ny other women
under the sun.

The natural volatility of the race must also be taken into
consideration. Stoical in their substratum, bubbling on the surface,
it may be that these women who took up the burdens of men so bravely
will shrug their shoulders and revert to pure femininity. Those past
the age of allurement may fight like termagants for their lucrative
jobs, their utter independence; but coquetry and the joy in life, or,
to put it more plainly, the powerful passions of the French race, may
do more to effect an automatic and permanent return to the old status
than any authoritative act on the part of man.

II

The women of England are (or were) far more neurotic than the women of
France, as they have fewer natural outlets. And the struggle for legal
enfranchisement, involving, as it did, a sensationalism that affected
even the non-combatants, did much to enhance this tendency, and it is
interesting to speculate whether this war will make or finish them.
Once more, personally, I believe it will make them, but as I was not
able to go to London after my investigations in France were concluded
and observe for myself I refuse to indulge in speculations. Time will
show, and before very long.

No doubt, however, when the greater question of winning the war is
settled, the question of sex equality will rage with a new violence,
perhaps in some new form, among such bodies of women as are not so
subject to the thrall of sex as to desert their new colors. It would
seem that the lot of woman is ever to be on the defensive. Nature
handicapped her at the start, giving man a tremendous advantage in his
minimum relationship to reproduction, and circumstances (mainly
perpetual warfare) postponed the development of her mental powers for
centuries. Certainly nothing in the whole history of mankind is so
startling as the abrupt awakening of woman and her demand for a
position in the world equal to that of the dominant male.

I use the word abrupt, because in spite of the scattered instances of
female prosiliency throughout history, and the long struggle beginning
in the last century for the vote, or the individual determination to
strive for some more distinguished fashion of coping with poverty than
school-teaching or boarding-house keeping, the concerted awakening of
the sex was almost as abrupt as the European War. Like many fires it
smouldered long, and then burst into a menacing conflagration. But I
do not for a mo