es, and the
dingy details of the commissariat--for these things are necessary if the
cry of victory is ever to ring out over the battlefield. Some of her
phrases have so militant an air that they seem to have been born among
the captains and the shouting. They make us ashamed of our vicious
civilian comfort.

Mrs. Gilman's attitude toward the bearing and rearing of children is
easy to misapprehend. She does seem to relegate these things to the
background of women's lives. She does deny to these things a tremendous
importance. Why, she asks, is it so important that women should bear and
rear children to live lives as empty and poor as their own? Surely, she
says, it is more important to make life something worth giving to
children! No, she insists, it is not sufficient to be a mother: an
oyster can be a mother. It is necessary that a woman should be a person
as well as a mother. She must know and do.

And as for the ideal of love which is founded on masculine privilege,
she satirizes it very effectively in some verses entitled "Wedded
Bliss":

"O come and be my mate!" said the Eagle to the Hen;
"I love to soar, but then
I want my mate to rest
Forever in the nest!"
Said the Hen, "I cannot fly
I have no wish to try,
But I joy to see my mate careering through the sky!"
They wed, and cried, "Ah, this is Love, my own!"
And the Hen sat, the Eagle soared, alone.

Woman, in Mrs. Gilman's view, must not be content with Hendom: the sky
is her province, too. Of all base domesticity, all degrading love, she
is the enemy. She gives her approval only to that work which has in it
something high and free, and that love which is the dalliance of the
eagles.

CHAPTER III

EMMELINE PANKHURST AND JANE ADDAMS

A few months ago it was rather the fashion to reply to some political
verses by Mr. Kipling which assumed to show that women should not be
given the ballot, and which had as their refrain:

The female of the species is more deadly than the male!

But it seems that no one pointed out that this fact, even in the limited
sense in which it is a fact in the human species, is an argument for
giving women the vote.

For if women are, as Mr. Kipling says, lacking in a sense of abstract
justice, in patience, in the spirit of compromise; if they are violent
and unscrupulous in gaining an end upon which they have set their
hearts, then by all means they should be