Free Consider Her Ways by John Wyndham Page A

… It can make you a garden out of a slum; brocade out of rags; music out of a speaking voice. It can show you a whole universe in someone else’s eyes. Oh, you don’t understand … you don’t know … you can’t … Oh, Donald, darling, how can I show her what she’s never even guessed at …?’
    There was an uncertain pause, but presently she said:
    ‘Naturally, in your form of society it was necessary for you to be given such a conditioned reaction, but you can scarcely expect us to surrender our freedom, to connive at our own re-subjection, by calling our oppressors into existence again.’
    ‘Oh, you
won’t
understand. It was only the more stupid men and women who were continually at war with one another. Lots of us were complementary. We were pairs who formed units.’
    She smiled. ‘My dear, either you are surprisingly ill-informed on your own period, or else the stupidity you speak of was astonishingly dominant. Neither as myself, nor as an historian, can I consider that we should be justified in resurrecting such a state of
affairs. A primitive stage of our development has now given way to a civilized era. Woman, who is the vessel of life, had the misfortune to find man necessary for a time, but now she does no longer. Are you suggesting that such a useless and dangerous encumbrance ought to be preserved, out of sheer sentimentality? I will admit that we have lost some minor conveniences – you will have noticed, I expect, that we are less inventive mechanically, and tend to copy the patterns we have inherited; but that troubles us very little; our interests lie not in the inorganic, but in the organic and the sentient. Perhaps men could show us how to travel twice as fast, or how to fly to the moon, or how to kill more people more quickly; but it does not seem to us that such kinds of knowledge would be good payment for re-enslaving ourselves. No, our kind of world suits us better – all of us except a few Reactionists. You have seen our Servitors. They are a little timid in manner, perhaps, but are they oppressed, or sad? Don’t they chatter among themselves as brightly and perkily as sparrows? And the Workers – those you called the Amazons – don’t they look strong, healthy, and cheerful?’
    ‘But you’re robbing them all – robbing them of their birthright.’
    ‘You mustn’t give me cant, my dear. Did not your social system conspire to rob a woman of her “birthright” unless she married? You not only let her know it, but you socially rubbed it in: here, our Servitors and Workers do not know it, and they are not worried by a sense of inadequacy. Motherhood is the function of the Mothers, and understood as such.’
    I shook my head. ‘Nevertheless, they
are
being robbed. A woman has a right to love –’
    For once she was a little impatient as she cut me short.
    ‘You keep repeating to me the propaganda of your age. The love you talk about, my dear, existed in your little sheltered part of the world by polite and profitable convention. You were scarcely ever allowed to see its other face, unglamorized by Romance.
You
were never openly bought and sold, like livestock;
you
never had to sell yourself to the first-comer in order to live;
you
did not happen to be one of the women who through the centuries have screamed in agony and suffered and died under invaders in a sacked city – nor were you ever flung into a pit of fire to be saved from them;
you
were never compelled to suttee upon your dead husband’s pyre;
you
did not have to spend your whole life imprisoned in a harem;
you
were never part of the cargo of a slave-ship;
you
never retained your own life only at the pleasure of your lord and master …
    ‘That is the other side – the age-long side. There is going to be no more of such things. They are finished at last. Dare you suggest that we should call them back, to suffer them all again?’
    ‘But most of these things had already gone,’ I protested. ‘The world was