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e effort our Women's Clubs show what women want to do. Men do not have to do these things through their clubs, which are mainly for pleasure; they can accomplish what they wish to through regular channels. But the character and direction of the influence of women in human affairs is conclusively established by the things they already do and try to do. In those countries, and in our own states, where they are already full citizens, the legislation introduced and promoted by them is of the same beneficent character. The normal woman is a strong creature, loving and serviceable. The kind of woman men are afraid to entrust with political power, selfish, idle, over-sexed, or ignorant and narrow-minded, is not normal, but is the creature of conditions men have made. We need have no fear of her, for she will disappear with the conditions which created her. In older days, without knowledge of the natural sciences, we accepted life as static. If, being born in China, we grew up with foot-bound women, we assumed that women were such, and must so remain. Born in India, we accepted the child-wife, the pitiful child-widow, the ecstatic _suttee_, as natural expressions of womanhood. In each age, each country, we have assumed life to be necessarily what it was--a moveless fact. All this is giving way fast in our new knowledge of the laws of life. We find that Growth is the eternal law, and that even rocks are slowly changing. Human life is seen to be as dynamic as any other form; and the most certain thing about it is that it will change. In the light of this knowledge we need no longer accept the load of what we call "sin;" the grouped misery of poverty, disease and crime; the cumbrous, inefficacious, wasteful processes of life today, as needful or permanent. We have but to learn the _real_ elements in humanity; its true powers and natural characteristics; to see wherein we are hampered by the wrong ideas and inherited habits of earlier generations, and break loose from them--then we can safely and swiftly introduce a far nobler grade of living. Of all crippling hindrances in false ideas, we have none more universally mischievous than this root error about men and women. Given the old androcentric theory, and we have an androcentric culture--the kind we so far know; this short stretch we call "history;" with its proud and pitiful record. We have done wonders of upward growth--for growth is the main law, and may not be whol
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