ne all they
could to arrest the spread of war. In England many have prevented their
men from volunteering; in America, I am told, women have been solid
against war with Germany. But let the reader not be deceived. A subtle
point arises which is often ignored. If women went to war instead of
men, their attitude might be different. Consider, indeed, these two
paragraphs, fictitious descriptions of a battlefield:--

"Before the trenches lay heaped hundreds of young men, with torn bodies,
their faces pale in the moonlight. The rays lit up the face of one that
lay near, made a glitter upon his little golden moustache."

"Before the trenches lay heaped hundreds of young girls. The moonlight
streamed upon their torn bodies and their fair skins. The rays fell upon
one that lay near, drawing a glow from the masses of her golden hair."

Let the masculine reader honestly read these two paragraphs (which I do
not put forward as literature). The first will pain him; the second will
hurt him more. That men should be slaughtered--how hateful! That girls
should be slaughtered--it is unbearable. Here, I submit, is part of
woman's opposition to war, of the exaggerated idea people have of her
humanitarian attitude. I will not press the point that as a savage she
may like blood better than man; I will confine myself to suggesting that
a large portion of her opposition to war comes out of a sexual
consciousness; it seems horrible to her that young men should be killed,
just as horrible as my paragraph on the dead girls may seem to the male
reader.

Some men have seen women as barbarous and dangerous only, have based
their attitude upon the words of Thomas Otway: "She betrayed the
Capitol, lost Mark Antony to the world, laid old Troy in ashes." This is
absurd; if man cannot resist the temptation of woman, he can surely
claim no greater nobility. Mark Antony "lost" Cleopatra by wretched
suicide as much as she "lost" him. If because of Helen old Troy was laid
in ashes, at least another woman, guiltless Andromache, paid the price.
To represent woman so, to suggest that there were only two people in
Eden, Adam and the Serpent, is as ridiculous as making a woman into a
goddess. It is the hope of the future that woman shall be realized as
neither diabolical nor divine, but as merely human.

6

We must recognize that the emotional quality in woman is not a
characteristic of sex; it is merely the exaggeration of a human
characteristic. For