should specialize and organize as well,
and extend to their babies these supreme advantages, is made a laughing
stock.

It is easy and profitable to laugh with the majority; but in the
judgment of history, those who do so, hold unenviable positions. The
time is coming when the human mother will recognize the educative
possibilities of early childhood, learn that the ability to rightly
teach little children is rare and precious, and be proud and glad to
avail themselves of it.

We shall then see a development of the most valuable human qualities
in our children's minds such as would now seem wildly Utopian. We shall
learn from wide and long experience to anticipate and provide for the
steps of the unfolding mind, and train it, through carefully prearranged
experiences, to a power of judgment, of self-control, of social
perception, now utterly unthought of.

Such an education would begin at birth; yes, far before it, in the
standards of a conscious human motherhood. It would require a quite
different status of wifehood, womanhood, girlhood. It would be wholly
impossible if we were never to outgrow our androcentric culture.

IX. "SOCIETY" AND "FASHION"

Among our many naive misbeliefs is the current fallacy that "society" is
made by women; and that women are responsible for that peculiar social
manifestation called "fashion."

Men and women alike accept this notion; the serious essayist and
philosopher, as well as the novelist and paragrapher, reflect it in
their pages. The force of inertia acts in the domain of psychics as
well as physics; any idea pushed into the popular mind with considerable
force will keep on going until some opposing force--or the slow
resistance of friction--stops it at last.

"Society" consists mostly of women. Women carry on most of its
processes, therefore women are its makers and masters, they are
responsible for it, that is the general belief.

We might as well hold women responsible for harems--or prisoners for
jails. To be helplessly confined to a given place or condition does not
prove that one has chosen it; much less made it.

No; in an androcentric culture "society," like every other social
relation, is dominated by the male and arranged for his convenience.
There are, of course, modifications due to the presence of the other
sex; where there are more women than men there are inevitable results
of their influence; but the character and conditions of the whole
performa