The New Orleans crescent. [volume] (New Orleans, La.) 1866-1869, 1869-03-21

| to them in the character of women. AS
women, they would have no use for them.
AS women, they would shrink with horror
from their possession, because OF the hard
heavy, unwomanly responsibilities and dunes'
and the uncongenial and revolving associa-
tions. which their possession would imply and
necessitate. Those rights could only be con-
! coded to them in the character of secondary
males. If, like the hen spoken ofby MIR. Oar
win. which had taken on the character of the
cock and had launched into q career OF crow
ing and fighting, they have somehow sunk
their original sex, why, by all means, let them
be invested with all that socially or politically
appertains to the other sex, and let them be
free to enter upon all the avocations and all
the enterprises Of men, asking no favors and
Drawing all dangers and hardships. The ere
alton of this order of secondary males would
seem to be, indeed, one of the inevitable incl
dents of the social evolution now going on.
Yet it is not the first time in history that
complexities, and refnements, and perversi-
ties of civilization produced in no.
table measure confusion of sexes. The
this kind marked the Augustan era
of Rome. There was, it is true, no can't
ing then about the rights of women, as there
was none about the rights of men. The un-
sexing process did not manifest itself in fana-
teal cries for woman suffrage, or for the en-
largement of woman's sphere. 1t found ex-
preston in horrid and unnatural forms OF
righteousness, luxury and dissipation, that
arrested the growth and emesculated the
essence of the old Roman stock and Slapped
the foundations of the Roman empire. A Ike
species of profigacy viii not necessarily at
tend the confusion of sexes which is BODIED by
the woman's rights movement. But in so far
as the accomplishment of such revolution
would enlarge, as in some degree it certainly
would, the circle of celibacy, it would, of
course, in the same measure, tend to arrest
the growth of population. These two things,
then, it is of serious Importance to consider
that the absolute equalization of sexes which
is aimed at means confusion of sexes, and
that confusion of sexes means nothing less
than ultimate depopulation.
And yet the unsexed women, the secondary
males, that is to say, who are urging on this
so-called reform, would hardly be blame
worthy if they claimed for themselves alone
absolute equalization with congenital man.
hood. The development in them of the rudi-
ments of the male character would seem to
leave them no other resource. They must
stand on the footing of women, or on thefoot-
ing of men, or they must stand nowhere. And
O like allowance may be made with respect to
those soft emasculated creatures in male form
who cultivate long hair and idolize the fierce
masculinity of the Anna Dickinsons and the
Lucy Stones Something unwholesome and
morbid without or within has caused them
to assume as far as may be the female nature,
and as far as may be they ought to be adj
mitted to the sphere and clothed with the
rights Of women. There are secondary
females as well as secondary males; and the
more the ranks of both orders are reinforced,
the more original sexhood will be merged in
sexual chaos, and the more the human race
will decline towards the catastrophe of de-
population.