ind. Any
stigma attached to women is really a stigma attached to their
potentiality as mothers, and we can only remove it by beginning with
the emancipation of the actual mother. No sharp cleavage can be made
between qualities that are good and masculine on the one side, and all
that is feminine on the other. The view is entirely erroneous. How,
for instance, can ignorance and weakness constitute at once the
perfection of womankind, and the imperfection of mankind? The matter
is not so simple. Man must fall with woman, and rise with her.

My first purpose is to make this clear.

To-day we are faced with the question whether the predominance of man
over woman is to be regarded as a natural, and therefore inviolable,
law of the male and female. Some will deny this mastery of the male.
It may be said that woman sways man more than he rules her. This is
true. The influence of woman is important--fearfully important. Yet
the fitting answer to such glossing--if it be necessary really to
point out that sexual privilege is not personal power--is that such
government is exercised in one direction alone, and arises not from
woman's strength, but out of her subjection. Women have rendered back
to men the ill that this long sex domination has wrought upon them.
None the less have we to reckon with the despotism of the male side of
life. "The softening influence of woman!" ... It is a pretty phrase;
but all the same women and men have been doing their best to degrade
each other to a pitiful mediocrity. It is not the purifying influence
of women--the theory of chivalrous moralists--but an unguided and
therefore deteriorating sexual tyranny that regulates society. Let us
have done with this absurd catch-phrase of "Woman's Influence." No
influence worth naming as such can be exercised but by an independent
mind. Women need better fields for the exercise of their love of
power. The sexual sphere, which has shaped an impalpable prison
around them, has barred them from that part of life which is social
and broadly human; the falsely feminine has been developed to the loss
of the womanhood in them. It is only in obedience to man that woman
has gained her power of life. She has borne children at his will and
for his pleasure. She has received her very consciousness from man:
this has been her womanhood, to feel herself under another's will.
There is no possible hiding of the truth; if women influence men, men
command life.

But is it po