o our own
love-passions, this is surely true.

Let me try to make this clearer by an example. It would seem but a
small step from the female spider, so ruthlessly eating up her lover,
to the type of woman celebrated by Mr. Bernard Shaw's immortal Ann. I
recall a woman friend saying to me once, "We may not like it, and, of
course, we refuse to own to it, but there is something of Ann in every
woman." I need not recall to you Ann's pursuit of her victim, Tanner,
nor his futile efforts to escape. Here, as so often he has done, Mr.
Shaw has presented us in comedy with a philosophy of life. You
believe, perhaps, the fiction, still brought forward by many who ought
to know better, that in love woman is passive and waits for man to woo
her. I think no woman in her heart believes this. She knows, by
instinct, that Nature has unmistakably made her the predominant
partner in all that relates to the perpetuation of the race; she knows
this in spite of all fictions set up by men. Have they done this, as
Mr. Shaw suggests, to protect themselves against a too humiliating
aggressiveness of the woman in following the driving of the
Life-Force? This pretence of male superiority in the sexual relation
is so shallow that it is strange how it can have imposed on any one.

I wish to state here quite definitely what I hold to be true; the
condition of female superiority with which sexuality began has in this
connection persisted. In every case the relation between woman and man
is the same--she is the pursuer, he the pursued and disposed of.
Nothing can or should alter this. The male from the very beginning has
been of use from Nature's point of view by assisting the female to
carry on life. It is the fierce hunger of the male, increasing in
strength through the long course of time, which places him in woman's
power. Man is the slave of woman, often when least he thinks so, and
still woman uses her power, even like the spider, not infrequently,
for his undoing.

Here, indeed, is a warning causing us to think. The touch of Nature
that makes the whole world kin is nowhere more manifest than in sex;
that absorption of the male by the female to which life owes its
continuation, its ecstasy, and its pain. It has seemed to me it is
here in the primitive relations of the sexes that we may find the clue
to many of those wrongs which women have suffered at the hands of men.
Man, acting instinctively, has rebelled, not so much, I think, against
wo