it. Consequently, the basis of "society" today is a class
of people naturally and inevitably inferior. It is this class which
dominates "society," which gives the tone, and which sets the standard.
So long, then, as "society" is dominated by inferiors, intelligent men
and women will not be inclined to waste what time they have for social
intercourse in such stupid activities as those that "society" can
furnish. They will flock by themselves, and if they become undemocratic
and unsocial as a result, that will appear to them the lesser evil. So
that, however catholic our standards, the saloniere, as a bounden
failure, has no place in this transcript of feminism.

One thing will be observed with regard to these following
papers--though they are imbued with an intense interest in women, they
are devoid of the spirit of Romance. I mean that attitude toward woman
which accepts her sex as a miraculous justification for her existence,
the belief that being a woman is a virtue in itself, apart from the
possession of other qualities: in short, woman-worship. The reverence
for woman as virgin, or wife, or mother, irrespective of her capacities
as friend or leader or servant--that is Romance. It is an attitude
which, discovered in the Middle Ages, has added a new glamour to
existence. To woman as a superior being, a divinity, one may look for
inspiration--and receive it. For those who cannot be fired by an
abstract idea, she gives to imagination "some pure light in human form
to fix it." She is the sustenance of hungry souls. Believe in her and
you shall be saved--so runs the gospel of Petrarch, of Dante, of
Browning, of George Meredith.

So runs not mine. I have hearkened to the voice of modern science, which
tells me that woman is an inferior being, with a weak body, a stunted
mind, poor in creative power, poor in imagination, poor in critical
capacity--a being who does not know how to work, nor how to talk, nor
how to play! I hope no one will imagine that I am making these charges
up maliciously out of my own head: such a notion would indicate that a
century of pamphleteering on the woman question had made no impression
on a mind saturated in the ideology of popular fiction.

But--I have hearkened even more eagerly to the voice of sociology,
which tells me of woman's wonderful possibilities. It is with these
possibilities that this book is, in the main, concerned.

But first the explanation of why I, a man, write these artic