Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II Woman's Physical Handicaps Feminism seeks to approximate woman's life and work to man's life and work. Women, it teaches, should be educated like men; they should do the same work as men in politics — voting, legislating, administering; they should follow industrial careers like men; they should reduce to a minimum the demands of motherhood and, like men, subordinate the home to their " life's work." " Feminism can be defined philosophically," says Mr. W. L. George, " as the levelling of the sexes." 1 Now, if it be admitted that women are in body and mind different from men, there is a preliminary obstacle, hard to evade, to the working out of this programme, and therefore Feminism is concerned to show that there is little difference in nature between men and women. Most of the characteristics that distinguish women from men are acquired, it contends, through the conventional training and environment to which they are subjected in a man-made world. It is difficult to discover any characteristics that Feminists allow are feminine. Though the existence of those fundamental physiological habits of bodywhich handicap women cannot be denied, even they are pooh-poohed, minimised and ignored. " I find that an average of sixty per cent. of girls enter college," says Miss M. Carey Thomas, president of the Bryn Mawr College, " absolutely and in every respect well, and that less than thirty per cent. make, or need to make, any periodic difference whatever in exercise or study from year's end to year's end." 2 1 " Woman and To-morrow," p. 8. In the same spirit, a president of a woman's college in England tells a feminist group that she finds young women can study hard, take examinations, and keep up with all their work by exercising a little strength of will when ...