after all, delivered without much hesitation, and few
men would question the legitimacy of their sense of an outraged tutelage
in any case that might arise. On the other hand, relatively little
discredit attaches to a woman through the evil deeds of the man with
whom her life is associated.

The good and beautiful scheme of life, then--that is to say the scheme
to which we are habituated--assigns to the woman a "sphere" ancillary
to the activity of the man; and it is felt that any departure from the
traditions of her assigned round of duties is unwomanly. If the
question is as to civil rights or the suffrage, our common sense in the
matter--that is to say the logical deliverance of our general scheme
of life upon the point in question--says that the woman should be
represented in the body politic and before the law, not immediately in
her own person, but through the mediation of the head of the
household to which she belongs. It is unfeminine in her to aspire to a
self-directing, self-centered life; and our common sense tells us that
her direct participation in the affairs of the community, civil or
industrial, is a menace to that social order which expresses our habits
of thought as they have been formed under the guidance of the traditions
of the pecuniary culture. "All this fume and froth of 'emancipating
woman from the slavery of man' and so on, is, to use the chaste and
expressive language of Elizabeth Cady Stanton inversely, 'utter rot.'
The social relations of the sexes are fixed by nature. Our entire
civilization--that is whatever is good in it--is based on the home."
The "home" is the household with a male head. This view, but commonly
expressed even more chastely, is the prevailing view of the woman's
status, not only among the common run of the men of civilized
communities, but among the women as well. Women have a very alert sense
of what the scheme of proprieties requires, and while it is true that
many of them are ill at ease under the details which the code imposes,
there are few who do not recognize that the existing moral order, of
necessity and by the divine right of prescription, places the woman in
a position ancillary to the man. In the last analysis, according to her
own sense of what is good and beautiful, the woman's life is, and in
theory must be, an expression of the man's life at the second remove.

But in spite of this pervading sense of what is the good and natural
place for the woman, the