Tesla the Feminist

My mother descended from one of the oldest families in the country  
and a line of inventors. Both her father and grandfather originated  
numerous implements for household, agricultural and other uses. She  
was a truly great woman, of rare skill, courage and fortitude, who  
had braved the storms of life and past thru many a trying experience.  
When she was sixteen a virulent pestilence swept the country. Her  
father was called away to administer the last sacraments to the dying  
and during his absence she went alone to the assistance of a  
neighboring family who were stricken by the dread disease. All of the  
members, five in number, succumbed in rapid succession. She bathed,  
clothed and laid out the bodies, decorating them with flowers  
according to the custom of the country and when her father returned  
he found everything ready for a Christian burial. My mother was an  
inventor of the first order and would, I believe, have achieved great  
things had she not been so remote from modern life and its multifold  
opportunities. She invented and constructed all kinds of tools and  
devices and wove the finest designs from thread which was spun by  
her. She even planted the seeds, raised the plants and separated the  
fibers herself. She worked indefatigably, from break of day till late  
at night, and most of the wearing apparel and furnishings of the home  
was the product of her hands. When she was past sixty, her fingers  
were still nimble enough to tie three knots in an eyelash.

Mr.  Tesla regards the emergence of woman as one of the most profound portents for the future.

"It is clear to any trained observer," he says, "and even to the sociologically untrained, that a new attitude toward sex discrimination has come over the world through the centuries, receiving an abrupt stimulus just before and after the World War.

"This struggle of the human female toward sex equality will end in a new sex order, with the female as superior.  The modern woman, who anticipates in merely superficial phenomena the advancement of her sex, is but a surface symptom of something deeper and more potent fermenting in the bosom of the race.

"It is not in the shallow physical imitation of men that women will assert first their equality and later their superiority, but in the awakening of the intellect of women.

"Through countless generations, from the very beginning, the social subservience of women resulted naturally in the partial atrophy or at least the hereditary suspension of mental qualities which we now know the female sex to be endowed with no less than men.

The Queen is the Center of Life

"BUT the female mind has demonstrated a capacity for all the mental acquirements and achievements of men, and as generations ensue that capacity will be expanded; the average woman will be as well educated as the average man, and then better educated, for the dormant faculties of her brain will be stimulated to an activity that will be all the more intense and powerful because of centuries of repose.  Woman will ignore precedent and startle civilization with their progress.

"The acquisition of new fields of endeavor by women, their gradual usurpation of leadership, will dull and finally dissipate feminine sensibilities, will choke the maternal instinct, so that marriage and motherhood may become abhorrent and human civilization draw closer and closer to the perfect civilization of the bee."

The significance of this lies in the principle dominating the economy of the bee--the most highly organized and intelligently coordinated system of any form of nonrational animal life--the all-governing supremacy of the instinct for immortality which makes divinity out of motherhood.

The center of all bee life is the queen.  She dominates the hive, not through hereditary right, for any egg may be hatched into a reigning queen, but because she is the womb of this insect race.

We Can Only Sit and Wonder

THERE are the vast, desexualized armies of workers whose sole aim and happiness in life is hard work.  It is the perfection of communism, of socialized, cooperative life wherein all things, including the young, are the property and concern of all.

Then there are the virgin bees, the princess bees, the females which are selected from the eggs of the queen when they are hatched and preserved in case an unfruitful queen should bring disappointment to the hive.  And there are the male bees, few in number, unclean of habit, tolerated only because they are necessary to mate with the queen.

When the time is ripe for the queen to take her nuptial flight the male bees are drilled and regimented.  The queen passes the drones which guard the gate of the hive, and the male bees follow her in rustling array.  Strongest of all the inhabitants of the hive, more powerful than any of her subjects, the queen launches into the air, spiraling upward and upward, the male bees following.  Some of the pursuers weaken and fail, drop out of the nuptial chase, but the queen wings higher and higher until a point is reached in the far ether where but one of the male bees remains.  By the inflexible law of natural selection he is the strongest, and he mates with the queen.  At the moment of marriage his body splits asunder and he perishes.

The queen returns to the hive, impregnated, carrying with her tens of thousands of eggs--a future city of bees, and then begins the cycle of reproduction, the concentration of the teeming life of the hive in unceasing work for the birth of a new generation.

Imagination falters at the prospect of human analogy to this mysterious and superbly dedicated civilization of the bee; but when we consider how the human instinct for race perpetuation dominates life in its normal and exaggerated and perverse manifestations, there is ironic justice in the possibility that this instinct, with the continuing intellectual advance of women, may be finally expressed after the manner of the bee, though it will take centuries to break down the habits and customs of peoples that bar the way to such a simiply and scientifically ordered civilization.

We have seen a beginning of this in the United States.  In Wisconsin the sterilization of confirmed criminals and pre-marriage examination of males is required by law, while the doctrine of eugenics is now boldly preached where a few decades ago its advocacy was a statutory offense.

Old men have dreamed dreams and young men have seen visions from the beginning of time.  We of today can only sit and wonder when a scientist has his say.