the prices will be alike, all the
goods alike; when food will be so graded that it will no longer be worth
the housekeeper's while to try and discover a particularly good
sirloin--instead she will telephone for seven pounds of quality AF,
Number 14,692. Then, having less to do, woman will want to do still
less, and the modern rebellion against house and home will find in her
restlessness a greater impetus.

When did the rebellion begin? Almost, it might be said, it began in the
beginning, and no doubt before the matriarchate period women were
striving toward liberty, only to lose it after having for a while
dominated man. In later years women such as Mary Wollstonecraft, but
more obscure, strove to emancipate themselves from the thralldom of the
household. The aspiration of woman, whether Greek courtesan, French
worldling, or English factory inspector, has always been toward equality
with man, perhaps toward mastery. And man has always stood in her path
to restrict her, to arrest her development for his pleasure, as does
to-day the Japanese to the little tree which he plants in a pot. The
clamor of to-day against the emancipated woman is as old as the rebukes
of St. Paul; Moliere gave it tongue in _Les Femmes Savantes_, when he
made the bourgeois say to his would-be learned wife:

"Former aux bonnes moeurs l'esprit de ses enfants,
Faire aller son menage, avoir l'oeil sur ses gens
Et regler la depense avec economie
Doit etre son etude et sa philosophie."

Man has laid down only three occupations: _kirche_, _kueche_, _kinder_.

Hence the revolt. If man had not so much desired that woman should be
housekeeper and courtesan, she would not so violently have rebelled
against him, for why should one rebel until somebody says, "Thou shalt"!
At the words "Thou shalt", rebellion becomes automatic, and, so long as
woman has virility in her, so will it be. Still, leaving origins alone,
and considering only the last fifty or sixty years of our history, it
might be said that they are divided into three periods:

(_a_) The shiny nose and virtue period.

(_b_) The powder-puff and possible virtue period.

(_c_) The Russian ballet and leopard-skin period.

There are exceptions, qualifications, occasional retrogressions, but,
taking it roughly, that is the history of English womanhood from wax
fruit to Bakst designs. There were crises, such as the early 'eighties,
when bloomers came in and women essayed ci