world a masculized literature.

It is hard for us to realize this. We can readily see, that if women had
always written the books, no men either writing or reading them, that
would have surely "feminized" our literature; but we have not in our
minds the concept, much less the word, for an overmasculized influence.

Men having been accepted as humanity, women but a side-issue; (most
literally if we accept the Hebrew legend!), whatever men did or said was
human--and not to be criticized. In no department of life is it easier
to contravert this old belief; to show how the male sex as such
differs from the human type; and how this maleness has monopolized and
disfigured a great social function.

Human life is a very large affair; and literature is its chief art. We
live, humanly, only through our power of communication. Speech gives
us this power laterally, as it were, in immediate personal contact.
For permanent use speech becomes oral tradition--a poor dependence.
Literature gives not only an infinite multiplication to the lateral
spread of communion but adds the vertical reach. Through it we know the
past, govern the present, and influence the future. In its servicable
common forms it is the indispensable daily servant of our lives; in its
nobler flights as a great art no means of human inter-change goes so
far.

In these brief limits we can touch but lightly on some phases of so
great a subject; and will rest the case mainly on the effect of an
exclusively masculine handling of the two fields of history and fiction.
In poetry and the drama the same influence is easily traced, but in the
first two it is so baldly prominent as to defy objection.

History is, or should be, the story of our racial life. What have men
made it? The story of warfare and conquest. Begin at the very beginning
with the carven stones of Egypt, the clay records of Chaldea, what do we
find of history?

"I Pharaoh, King of Kings! Lord of Lords! (etc. etc.), went down into
the miserable land of Kush, and slew of the inhabitants thereof an
hundred and forty and two thousands!" That, or something like it, is the
kind of record early history gives us.

The story of Conquering Kings, who and how many they killed and
enslaved; the grovelling adulation of the abased; the unlimited
jubilation of the victor; from the primitive state of most ancient
kings, and the Roman triumphs where queens walked in chains, down to our
omni present soldier's monument