tion in such a
series, notably her aspect as mother and as educator. If she has not
been shown as poet, as artist, as scientist, as talker (for talk is a
thing quite as important as poetry or science or art), it has not been
so much because of an actual lack of specific examples of women
distinguished in these fields as because of the unrepresentative
character of such examples.

Here, then, is a man's view of modern woman. To complete that view, to
round off that conception, I now speak of Ellen Key.

Her writings have had a peculiar career in America, one which perhaps
prevents a clear understanding of their character. On the one hand, they
have seemed to many to be radically "advanced"; to thousands of
middle-class women, who have heard vaguely of these new ideas, and who
have secretly and strongly desired to know more of them, her "Love and
Marriage" has come as a revolutionary document, the first outspoken word
of scorn for conventional morality, the first call to them to take their
part in the breaking of new paths.

On the other hand, it must be remembered that America is the home of
Mormonism, of the Oneida Community, of the Woodhull and Claflin
"free-love" movement of the '70s, of "Dianism" and a hundred other
obscure but pervasive sexual cults--in short, of movements of greater or
less respectability, capable of giving considerable currency to their
beliefs. And they have given considerable currency to their beliefs. In
spite of the dominant tone of Puritanism in American thought, our social
life has been affected to an appreciable extent by these beliefs.

And these beliefs may be summed up hastily, but, on the whole, justly,
as materialistic--in the common and unfavorable sense. They have
converged, from one direction or another, upon the opinion that sex is
an animal function, no more sacred than any other animal function,
which, by a ridiculous over-estimation, is made to give rise to
jealousy, unhappiness, madness, vice, and crime.

It is a fact that the Puritan temperament readily finds this opinion,
if not the program which accompanies it, acceptable, as one may discover
in private conversation with respectable Puritans of both sexes. And it
is more unfortunately true that the present-day rebellion against
conventional morality in America has found, in Hardy and Shaw and other
anti-romanticists, a seeming support of this opinion. So that one finds
in America today (though some people may not know a