the production of others....

Closely allied to the fallacy that man supports woman is the
fallacy that man protects woman, and has a right to control her
by virtue of this protection. There was a period in the world's
transition from savagery to civilization when mankind had so
little conception of the mutuality of human interests that war
was a perpetual condition of society. Originally women also were
fighters; just as the lioness or tigress is as capable as her
mate of self-defense and protection of her young, so the savage
woman, when necessity required, was equally capable of conducting
warfare in the same cause. But long before men had given up
killing each other for the better business of trading with and
helping each other woman had ceased to be a fighter. She was the
first to see the advantages of peace, both because she was the
earliest manufacturer and trader and because it cost her more in
the production of every soldier than it cost man. Instinct
directed her toward peace long before reason made it possible for
her to explain why she hated war, and she hated it as an
occupation for herself long before it occurred to her to despise
it as an occupation for man. To-day the love of peace and hatred
for war which she is rapidly spreading through the world is the
real protector of woman; she is a self-protector by virtue of
this proclivity, and, as war is equally the enemy of man, here
again woman gives to man as much as she receives. Whatever force
the argument based on the right of soldiers to rule may once have
had is rapidly passing away. The era of the destroyer is dying,
the epoch of the Creator is coming in....

The subjugation of woman doubtless arose from an honest desire of
man to protect her. His mistake lay in assuming that his mind and
will could do private and public duty for both. Woman's mistake
lay in assuming that she might with safety permit man's mind and
will to discharge the duties nature meant to be fulfilled by her
own. Unhappily nature has a way of allowing the human race to
learn by its own experience, even though the lesson consume ages
of time; and she has also a rule that unused faculties and
functions fall into a state of atrophy. It was by such a
substitution of masculine for feminine will that woman fel