Revolted Woman

Charles George Harper (1863 – 1943) was an English author and illustrator. Born in London, England, Harper wrote many self-illustrated travel books, exploring the regions, roads, coastlines, literary connections, old inns etc. of Britain. In later life, he lived in Petersham.


PREFACE

IT might have been supposed, having in mind her first and most stupendous faux pas, that Woman would be content to sit, for all time, humbly under correction, satisfied with her lot until the crack of doom, when man and woman shall be no more; when heaven and earth shall pass away, and pale humanity come to judgment.


But it is essentially feminine, and womanlike (and therefore of necessity illogical) that she should be forgetful of the primeval curse which Mother Eve brought upon the race, and that she should, instead of going in sackcloth and ashes for her ancestor’s disobedience, seek instead, not only to be the equal of man, but, in her foremost advocates—the strenuous and ungenerous females who periodically crucify the male sex in sexual novels written under manly pseudonyms—aspire to rule him, while as yet she has no efficient control over her own hysterical being. x


Humanity is condemned by the First Woman’s disobedience to earn a precarious livelihood by the sweat of its brow. All the toil and trouble of this work-a-day world proceed from her sex; and yet the cant of ‘Woman’s Mission’ fills the air, and the New Woman is promised us as some sort of a pedagogue who shall teach the ‘Child-Man’ how to toddle in the paths of virtue and content. How absurd it all is, when the women who write these things pander to the depraved palate which gained Holywell Street a living and an unenviable notoriety years ago; when they obtain three-fourths of their readers from their fellow-women who read their productions hopeful of indecency, and conceive themselves cheated if they do not find it. Let us, however, do these women writers, or ‘Literary Ladies,’ as they have labelled themselves—margarine masquerading as ‘best fresh’—the justice to acknowledge that they do not halt half-way on the road to viciousness, though to reach their goal they wade knee-deep in abominations. Here, indeed, they are no cheats, and it remains the unlikeliest sequel that you close their pages and yet do not find Holywell Street outdone.


Consider: If morals are to be called into question, xi can it be disputed that, as compared with Woman, Man is the moral creature, and has ever been, from the time of Potiphar’s wife, up to the present?


Woman is the irresponsible creature who cannot reason nor follow an argument to its just conclusion—who cannot control her own emotions, nor rid herself of superstition. What question more pertinent, then, to ask than this: If mankind is to be led by the New Woman, is she, first of all, sure of the path?


CHARLES G. HARPER.