good or ill, what shall that master be;
'Tis magic she must have or prophecy--
Home never taught her that--how best to guide
Toward peace this thing that sleepeth at her side.
And she who, laboring long, shall find some way
Whereby her lord may bear with her, nor fray
His yoke too fiercely, blessed is the breath
That woman draws!

Medea's difficulty was that which is oftenest in the way of a woman
carrying her business in life to a satisfactory completion--false
mating. It is not a difficulty peculiar to woman. Man knows it as
often. It is the heaviest curse society brings on human beings--the
most fertile cause of apathy, agony, and failure. If the woman's cry
is more poignant under it than the man's, it is because the machine
which holds them both allows him a wider sweep, more interests outside
of their immediate alliance. "A man, when he is vexed at home,"
complains Medea, "can go out and find relief among his friends or
acquaintances, but we women have none to look at but him."

And when it is impossible longer to "look" at him, what shall she do!
Tell her woe to the world, seek a soporific, repudiate the scheme of
things, or from the vantage point of her failure turn to the untried
relations of her life, call upon her unused powers?

From the beginning of time she has tried each and all of these methods
of meeting her purely human woe. At times the women of whole peoples
have sunk into apathy, their business reduced to its dullest,
grossest forms. Again, whole groups have taken themselves out of the
partnership which both Nature and Society have ordered. The Amazons
refused to recognize man as an equal and mated simply that they might
rear more women like themselves. Here the tables were turned and the
boy baby turned out--not to the wolves, but to man! The convent has
always been a favorite way of escape.

It has never been a majority of women who for a great length of time
have shirked this problem by any one of these methods. By individuals
and by groups woman has always been seeking to develop the business of
life to such proportions, to so diversify, refine, and broaden it that
no half failure or utter failure of its fundamental relations would
swamp her, leave her comfortless, or prevent her working out that
family which she knew to be her part in the scheme of things. It is
from her conscious attempt to make the best of things when they are
proved bad, that there has come t