l loved, has been known to be an inferior, and who has
accepted all the conditions of inferiors. Women, women's intelligence,
and women's judgments have always been regarded with more or less secret
contempt, and when woman now speaks of 'equality,' all the natural
contempt which a higher order feels for a lower order when it presumes
bursts out into the open. This contempt rests upon quite honest and
sound instinct, so honest, indeed, that it must provide all the charm of
an unaccustomed sensation for fine gentlemen like the Curzons and
Cromers and Asquiths to feel anything quite so instinctive and
primitive.

"With the women opponents it is another matter. These latter apart,
however, it is for would-be Freewomen to realize that for them this
contempt is the healthiest thing in the world, and that those who
express it honestly feel it; that these opponents have argued quite
soundly that women have allowed themselves to be used, ever since there
has been any record of them; and that if women had had higher uses of
their own they would not have foregone them. They have never known women
to formulate imperious wants, this in itself implying lack of wants, and
this in turn implying lack of ideals. Women as a whole have shown
nothing save 'servant' attributes. All those activities which presuppose
the master qualities, the standard-making, the law-giving, the
moral-framing, belong to men. Religions, philosophies, legal codes,
standards in morals, canons in art, have all issued from men, while
women have been the 'followers,' 'believers,' the 'law-abiding,' the
'moral,' the conventionally admiring. They have been the administrators,
the servants, living by borrowed precept, receiving orders, doing
hodmen's work. For note, though some men must be servants, all women are
servants, and all the masters are men. That is the difference and
distinction. The servile condition is common to all women."

This was only the beginning of such a campaign of radical propaganda as
feminism never knew before. Miss Marsden went on to attack all the
things which bind women and keep them unfree. As such she denounced what
she considered the cant of "motherhood."

"Considering, therefore, that children, from both physiological and
psychological points of view, belong more to the woman than to the man;
considering, too, that not only does she need them more, but, as a rule,
wants them more than the man, the parental situation begins to present