redity environment has coalesced, and I think no one will
deny that a continuous suggestion of helplessness and mental inferiority
must affect woman. It means most during youth, when one is easily
snubbed, when one looks up to one's elders. By the time one has found
out one's elders, it is generally too late; the imprint is made, and
woman, looking upon herself as inferior, hands on to her daughters the
old slavery that was in her forbears' blood. To me this seems foolish,
and during the past thirty or forty years a great many have come to
think so too; they have shown it by opening wide to woman the doors of
colleges, many occupations and professions. Many are to-day impatient
because woman has not done enough, has not justified this new freedom. I
think they are unjust; they do not understand that a generation of
training and of relative liberty is not enough to undo evils neolithic
in origin. All that we are doing to-day by opening gates to women is to
counter-influence the old tradition, to implant in the woman of
to-morrow the new faith that nothing is beyond her powers. It lies with
the woman of to-day to make that faith so strong as to move mountains. I
think she will succeed, for I doubt whether any mental power is inherent
in sex. There are differences of degree, differences of quality; but I
suspect that they are mainly due to sexual heredity, to environment, to
suggestion, and that indeed, if I may trench upon biology, human
creatures are never entirely male or entirely female; there are no men,
there are no women, but only sexual majorities.

The evolution of woman toward mental assimilation with man, though
particularly swift in the past half-century, has been steady since the
Renaissance. Roughly, one might say that the woman of the year 1450 had
no education at all; in this she was more like man than she ever was
later, for the knights could not read, and learning existed only among
the priests. The time had not yet come for the learned nobleman; Sir
Philip Sidney, the Earl of Surrey, the Euphuists, had not yet dispelled
the mediaeval fogs, and few among the laymen, save Cheke and Ascham, had
any learning at all. In those days woman sang songs and brought up
babies. Two hundred and fifty years later the well-to-do woman had
become somebody; she could even read, though she mainly read tales such
as _The Miraculous Love of Prince Alzamore_. She was growing significant
in the backstairs of politics. Sometimes