lear.

The separation in the social activities of women and men was not
brought about, as is stated so frequently, by men's injustice to
women. There is an unfortunate tendency to regard the subjection of
woman as wholly due to male selfishness and tyranny. Many leaders of
woman's freedom hold to this view as their broad exposition of
principle. Such belief is illogical and untrue. It cannot be too often
repeated that sex-hatred means retrogression and not progress. I do
not mean to say that women have not suffered at men's hands. They
have, but not more than men have suffered at their hands. No woman who
faces facts can deny this truth. Neither sex can afford to bring
railing accusations against the other. The old doctrine of blame is
insufficient. Women's disabilities are not, in their origin at least,
due to any form of male tyranny. I believe, moreover, that any
solution of the woman problem, and of woman's rights, is of ridiculous
impotence that attempts to see in man woman's perpetual oppressor. The
enemy, if enemy there is, of woman's emancipation, is woman herself.

But, on the other side, it is certain that the long-held opinion--what
we may call "the male view of women"--which believes that the position
woman occupies in society and the duties she performs are, in the
main, what they should be, she being what she is, is equally false.
Such theorists throw upon Nature the responsibility of the evils
consequent on the deviations from equality of opportunity in the past
lives of women. Truly we credit Nature with an absurd blunder do we
accept this inferiority of the female half of life. _Woman is what she
is because she has lived as she has._ And no estimate of her
character, no effort to fix the limit of her activities, can carry
weight that ignores the totally different relations towards society
that have artificially grown up, dividing so sharply the life of woman
from that of man.

I am brought back to the object of this book.

What are the conditions that have brought woman to her position of
dependence upon man? How far is her state of physical and mental
inferiority the result of this position? To what extent is she
justified in her present revolt? What result will her freedom have on
the sexual relationships? Will the change be likely to work for the
benefit of the future? In a word, how far are the new claims woman is
making consistent with race permanence? It is not one, but a whole
group of quest