mpetitive cook; a school mistress, but not a competitive
schoolmistress; a house-decorator but not a competitive house-decorator;
a dressmaker, but not a competitive dressmaker. She should have not
one trade but twenty hobbies; she, unlike the man, may develop all her
second bests. This is what has been really aimed at from the first in
what is called the seclusion, or even the oppression, of women. Women
were not kept at home in order to keep them narrow; on the contrary,
they were kept at home in order to keep them broad. The world outside
the home was one mass of narrowness, a maze of cramped paths, a madhouse
of monomaniacs. It was only by partly limiting and protecting the woman
that she was enabled to play at five or six professions and so come
almost as near to God as the child when he plays at a hundred trades.
But the woman's professions, unlike the child's, were all truly and
almost terribly fruitful; so tragically real that nothing but her
universality and balance prevented them being merely morbid. This is the
substance of the contention I offer about the historic female position.
I do not deny that women have been wronged and even tortured; but I
doubt if they were ever tortured so much as they are tortured now by the
absurd modern attempt to make them domestic empresses and competitive
clerks at the same time. I do not deny that even under the old tradition
women had a harder time than men; that is why we take off our hats. I do
not deny that all these various female functions were exasperating; but
I say that there was some aim and meaning in keeping them various. I do
not pause even to deny that woman was a servant; but at least she was a
general servant.

The shortest way of summarizing the position is to say that woman stands
for the idea of Sanity; that intellectual home to which the mind must
return after every excursion on extravagance. The mind that finds its
way to wild places is the poet's; but the mind that never finds its way
back is the lunatic's. There must in every machine be a part that moves
and a part that stands still; there must be in everything that changes
a part that is unchangeable. And many of the phenomena which moderns
hastily condemn are really parts of this position of the woman as the
center and pillar of health. Much of what is called her subservience,
and even her pliability, is merely the subservience and pliability of
a universal remedy; she varies as medicines vary, with t