such a movement.

But the most superficial study of human life and the relation of the
sexes negates such a conception.

The two sexes are not distinct species but the two halves of one whole,
always acting and interacting on each other through inheritance, and
reproducing and blending with each other in each generation. The human
female is bound organically in two ways to the males of her society:
collaterally they are her companions and the co-progenitors with her
of the race; but she is also the mother of the males of each succeeding
generation, bearing, shaping, and impressing her personality upon them.
The males and females of each human society resemble two oxen tethered
to one yoke: for a moment one may move slightly forward and the other
remain stationary; but they can never move farther from each other than
the length of the yoke that binds them; and they must ultimately
remain stationary or move forward together. That which the women of one
generation are mentally or physically, that by inheritance and education
the males of the next tend to be: there can be no movement or change in
one sex which will not instantly have its co-ordinating effect upon the
other; the males of tomorrow are being cast in the mould of the women of
today. If new ideals, new moral conceptions, new methods of action are
found permeating the minds of the women of one generation, they will
reappear in the ideals, moral conceptions, methods of action of the men
of thirty years hence; and the idea that the males of a society can ever
become permanently farther removed from its females than the individual
man is from the mother who bore and reared him, is at variance with
every law of human inheritance.

If, further, we turn from an abstract consideration of this supposition,
and examine practically in the modern world men and women as they exist
today, the irrationality of the supposition is yet more evident.

Not merely is the Woman's Movement of our age not a sporadic and
abnormal growth, like a cancer bearing no organic relation to the
development of the rest of the social organism, but it is essentially
but one important phase of a general modification which the whole of
modern life is undergoing. Further, careful study of the movement will
show that, not only is it not a movement on the part of woman leading to
severance and separation between the woman and the man, but that it
is essentially a movement of the woman towards the man