tion as a social criterion for women, must logically be
exactly what it has been in the experience of the past century: a bitter
and brutal struggle for self-aggrandizement, with the failures
remorselessly crushed underfoot, and the very idea of a fixed common
responsibility and common good for all forgotten or denied. My plea for
women is, therefore, based not upon the notion of equal rights, but
rather upon that of equal duties. Moral equality means equality in the
will to serve--not self, but all. And the practical correlative of this
conception must be a social organization which secures equalities of
opportunity for service to women and men. The only rights I desire to
claim for my sex are those necessary to the discharge of its own duties;
the fulfillment of the instinctive maternal craving; the realization of
the deepest impulses of a woman's nature.

The pitiless war of every individual against his, or her, fellow waged
with gold or with steel, can never make life other than mean and empty.
Women and men must learn again to regard themselves as part of a
mightier whole, one of the human race, and, as we feel in moments of
deeper insight, of the universe, which is a unity in spite of all the
discords it contains.

It follows from this, that I am not greatly concerned with what any
individual woman, or group of women, can do, or cannot do, should be
encouraged to do, or be restrained from doing, in competition with men
and with each other, but rather what is most right and worth while for
all women, _as women_, to do. _I do not want freedom for each woman to
do what she wants._

You see, in my view of life, such freedom can lead only to a more
degraded slavery. And because I am certain about this, I do not desire
success for women in the blind struggle based on the doctrine (so
fundamentally untrue in my opinion) of personal rights. A doctrine which
results inevitably in separations, in hatreds, in disorders and
struggling one with another. Unity of ideals and of conduct becomes
impossible. The general life is driven about in this way or the other,
directed by this purpose or by that, but always by individualistic
principles, and not to serve the good of all, but by each person for his
own, or her own, ends. How can order come out of such a way of life? Do
you think you are going to improve things in the old selfish ways. I
tell you the result can be nothing but a further failure of vision. The
mountain heights