garettes, and felt very
advanced and sick; when they joined Ibsen clubs and took up Bernard
Shaw, and wore eyeglasses and generally tried to be men without
succeeding in being gentlemen. There was another crisis about 1906, when
suffrage put forward in England its first violent claims. That, too, was
abortive in a sense, as is ironically recorded in a comic song popular
at the time:

"Back, back to the office she went:
The secretary was a perfect gent."

But still, in a rough and general way, there has been a continual and
growing discontent with the heavy weight of the household, the
complications of its administration. There has been a drive toward
freedom which has affected even that most conservative of all animals,
the male. There have been conscious rebellions as expressed, for
instance, by Nora who "slammed the door"; by the many girls who decide
to "live their own lives", as life was expounded in the yellow-backs of
the 'nineties; by the growing demand for entry into the professions; for
votes; for admission to the legislatures. There is nothing irrelevant in
this; given that by the nature of her position in society and of the
duties intrusted to her in the household, she was cut off from all other
fields of human activity, it may be said that every attempt that woman
has made to share in any activity that lay beyond her front door has
been revolutionary and directed at the foundations of the English
household system. Whether this has also been the case in America, where
a curious type of woman has been evolved--pampered, selfish,
intelligent, domineering, and wildly pleasure-loving--I cannot tell.
Nor is it my business; like other men, the Americans have the wives they
deserve.

But behind the conscious rebellions are the subtle and, in a way,
infinitely more powerful unconscious rebellions, the dull discontents
of overworked and over-preoccupied women; the weariness, the desire for
pleasure and travel, for change, for time to play and to love, and--what
is more pathetic--for time just to sit and rest. The epitaph of the
charwoman--

"Weep for me not, weep for me never,
I'm going to do nothing, nothing forever--"

embodies pains deep-buried in millions of women's hearts. Most people do
not know that, because women never smile so brightly as when they are
unhappy. Sometimes I suspect that public pronouncements and suffrage
manifestoes have had very much less to do with modern upheavals than
these