ment of the lot of woman, the least likely to
compromise at the instance of man, child, church, state, or devil.

Mrs. Gilman is the author of "Women and Economics" and several other
books of theory, "What Diantha Did" and several other books of fiction;
she is the editor and publisher of a remarkable journal, The Forerunner,
the whole varied contents of which is written by herself; she has a
couple of plays to her credit, and she has published a book of poems.
If in spite of all this publicity it is still possible to misunderstand the
attitude of Mrs. Gilman, I can only suppose it to be because her poetry
is less well known than her prose. For in this book of verse, "In This
Our World," Mrs. Gilman has so completely justified herself that no man
need ever be afraid of her--nor any woman who, having a lingering
tenderness for the other sex, would object to living in a beehive world,
full of raging efficient females, with the males relegated to the
position of drones.

Of course, I do but jest when I speak of this fear; but there is, to
the ordinary male, something curiously objectionable at the first glance
in Mrs. Gilman's arguments, whether they are for cooeperative kitchens or
for the labor of women outside the home. And the reason for that
objection lies precisely in the fact that her plans seem to be made in a
complete forgetfulness of him and his interests. It all has the air of a
feminine plot. The cooeperative kitchens, and the labor by which women's
economic independence is to be achieved, seem the means to an end.

And so they are. But the end, as revealed in Mrs. Gilman's poems, is
that one which all intelligent men must desire. I do not know whether or
not the more elaborate cooeperative schemes of Mrs. Gilman are practical;
and I fancy that she rather exaggerates the possibilities of independent
work for women who have or intend to have children. But the spirit
behind these plans is one which cannot but be in the greatest degree
stimulating and beneficent in its effect upon her sex.

For Mrs. Gilman is, first of all, a poet, an idealist. She is a lover
of life. She rejoices in beauty and daring and achievement, in all the
fine and splendid things of the world. She does not merely disapprove of
the contemporary "home" as wasteful and inefficient--she hates it
because it vulgarizes life. In this "home," this private food-preparing
and baby-rearing establishment, she sees a machine which breaks down all
tha