ALL nature is action and reaction. Feminism is the supreme reaction of Intuition against Intellectualism. It is a giant, protesting, vital groundswell from out of the very dugs of the race.
Man is bankrupt. Given intellect, will and brawn, he is to-day the arch-[1041]bungler. His laws are a mass of contradictions and absurdities. He has tried every form of social organization, with the result that bloodshed, standing armies and devitalizing taxation are all he has to show for it.
Comes now the greatest of all psychological reactions, the sublimest portent in the social life of the planet—the principle of the Irrational, the principle of Impulse, the avatar of Intuition, the supra-reality called Instinct. In other words: Woman.
Feminism comes to cleanse and heal, fortify and balance. Woman no longer asks to be free. She is too great for that. She will take what she wants as a divine right.
And she has that divine right, for she is life itself. Man is only an accessory. In the beginning was Woman and in the end will be Woman because Nature itself is feminine. Nature has no brains. It is blind instinct, will and womb.
Man with his intellect—of which he is so boastful—is an accident. Thought is a freak. Every veil that man takes off of the mystery-in-things falls over his own eyes. Only the eyes in the heart of feminine instinct have ever seen clearly. She can be trusted with the fate of the planet.
Man while holding woman as a bond-servant to his flesh has been compelled to glorify her through art. Woman is the real superman. Man has admitted it from the time he created the sublime Antigone to the time he created the sublime Isolde.
The great woman comes rank and stark out of nature. In so far as man has civilized her he has denaturalized her. Woman is the great anarch, the [1042] great dramaturge of life, the supreme immoralist.
These things make her the glory of the planet. She knows nothing—cares nothing—for justice, truth and the other gilded idols of the market place. When she has set her heart on attaining a thing she will go through hell-fire and all the Magna Chartas that were ever written to attain it.
Scruples are for over-intellectualized man. Conscience has always made a poltroon out of him. Woman comes straight from the loins of the gods: What she wants she’ll go and take. Her Will is her conscience.
Feminism is the new Promethean fire that will make mankind heroic again. It is eternal return to the Supreme Fact.
I glorify Woman as the tempestuous rebel of everyday life. She is always Antigone, Cordelia, Brunnhilde, Isolde, Pankhurst. She has been and ever will be the Superman.
Benjamin De Casseres.
Source: Life, June 4, 1914, Vol. 63 No. 1649, pp. 1040-1042.