e
female half of human-kind to acquire and keep that position of
essential usefulness held by the females of all other species? Will
women learn to develop their own nature and to express their own
genius? Can their present characteristic weakness, vices, and failings
be really overcome under different and freer conditions of domestic
and social life? Are we of to-day justified in looking forward to the
new woman of the future, with saner aspirations and wider aims, who
lives the whole of her life; who will restore to humanity harmony
between the sexes, and transform the miseries of love back to its
rightful joys? Can these things, indeed, be?

The answer is a confident and joyful "Yes!"

The re-birth of woman is no dream.

We have become accustomed to listen to the opinion voiced by men. We
have heard that belief in women is a symptom of youth or of
inexperience of the sex, which a riper mind and wider knowledge will
invariably tend to dissipate. So woman has come to regard herself as
almost an indiscretion on the part of the Creator, necessary indeed to
man, but something which he must try to hide and hush up. We have, in
fact, put into practice Milton's ideal: "He, for God only, she, for
God in him." Some such arguments from the lips of disillusioned men
have been possible, perhaps, with some measure of reason. But the time
has come for men to hold their peace.

Woman is learning to believe in herself.

Now, so far, the great result of the long years of repression has been
the sterility of women's lives. Sterility is a deadly sin. To-day so
many of our activities are sterile. The women of our richer classes
have been impotent by reason of their soft living; the women of our
workers have had their vitality sweated out of them by their filthy
labours; they could bear only dead things. Life ought to be a struggle
of desire towards adventures of expression, whose nobility will
fertilise the mind and lead to the conception of new and glorious
births. Women have been forced to use life wastefully. They have been
spiritually sterile; consuming, not giving: getting little from life,
giving back little to life.

But woman is awakening to find her place in the eternal purpose. She
is adding understanding to her feeling and passion.

Never before throughout the history of modern womankind has her own
character evoked so earnest and profound an interest as to-day: never
has she considered herself from so truly a social