y that extremity is the vanishing extremity of these things.
The new freewoman is going to be a grave and capable being, soberly
dressed, and imposing her own decency and neutrality of behaviour upon
the men she meets. And along the line of sober costume and simple and
restrained behaviour that the freewoman is marking out, the married
woman will also escape to new measures of freedom.

I do not believe that among women of the same social origins and the
same educational quality there can exist side by side entirely distinct
schools of costume, deportment, and behaviour based on entirely
divergent views of life. I do not think that men can be trained to
differentiate between different sorts of women, sorts of women they will
often be meeting simultaneously, and to treat this one with frankness
and fellowship and that one with awe passion and romantic old-world
gallantry. All sorts of intermediate types--the majority of women will
be intermediate types--will complicate the problem. This conflict of the
citizen-woman ideal with the loveliness-woman ideal, which was breaking
out very plainly in the British suffrage movement before the war, will
certainly return after the war, and I have little doubt which way the
issue will fall. The human being is going to carry it against the sexual
being. The struggle is going to be extensive and various and prolonged,
but in the serious years ahead the serious type must, I feel, win. The
plain, well-made dress will oust the ribbon and the decolletage.

In every way the war is accelerating the emancipation of women from
sexual specialisation. It is facilitating their economic emancipation.
It is liberating types that will inevitably destroy both the "atmosphere
of gallantry" which is such a bar to friendliness between people of
opposite sexes and that atmosphere of hostile distrust which is its
counterpart in the minds of the over-sexual suffragettes. It is
arresting the change of fashions and simplifying manners.

In another way also it is working to the same end. That fall in the
birth-rate which has been so marked a feature in the social development
of all modern states has become much more perceptible since the war
began to tell upon domestic comfort. There is a full-cradle agitation
going on in Germany to check this decline; German mothers are being
urged not to leave the Crown Prince of 1930 or 1940 without the
necessary material for glory at some fresh Battle of Verdun. I doubt