c development of her passionate faculty. Woman is about to
gain political power. She will use it to improve the education of her
sex, to broaden its opportunities. She is coming out into the world in
cooeperation and in conflict with man; she will become more
self-conscious, and gain a solidarity of sex upon which will follow
mutual mental stimulation and specialized sex development. For that
reason I believe woman's progress will not be less in the pictorial arts
than in other fields if she develops in herself the fullness of life and
its implications. She will inevitably wage the sex war: she will gain
her artistic deserts after the sex peace.

V

THE DOWNFALL OF THE HOME

There is something the matter with the home. It may be merely the subtle
decay which, in birth beginning and in death persisting, escorts all
things human and perchance divine. It may be decay assisted by the
violence of a time unborn and striving through novelty toward its own
end, or toward an endlessness of change. But, whatever the causes, which
interest little a hasty generation, signs written in brick and mortar
and social custom, in rebellion and in aspiration, are not wanting to
show that the home, so long the center of Anglo-Saxon and American
society, is doomed. And, as is usual in the twentieth century, as has
been usual since the middle of the nineteenth, woman is at the bottom of
the change. It is women who now make revolutions. A hundred years ago it
was men who made revolutions; nowadays they content themselves with
resolutions. So it has been left for woman, more animal, more radical,
more divinely endowed with the faculty of seeing only her own side, to
sap the foundations of what was supposed to be her shelter.

I do not suppose that the household has ever been quite as much of a
shelter for women as the Victorian philosophers said, and possibly
believed; an elementary study of the feminist question will certainly
incline the unprejudiced to see that the home, which has for so long
masqueraded in the guise of woman's friend, has on the whole been her
enemy; that instead of being her protector it has been her oppressor;
that it has not been her fortress, but her jail. Woman has felt in the
home much as a workman might feel if he were given the White House as a
present, told to live in it and keep it clean without help on two
dollars a week. If the home be a precious possession, it may very well
be a possession bought at