nce are dictated by men.

Social intercourse is the prime condition of human life. To meet, to
mingle, to know one another, to exchange, not only definite ideas,
facts, and feelings, but to experience that vague general stimulus
and enlarged power that comes of contact--all this is essential to our
happiness as well as to our progress.

This grand desideratum has always been monopolized by men as far as
possible. What intercourse was allowed to women has been rigidly hemmed
its by man-made conventions. Women accept these conventions, repeat
them, enforce them upon their daughters; but they originate with men.

The feet of the little Chinese girl are bound by her mother and her
nurse--but it is not for woman's pleasure that this crippling torture
was invented. The Oriental veil is worn by women, but it is not for any
need of theirs that veils were decreed them.

When we look at society in its earlier form we find that the public
house has always been with us. It is as old almost as the private house;
the need for association is as human as the need for privacy. But the
public house was--and is--for men only. The woman was kept as far as
possible at home. Her female nature was supposed to delimit her life
satisfactorily, and her human stature was completely ignored.

Under the pressure of that human nature she has always rebelled at the
social restrictions which surrounded her; and from the women of older
lands gathered at the well, or in the market place, to our own women
on the church steps or in the sewing circle, they have ceaselessly
struggled for the social intercourse which was as much a law of their
being as of man's.

When we come to the modern special field that we call "society," we
find it to consist of a carefully arranged set of processes and places
wherein women may meet one another and meet men. These vary, of course,
with race, country, class, and period; from the clean licence of our
western customs to the strict chaperonage of older lands; but free as it
is in America, even here there are bounds.

Men associate without any limit but that of inclination and financial
capacity. Even class distinction only works one way--the low-class man
may not mingle with high-class women; but the high-class man may--and
does--mingle with low-class women. It is his society--may not a man do
what he will with his own?

Caste distinctions, as have been ably shown by Prof. Lester F. Ward, are
relics of race distin