e, their attention being given to the domestic arts--to agriculture
and the attendant stationary industries. Woman's position during the
matriarchate was largely the result of the need in primitive society
of woman's constructive energy, and her power arose from an unfettered
use of her special functions. But this divergence of the paths of
women from the paths of men continued, and during the patriarchal
period became arbitrary with the withdrawal of women from initiative
labour, an unnatural arrangement which arose out of later social
conditions. The militant side of social activities has belonged to
men, the passive to women; and men have been goaded into growth by the
conditions and struggles of their lives. They have gathered around
themselves a special man-formed environment of institutions and laws,
of activities and inventions, of art and literature, of male
sentiments, and male systems of opinions, to which they are connected
in subtle and numerous relations, and this complex heritage of
influences has been reimposed on men generation by generation. In this
social working-life women have not had an equal part--and a drag in
their development has arisen as the result of this passivity. At a
certain period in civilisation women became an inferior class because
men with their greater range of opportunities, which brought them
within a wider and more variable circle of influences, developed a
superior fitness on the motor side. Another contrast is very evident,
men's work being performed under more striking circumstances and with
more apparent effort and danger, drew to itself prestige, which
women's work did not receive; their work, on the contrary, was held in
contempt.[7]

Yet, in this connection, it is necessary to say emphatically that, in
its origin, there was nothing arbitrary in this division between the
sexes. It was, in itself, a natural outcome of natural causes, arising
out of the needs of primitive societies. There is nothing derogatory
to woman in accepting the passive or, more truly, the constructive
power of her nature; rather it is her chief claim for the regaining of
her true position in society. I wish at once to say how far it is from
my desire to judge woman from a male standpoint. The power and nature
that are woman's are not secondary to man's; they are equal, but
different, being co-existent and complementary--in fact, just the
completion of his.

There is another point that must be made c