ces its way down, no
man observes it. (An interesting practical illustration of this fact
is found in the vast attention and uproar created when the first three
women in England, some thirty odd years ago, sought to enter the medical
profession. At the present day scores of women prepare to enter it
yearly without attracting any general attention; not that the change
which is going on is not far more in volume and social importance, but
that, having overcome the first obstruction, it is now noiseless.)

Between the Emilias and Sophy Westerns of a bygone generation and the
most typical of modern women, there exists no greater gap (probably not
so great a one) as that which exists between the Tom Joneses and Squire
Westerns of that day and the most typical of entirely modern men.

The sexual and social ideals which dominated the fox-hunting,
hard-drinking, high-playing, recklessly loose-living country squire,
clergyman, lawyer, and politician who headed the social organism of the
past, are at least as distinct from the ideals which dominate thousands
of their male descendants holding corresponding positions in the
societies of today, as are the ideals of her great-great-grand mother's
remote from those dominating the most modern of New Women.

That which most forces itself upon us as the result of a close personal
study of those sections of modern European societies in which change
and adaptation to the new conditions of life are now most rapidly
progressing, is, not merely that equally large bodies of men and women
are being rapidly modified as to their sexual and social ideals and as
to their mode of life, but that this change is strictly complementary.

If the ideal of the modern woman becomes increasingly one inconsistent
with the passive existence of woman on the remuneration which her sexual
attributes may win from man, and marriage becomes for her increasingly
a fellowship of comrades, rather than the relationship of the owner and
the bought, the keeper and the kept; the ideal of the typically modern
man departs quite as strongly from that of his forefathers in the
direction of finding in woman active companionship and co-operation
rather than passive submission. If the New Woman's conception of
parenthood differs from the old in the greater sense of the gravity and
obligation resting on those who are responsible for the production of
the individual life, making her attitude toward the production of her
race wid