YARROS, Victor S. "The Woman Question"

feminismYARROS, Victor S. Journaliste américain

Liberty, Boston (12 May 1888) # 124 , pp. 6-7.

Possibly at the expense of my reputation as a radical, but certainly to the entertainment and interest of Liberty’s readers, I intend to express in this article some conservative thoughts on the so-called Woman Question. This I will do, not so much because of my desire to present my own views, but because it appears to me a good way of eliciting elaborate statement and clear explanation from those with whom I shall take the issue. The discussion (if such it may be called) of the Woman Question has so far been confined to platitudes and trivial points, while it has been deemed one of the absolute requisites of an advanced, progressive, and liberal thinker to believe in equality of the sexes and to indulge in cheap talk about economic emancipation, equal rights, etc., of the “weaker sex.” Declining to repeat this talk in a parrot-like fashion, I ask to be offered some solid arguments in support of the position which I now, with all my willingness, cannot consider well-grounded.
But let me state at the outset that I have not a word to say against the demand – which, alas! is not very loud and determined – on the part of women for a “free field and no favors.” I fully believe in liberty for man, woman, and child. So far as I know of Proudhon’s views upon the function and sphere of woman I utterly oppose it, and his exclusion of the relations of the family institution from the application of his principle of free contract I regard as arbitrary, illogical, and contradictory of his whole philosophy. Nor, on the other hand, am I jealous of the privileges and special homage accorded by the bourgeois world to women, and do not in the least share the sentiments of E. Belford Bax, who declaims against an alleged tyranny exercised by women over men. Not denying that such “tyranny” exists, I assert that Mr. Bax entirely misunderstands its real nature. Man’s condescension he mistakes for submission; marks of woman’s degradation and slavery his obliquity of vision transforms into properties of sovereignty. Tchernychewsky takes the correct view upon this matter when he makes Vera Pavlovna say; “Men should not kiss women’s hands, since that ought to be offensive to women, for it means that men do not consider them as human beings like themselves, but believe that they can in no way lower their dignity before a woman, so inferior to them is she, and that no marks of affected respect for her can lessen their superiority.” What to Mr. Bax appears to be servility on the part of men is really but insult added to injury.
The Woman Question, 1888