ranches of employment for any but very
keen and able workers was diminishing. So that simultaneously the world,
that vanished world before 1914, was releasing and disengaging enormous
volumes of untrained and unassigned feminine energy and also diminishing
the usefulness of unskilful effort in every department of life. There
was no demand to meet the supply. These were the underlying processes
that produced the feminist outbreak of the decade before the war.

Now the debate between the sexes is a perennial. It began while we were
still in the trees. It has its stereotyped accusations; its stereotyped
repartees. The Canterbury Pilgrims had little to learn from Christabel
Pankhurst. Man and woman in that duet struggle perpetually for the upper
hand, and the man restrains the woman and the woman resents the man. In
every age some voice has been heard asserting, like Plato, that the
woman is a human being; and the prompt answer has been, "but such a
different human being." Wherever there is a human difference fair play
is difficult, the universal clash of races witnesses to that, and sex is
the greatest of human differences.

But the general trend of mankind towards intelligence and reason has
been also a trend away from a superstitious treatment of sexual
questions and a recognition, so to speak, that a woman's "a man for a'
that," that she is indeed as entitled to an independent soul and a
separate voice in collective affairs. As brain has counted for more and
more in the human effort and brute strength and the advantage of not
bearing children for less and less, as man has felt a greater need for a
companion and a lesser need for a slave, and as the increase of food and
the protection of the girl from premature child-bearing has approximated
the stature and strength and enterprise of the woman more and more to
that of the man, this secular emancipation of the human female from the
old herd subordination and servitude to the patriarchal male has gone
on. Essentially the secular process has been an equalising process. It
was merely the exaggeration of its sustaining causes during the plenty
and social and intellectual expansion of the last half-century that had
stimulated this secular process to the pitch of crisis.

There have always been two extreme aspects of the sexual debate. There
have always been the oversexed women who wanted to be treated primarily
as women, and the women who were irritated and bored by being tre