we observe the suffragette, with her grotesque
adoption of the male belief in laws, phrases and talismans, and her
hysterical demand for a sexual libertarianism that she could not put
to use if she had it. And at the other end we find the snuffling and
neurotic woman, with her bogus martyrdom, her extravagant pruderies and
her pathological delusions. As Ibsen observed long ago, this is a man's
world. Women have broken many of their old chains, but they are
still enmeshed in a formidable network of man-made taboos and
sentimentalities, and it will take them another generation, at least, to
get genuine freedom. That this is true is shown by the deep unrest that
yet marks the sex, despite its recent progress toward social, political
and economic equality. It is almost impossible to find a man who
honestly wishes that he were a woman, but almost every woman, at some
time or other in her life, is gnawed by a regret that she is not a man.

Two of the hardest things that women have to bear are (a) the stupid
masculine disinclination to admit their intellectual superiority,
or even their equality, or even their possession of a normal human
equipment for thought, and (b) the equally stupid masculine doctrine
that they constitute a special and ineffable species of vertebrate,
without the natural instincts and appetites of the order--to adapt a
phrase from Hackle, that they are transcendental and almost gaseous
mammals, and marked by a complete lack of certain salient mammalian
characters. The first imbecility has already concerned us at length. One
finds traces of it even in works professedly devoted to disposing of it.
In one such book, for example, I come upon this: "What all the skill
and constructive capacity of the physicians in the Crimean War failed to
accomplish Florence Nightingale accomplished by her beautiful femininity
and nobility of soul." In other words, by her possession of some
recondite and indescribable magic, sharply separated from the ordinary
mental processes of man. The theory is unsound and preposterous. Miss
Nightingale accomplished her useful work, not by magic, but by hard
common sense. The problem before her was simply one of organization.
Many men had tackled it, and all of them had failed stupendously.
What she did was to bring her feminine sharpness of wit, her feminine
clear-thinking, to bear upon it. Thus attacked, it yielded quickly, and
once it had been brought to order it was easy for other p