and exile, but not to remedy. Medea, driven madÑlike so many able and remarkable womenÑby the contempt and ingratitude of men as individuals or in the mass, and aware that the law was a mockery where she was concerned, expressed herself in savage protest after the manner of a militant suffragette. While I can open my newspaper to-day and read of mothers desperate with hunger, misery, or rage drowning themselves and their children, I cannot bring myself to look upon Medea as some elemental being from a dark and outrageous past. As for Jason, he never did appear to anybody as other than an ordinary male.

During the last twenty or twenty-five years, when women were struggling for their right as citizens to a vote and to a decent education, began what has been called the sex war. No woman would deny that we began it, in the sense that we were rebels against a system of masculine repression which had lasted almost unbroken since the beginning of history. In a similar sense, the proletarian to-day begins the class war. Those who remember the heroic battles of suffrage days know that the sequence of events was as follows: We made our just demands and were met with ridicule. We followed with abuseÑall the pent-up anger, misery, and despair of centuries of thwarted instinct and intelligence. Man retaliated with rotten eggs. We replied with smashed windows; he with prison and torture. People forget so readily, that it is well to remember that this was in the immediate past; it is not a nightmare picture of one of those future sex wars with which our modern Jasons delight to terrify the timorous of both sexes.

Is there a sex war? There has been. It was a disgraceful exhibition, and would not have come to a truce so soon, but that it was eclipsed by the still more disgraceful exhibition of the European War. In 1918 they bestowed the vote, just as they dropped about a few Dames and M.B.E.Õs, as a reward for our services in helping the destruction of our offspring. Had we done it after the fashion of Medea, the logical male would have been angry. They gave the vote to the older women, who were deemed less rebellious. Such is the discipline of patriotism and marriage, as it is understood by most women, that the mother will sacrifice her son with a more resigned devotion than the younger woman brings to the loss of her lover. There may be more in this than discipline. If honesty of thought, speech, and action were made possible for women, it might transpire that on the average a womanÕs love for her mate is more compelling than love for her offspring. Maternal instinctÑgenuine, not simulatedÑis rarer, but, when found, more enduring.