she took a bath. Round about
1850 she turned into the "perfect lady" who kept an album bound in
morocco leather. She wrote verses that embodied yearnings. Often she had
a Turkish parlor, and usually as many babies as she could. But already
the Brontes and George Eliot had come to knock at the door; Miss Braddon
was promising to be, if not a glory, at least a power, and before twenty
years were out, John Stuart Mill was to lead the first suffragettes to
the House of Commons.

To-day it is another picture: woman in every trade except those in which
she intends to be; woman demanding and using political power; woman
governing her own property; woman senior to man in the civil service.
She has not yet her charter, and still suffers much from the tradition
of inferiority, from her lack of confidence in herself. But many women
are all ambition, and within the last year two young women novelists
have convinced me that the thing they most desire is to be great in
their art. Whether they will succeed does not matter much; what does
matter is that they should harbor such a wish. Whether woman's physical
disabilities, her present bias toward unduly moral and inadequately
intellectual judgments, will forever hamper her, I do not know; but I do
not think so. Whether the influence of woman, more inherently lawless,
more anarchic than man, will result in the breaking down of conventions
and the despising of the law, I do not know either. But if the world is
to be remoulded, I think it much more likely to be remoulded by woman
than by man, simply because that as a sex he is in power, and the people
who are in power never want to alter anything.

Woman's rebellion is everywhere indicated: her brilliance, her failings,
her unreasonableness, all these are excellent signs of her revolt. She
is even revolting against her own beauty; often she neglects her
clothes, her hair, her complexion, her teeth. This is a pity, but it
must not be taken too seriously: men on active service grow beards, and
woman in her emancipation campaign is still too busy to think of the art
of charming. I suspect that as time passes and she suffers less
intolerably from a sense of injustice, she will revert to the old
graces. The art of charming was a response to convention; and of late
years unconventionality, a great deal of which is ridiculous, has grown
much more among women than among men. That is not wonderful, for there
were so many things woman might not d