en require the aid
of masculine force become ever fewer and more unimportant. The
conventionalized chivalry of men then tends to become an offer of
services which it would be better for women to do for themselves and a
bestowal of privileges to which they are nowise entitled.[83] Moreover,
this same chivalry is, under these conditions, apt to take on a
character which is the reverse of its face value. It becomes the
assertion of a power over women instead of a power on their behalf; and
it carries with it a tinge of contempt in place of respect.
Theoretically, a thousand chivalrous swords should leap from their
scabbards to succour the distressed woman. In practice this may only
mean that the thousand owners of these metaphorical weapons are on the
alert to take advantage of the distressed woman.

Thus the romantic emotions based on medieval ideals gradually lost their
worth. They were not in relation to the altered facts of life; they had
become an empty convention which could be turned to very unromantic
uses. The movement for the emancipation of women was not consciously or
directly a movement of revolt against an antiquated chivalry. It was
rather a part of the development of civilization which rendered chivalry
antique. Medieval romantic love implied in women a weakness in the soil
of which only a spiritual force could flourish. The betterment of social
conditions, the subordination of violence to order, the growing respect
for individual rights, took away the reasons for consecrating weakness
in women, and created an ever larger field in which women could freely
seek to rival men, because it is a field in which knowledge and skill
are of far more importance than muscular strength. The emancipation of
women has simply been the later and more conscious phase of the process
by which women have entered into this field and sought their share of
its rights and its responsibilities.

The woman movement of modern times, properly understood, has thus been
the effort of women to adapt themselves to the conditions of an orderly
and peaceful civilization. Education, under the changed conditions, can
effect what before needed force of arms; responsibility is now demanded
where before only tutelage was possible. A civilized society in which
women are ignorant and irresponsible is an anachronism, and, however
great the wrench with the past might be, it was necessary that women
should be adjusted to the changing times. The ideal