he power to beat
his wife--but as a matter of fact few men did beat their wives, and
popular opinion was a powerful weapon. They might deplore the laws of
property--but few of them were deeply touched by them. The husband,
the child, the home, the social circle, the church, these things were
infinitely more interesting and important to them than diplomas,
rights to work, rights to property, rights to vote. All the sentiments
in the revolting women's program seemed trivial, cold, profitless
beside the realities of life as they dreamed them and struggled to
realize them.

It is this same intuitive loyalty to her Business of Being a Woman,
her unwillingness to have it tampered with, that is to-day the great
obstacle to our Uneasy Woman putting her program of relief into force.
And it is the effort to move this mass which she derides as inert that
leads to much of the overemphasis in her program and her methods. If
she is to attract attention, she must be extreme. The campaigner is
like the actor--he must exaggerate to get his effect over the
footlights. Moreover, there are natures like that of the actor who
could not play Othello unless his whole body was blackened. Nor is the
extravagance of the methods, which the militant lady follows to put
over her program, so foreign to her nature as it may seem. The
suffragette adapts to her needs a form of feminine coquetry as old as
the world. To defy and denounce the male has always been one of
woman's most successful provocative ways!

However much certain of the assumptions in her program may seem to be
against its success, there is much for it. It gives her a
scapegoat--an outside, personal, attackable cause for the limitations
and defeats she suffers. And there is no greater consolation than
fixing blame. It is half a cure in itself to know or to think you know
the cause of your difficulties. Moreover, it gives her a scapegoat
against whom it is easy to make up a case. She knows him too well,
much better than he knows her, much better than she knows herself; at
least her knowledge of him is better formulated. And she has this
advantage: custom makes it cowardly for a man to attempt to
demonstrate that woman is a tyrant--it laughs and applauds woman's
attempt to fix the charge on man.

It gives her a definite program of relief. To attack life as man does:
to secure the same kind of training, enter a trade or profession where
she can support herself, mingle with the crowd as