The Pittsburgh Press (February 15, 1944)
Ferguson: Women’s emancipation
By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
Dr. Albert E. Wiggam reminds us that Olive Schreiner, one of the first great feminine leaders, prophesied long ago that women’s emancipation advances only when it is to men’s advantage. History has proved her right.
Women have moved into new fields only as men profited financially from those changes, and as they saw how easy it was to persuade women to take on additional duties.
No one can deny that every freedom gained by women has given an additional freedom to men. Rebecca West puts it this way:
It is certain that men suffer from a certain timidity, a liability to discouragement which makes them reluctant to go on doing anything once it has been proved that women can do it as well. This was painfully illustrated during the slump in both Europe and America where wives found to their amazement that if they got jobs when their husbands lost theirs, the husbands became either their frenzied enemies or relapsed into an infantile state of dependence and never worked again.
Nowhere is Miss Schreiner’s point so strongly proved as in marriage. There, women have achieved many liberties, but at a high rate of exchange. The woman with the latchkey finds that her man stays out at all hours, too. Divorce, which was first arranged in order to free the wife from an unbearable situation, has bred vast irresponsibilities in men. Thousands of emancipated women are forced to support as well as rear their children.
But I see a light along the horizon. Now that women have joined the Army, maybe they’ll do its work so well that the men may feel it wise to stop war before they expose their ignorance on what has been, up to now, their pet monopoly.