surely killing the fatalism of a past acquiescing in wrongs, and is
slowly giving birth to a fine spiritual apprehension of the great
truth that what concerns any woman concerns all women, and, I would
add, also all men. This last--that there can be no woman's question
that is not also a man's question--is so essentially a part of any
fruitful change in our domestic and social relationship that women
must not permit themselves for a moment to forget it. It is the very
plain things that so often we do overlook.

So it becomes clear that the parrot cries "Woman's Place!" "Woman's
Sphere!" "Her place is the home!" have lost much, even if not all,
their significance. For, in the first place, it is obvious that under
present conditions there are not enough homes to go round; and
second, even if we neglect this essential fact, women may well answer
such demands by saying "much depends on the character and conditions
of the home we are to stay in." It was a many-sided home of free and
full activity in which woman evolved and wherein for long ages she
worked; a home, in fact, which gave free opportunities for the
exercise of those qualities of constructive energy that women, broadly
speaking, may be said to possess. The woman's so-called natural
position in the home is not now natural at all. The conditions of life
have changed. Everything is drifting towards separation from worn-out
conditions. We are increasingly conscious of a growing discontent at
waste. The home with its old full activities has passed from women's
hands. But woman's work is not less needed. To-day the State claims
her; the Nation's housekeeping needs the vitalising mother-force more
than anything else.

The old way of looking at the patriarchal family was, from one point
of thought, perfectly right and reasonable as long as every woman was
ensured the protection of, and maintenance by, some man. Nor do I
think there was any unhappiness or degradation involved to women in
this co-operation of the old days, where the man went out to work and
the woman stayed to do work at least equally valuable in the home. It
was, as a rule, a co-operation of love, and, in any case, it was an
equal partnership in work. But what was true once is not true now. We
are living in a continually changing development and modification of
the old tradition of the relationship of woman and man. It is very
needful to impress this factor of constant change on our attention,
and to fix