ir own needs; the many
types of efficient workers, alert, hard, self-satisfied, not wholly
cynical, yet with a touch of something that borders on cynicism,
submitting almost with a secret repugnance to the mysterious but supreme
bond which holds the sexes miserably together; and the prostitute woman
of all kinds, out to seize every advantage from men, ruthless, living
upon sex--these are, it seems to me, the three main types of women
resulting in our so-called civilization of to-day, from our repressions
and falsehoods, our indefinite wills, from our confused ideals and
failure in living; and it is hard to say which is the most harmful,
which is the most wronged, which is the most unhappy, the furthest
removed from the type that is eternal--the ideal woman, satisfied and
glad, whom a happier future may again permit to live.

V

It was Mr. Wells who said in one of his novels, "suppose the liberation
of women simply means the liberation of mischief." "Suppose she _is_
wicked as a sex, suppose she _will_ trade on her power of exciting
imaginative men."

Something very like this has been happening in the world to-day.

We are all to pieces morally. The consciences of many people are their
neighbor's opinions, and the removal of so many young girls and men from
their home surroundings, their relations and old friends, has greatly
slackened the watchful safe-guarding of morals, so that any slightest
infringement has not been at once observed and quickly punished. The
important barriers of difference in class, in social positions, and in
race have also broken through. Conditions in the five war-years and most
of the arrangements of society have discouraged morality very heavily,
and the wise thing for us to do in the matter is not to grow eloquent
about sin, but at once to do intelligent things to make right conduct
easier.

An organized freedom and independence for women has certainly had
startling moral results. The reasons are obvious enough. It is a
necessary consequence of our modern insistence on individual values; the
harping of one generation on freedom, which has caused our young women,
in many directions, to carry their ideas of freedom far beyond the
accepted conventions of our ordinary civilized human association. It has
been shown as manifestly true that for all ordinary young women that
intimate association with men, fellowship in the workshops and factories
and in play, turns them with extreme readiness