ur wives!" is not a bad demand from men's point of view, and it is
assuredly the best possible for the sake of the future.

It is claimed, then, for the teaching of this book that, being based
upon the evident and unquestionable indications of Nature, it is
calculated to serve her end, which is the welfare of the race as a
whole, including both sexes. No one will question that the position and
happiness and self-realization of women in the modern world would be
vastly enhanced by the reforms for which I plead, though some men will
not think that game worth the candle. But I have argued that men also
will profit; nor can there be any question as to the advantage for
children. It is just because our scheme and our objects are natural that
they require no support from and lend no warrant to that accursed spirit
of sex-antagonism which many well-meaning women now display--doubtless
by a natural reflex, because it is the spirit of the worst men
everywhere. It is primarily men's desire for sex-dominance that
engenders a sex-resentment in women; but the spirit is lamentable,
whatever its origin and wherever it be found. It is most lamentable in
the bully, the drunkard, the cad, the Mammonist, the satyr, who are
everywhere to be found opposing woman and her claims. There is no
variety of male blackguardism and bestiality, of vileness and
selfishness, of lust and greed, whose representatives' names should not
be added to those of the illustrious pro-consuls and elegant peeresses
and their following who form Anti-Suffrage Societies. Before we
criticise sex-antagonism in women, let us be honest about it in men; and
before we sneer at the type of women who most display it, let us realize
fully the worthlessness of the types of men who display it. But if this
be granted--and I have never heard it granted by the men who deplore
sex-antagonism as if only women displayed it--we must none the less
recognize that this spirit injures both sexes, and that it is
necessarily false, since none can question that Nature devised the sexes
for mutual aid to her end. By this first principle sex-antagonism is
therefore condemned. This book, written by a man in behalf of
womanhood--and therefore in behalf of manhood and childhood--is
consistently opposed to all notions of sex-antagonism, or sex-dominance,
male or female, or of competing claims between the sexes. Man and woman
are complementary halves of the highest thing we know, and just as the
men