to note that the line which divides the progressive
sections of our communities, seeking to co-ordinate themselves to the
new conditions of life, from the retrogressive, is not a line running
coincidentally with the line of sex. A George Sand and a Henrik Ibsen
belong more essentially to the same class in the order of modern
development, than either belongs to any class composed entirely of their
own sex. If we divide humanity into classes according to type, in each
division will be found the male with his complementary female. Side by
side with the old harlot at the street corner anxious to sell herself,
stands the old aboriginal male, whether covered or not with a veneer of
civilisation, eager and desiring to buy. Side by side with the parasitic
woman, seeking only increased pleasure and luxury from her relations
with man, stands the male seeking only pleasure and self-indulgence from
his relations with her. Side by side with the New Woman, anxious for
labour and seeking from man only such love and fellowship as she gives,
stands the New Man, anxious to possess her only on the terms she offers.
If the social movement, through which the most advanced women of our
day are attempting to bring themselves into co-ordination with the new
conditions of life, removes them immeasurably from certain types of the
primitive male; the same movement equally removes the new male from the
old female. The sexual tragedy of modern life lies, not in the fact that
woman as such is tending to differ fundamentally from man as such; but
that, in the unassorted confusion of our modern life, it is continually
the modified type of man or woman who is thrown into the closest
personal relations with the antiquated type of the opposite sex; that
between father and daughter, mother and son, brother and sister, husband
and wife, may sometimes be found to intervene not merely years, but even
centuries of social evolution.

It is not man as man who opposes the attempt of woman to readjust
herself to the new conditions of life: that opposition arises, perhaps
more often, from the retrogressive members of her own sex. And it is a
fact which will surprise no one who has studied the conditions of modern
life; that among the works of literature in all European languages,
which most powerfully advocate the entrance of woman into the new fields
of labour, and which most uncompromisingly demand for her the widest
training and freedom of action, and which mos