The World Set Free, H. G. Wells [ereader for textbooks .txt] 📗

all our emotional forms have been almost altogether adolescent; plays and stories, delights and hopes, they have all turned on that marvellous discovery of the love interest, but life lengthens out now and the mind of adult humanity detaches itself. Poets who used to die at thirty live now to eighty-five. You, too, Kahn! There are endless years yet for you⁠—and all full of learning.⁠ ⁠… We carry an excessive burden of sex and sexual tradition still, and we have to free ourselves from it. We do free ourselves from it. We have learnt in a thousand different ways to hold back death, and this sex, which in the old barbaric days was just sufficient to balance our dying, is now like a hammer that has lost its anvil, it plunges through human life. You poets, you young people want to turn it to delight. Turn it to delight. That may be one way out. In a little while, if you have any brains worth thinking about, you will be satisfied, and then you will come up here to the greater things. The old religions and their new offsets want still, I see, to suppress all these things. Let them suppress. If they can suppress. In their own people. Either road will bring you here at last to the eternal search for knowledge and the great adventure of power.”

“But incidentally,” said Rachel Borken; “incidentally you have half of humanity, you have womankind, very much specialised for⁠—for this love and reproduction that is so much less needed than it was.”

“Both sexes are specialised for love and reproduction,” said Karenin.

“But the women carry the heavier burden.”

“Not in their imaginations,” said Edwards.

“And surely,” said Kahn, “when you speak of love as a phase⁠—isn’t it a necessary phase? Quite apart from reproduction, the love of the sexes is necessary. Isn’t it love, sexual love, which has released the imagination? Without that stir, without that impulse to go out from ourselves, to be reckless of ourselves and wonderful, would our lives be anything more than the contentment of the stalled ox?”

“The key that opens the door,” said Karenin, “is not the goal of the journey.”

“But women!” cried Rachel. “Here we are! What is our future⁠—as women? Is it only that we have unlocked the doors of the imagination for you men? Let us speak of this question now. It is a thing constantly in my thoughts, Karenin. What do you think of us? You who must have thought so much of these perplexities.”

Karenin seemed to weigh his words. He spoke very deliberately. “I do not care a rap about your future⁠—as women. I do not care a rap about the future of men⁠—as males. I want to destroy these peculiar futures. I care for your future as intelligences, as parts of and contribution to the universal mind of the race. Humanity is not only naturally overspecialised in these matters, but all its institutions, its customs, everything, exaggerate, intensify this difference. I want to unspecialise women. No new idea. Plato wanted exactly that. I do not want to go on as we go now, emphasising this natural difference; I do not deny it, but I want to reduce it and overcome it.”

“And we remain women,” said Rachel Borken.

“Need you remain thinking of yourselves as women?”

“It is forced upon us,” said Edith Haydon.

“I do not think a woman becomes less of a woman, because she dresses and works like a man,” said Edwards. “You women here, I mean you scientific women, wear white clothing like the men, twist up your hair in the simplest fashion, go about your work as though there was only one sex in the world. You are just as much women, even if you are not so feminine, as the fine ladies down below there in the plains who dress for excitement and display, whose only thoughts are of lovers, who exaggerate every difference.⁠ ⁠… Indeed we love you more.”

“But we go about our work,” said Edith Haydon.

“So does it matter?” asked Rachel.

“If you go about your work and if the men go about their work then for Heaven’s sake be as much woman as you wish,” said Karenin. “When I ask you to unspecialise, I am thinking not of the abolition of sex, but the abolition of the irksome, restricting, obstructive obsession with sex. It may be true that sex made society, that the first society was the sex-cemented family, the first state a confederacy of blood relations, the first laws sexual taboos. Until a few years ago morality meant proper sexual behaviour. Up to within a few years of us the chief interest and motive of an ordinary man was to keep and rule a woman and her children, and the chief concern of a woman was to get a man to do that. That was the drama, that was life. And the jealousy of these demands was the master motive in the world. You said, Kahn, a little while ago that sexual love was the key that let one out from the solitude of self, but I tell you that so far it has only done so in order to lock us all up again in a solitude of two.⁠ ⁠… All that may have been necessary but it is necessary no longer. All that has changed and changes still very swiftly. Your future, Rachel, as women, is a diminishing future.”

“Karenin?” asked Rachel, “do you mean that women are to become men?”

“Men and women have to become human beings.”

“You would abolish women? But, Karenin, listen! There is more than sex in this. Apart from sex we are different from you. We take up life differently. Forget we are⁠—females, Karenin, and still we are a different sort of human being with a different use. In some things we are amazingly secondary. Here am I in this place because of my trick of management, and Edith is here because of her patient, subtle hands. That does not alter the fact that nearly the whole body