ion. Now, let us be clear about it: this is a process which makes
the excitement and experience and possible good of the individual woman
outweigh in importance the safeguarding of the perpetual stream of man.
A confusion of values has led women astray. Being a woman _is_ a
handicap. For the true carrying out of the duties of the wife and mother
physical and mental quiet and sound nerves are needed. The industrial
field has become the ideal place of action for the feminists, who
persistently romanticize the independent commercial or industrial
career, trampling heedlessly on the wisdom of the past, bent on living
their own little lives and all that kind of egoistic futility; holding
up as admirable cheap achievements in the hell of modern competitive,
beggar-your-fellow-worker, sell-at-a-profit industrialism; blackening as
sacrifice, as a limiting of character, woman's service to her husband
and her children, her work in the home and in the nursery.

I tell you women everywhere among us are being starved of sacrifice and
service. Sacrifice lives in the soul of a woman, and not alone in the
separate spirit of the individual woman to whom it is communicated only
through a losing of herself, which marks her union with the greatest
powers of life. It is, I think, one of the most destroying tragedies of
our industrial society that women are denied this sustenance in a fixed
and regulated unison of sacrifice, are forced away from service to life,
excited to do violence to their deepest instinct, by engaging in the
deadly and futile rivalry, where the greatest successfulness must bring
to them the greatest destruction.

There has been much happening to bring fear. Something has gone wrong
with the women of this land. In saying this, I am not forgetting the
splendidness of their work; what I complain of is that their womanly
vision has failed. In France, as is evident to all, the attitude of
women has been very different. The French women also worked hard during
the war to save their country, but they did not as our women have done,
_like war-work for its own sake_. They never transferred their
affections from their homes to the factories of war, they were too
certain of themselves, too content with their power as women to do
anything so foolish. What is the explanation of this profound difference
in attitude? Why has the vision of English women failed? That is the
question to which we have to try to find an answer.

II