the Woman's Movement has involved a tendency to follow
individual paths, without waiting to consider to what end they lead.
There has arisen a sort of glamour about freedom. No one of us can be
free, for no one of us stands alone; we are all members one of
another. And woman's destiny is rooted in the race. This, rightly
considered, is the most vital of all vital facts. I appeal to women to
realise more clearly their true place and gifts, as representing that
original racial motherhood, out of which the masculine and feminine
characters have arisen.

My book is a statement of my faith in Woman as the predominant and
responsible partner in the relations of the sexes. To such a belief my
opinion was driven, as it were, not deliberately set from the
beginning. The time when the resolve to write a book upon Woman first
took a place in my thoughts goes back for many years. The child of a
Puritan father, who died for the faith in which he believed, the
desire to teach was born in my blood. Our character is forged in the
past, we cannot escape our inheritance. I began my work as the
head-mistress of a school for girls. I was young in experience and
very ignorant of life. In my enthusiasm I was quite unconscious of my
own limitations, I believed that I was able to train up a new type of
free woman. Of course I failed. Looking back now I wonder if I ever
taught my pupils one-hundredth part of what they taught me. Perhaps if
any of them, separated from me by time and circumstances, chance to
read my book, they may be glad to know that it was largely due to them
and what I learnt from them that it has come to be written. Certainly
it was in those days, when saddened by my own failures, that the
purpose came to me, dimly but insistently, to seek out the Truth about
Woman and the relations of the sexes. I began to read and to collect
material at first for my own guidance and instruction, and as a
necessary preparation for my work. I needed it: I must have been slow
to learn. For a long time I wandered in the wrong path. My desire was
to find proofs that would enable me to ignore all those facts of
woman's organic constitution which makes her unlike man. I stumbled
blindly into the fatal error of following masculine ideals. I desired
freedom for women to enable them to live the same lives that men live
and to do the same work that men do. I did not understand that this
was a wastage of the force of womanhood; that no freedom can be