ions that have to be answered when once the ideal of the
right of the present position of the sexes is shaken. The subject is
so entangled that a straightforward step-by-step inquiry will not
always be possible. Dogmatic conclusions, and the bringing forward of
too hasty remedies must alike be avoided. The past must lead us to the
present, and thence we must look to the future. The first need is to
find out every fact that we can that will help us in our search for
the truth. Most writers on the subject, in their desire to fix on a
cause of the evil, have selected one factor, or group of factors, and
largely neglected all others. Otto Weininger, for instance, the
brilliant modern denouncer of woman, refers the whole great difference
between women and men to one cause--the bondage of sexuality. Mrs.
Stetson, in _Woman and Economics_, finds a different answer to the
same question, and assumes that the whole evil is of economic origin.
Both explanations are in part true, but neither is the truth.

To institute reform successfully needs a wider spirit. We must face
sex problems with biological and historical knowledge. Before we can
understand women's present position in society, or even suggest a
future, we must examine the place she has filled in the civilisations
of the past; we must fix, too, the part the female half of life has
played in the evolution of the sexes. Yet an inquiry into facts is
only the first stage, and not the final. When we can go on from these
facts to their results, and learn the reasons of what we have
discovered, we shall become to some extent, at least, prepared. Then,
and then only, can we venture to look forward and intelligently
suggest whither the present revolution is leading us.

It is to reach this goal that this book is written. It is an attempt
to place the woman question in a wider and more decisive light. It is
not an investigation of facts alone, but of causes. The gospel it
would preach is a gospel of liberation. And that from which woman must
be freed is herself--the unsocial self that has been created by a
restricted environment. We have seen that woman's social inferiority
in the past has been to a great extent a legitimate thing. To all
appearances history would have been impossible without it, just as it
would have been impossible without an epoch of slavery and war.
Physical strength has ruled in the past, and woman was the weaker. The
truth is that woman's time had not come,