ated
primarily as women. There have always been those women who wanted to
get, like Joan of Arc, into masculine attire, and the school of the
"mystical darlings." There have always been the women who wanted to
share men's work and the women who wanted to "inspire" it--the mates and
the mistresses. Of course, the mass of women lies between these
extremes. But it is possible, nevertheless, to discuss this question as
though it were a conflict of two sharply opposed ideals. It is
convenient to write as if there were just these two sorts of women
because so one can get a sharp definition in the picture. The ordinary
woman fluctuates between the two, turns now to the Western ideal of
citizenship and now to the Eastern of submission. These ideals fight not
only in human society, but in every woman's career.

Chitra in Rabindranath Tagore's play, for example, tried both aspects of
the woman's life, and Tagore is at one with Plato in preferring the
Rosalind type to the houri. And with him I venture to think is the clear
reason of mankind. The real "emancipation" to which reason and the trend
of things makes is from the yielding to the energetic side of a woman's
disposition, from beauty enthroned for love towards the tall,
weather-hardened woman with a spear, loving her mate as her mate loves
her, and as sexless as a man in all her busy hours.

But it was not simply the energies that tended towards this particular
type that were set free during the latter half of the nineteenth
century. Every sort of feminine energy was set free. And it was not
merely the self-reliant, independence-seeking women who were
discontented. The ladies who specialised in feminine arts and graces and
mysteries were also dissatisfied. They found they were not important
enough. The former type found itself insufficiently respected, and the
latter type found itself insufficiently adored. The two mingled their
voices in the most confusing way in the literature of the suffrage
movement before the war. The two tendencies mingle confusingly in the
minds of the women that this movement was stirring up to think. The Vote
became the symbol for absolutely contradictory things; there is scarcely
a single argument for it in suffragist literature that cannot be
completely negatived out of suffragist literature.

For example, compare the writings of Miss Cicely Hamilton, the
distinguished actress, with the publications of the Pankhurst family.
The former expresses