llot,
will set woman free, will make her a force hitherto unknown in the
world; a force for real love, for peace, for harmony; a force of divine
fire, of life giving; a creator of free men and women."

There is little in this that Ibsen would not have said amen to. But--and
this is the conclusion to which my chapter draws--Ibsen has said it
already, and said it more powerfully. Emma Goldman--who (if among women
anyone) should have for us a message of her own, striking to the
heart--repeats, in a less effective cadence, what she has learned from
him.

The work of Beatrice Webb is the prose of revolution. The work of Ibsen
is its poetry. Beatrice Webb has performed her work--one comes to
feel--as well as Ibsen has his. And one wonders if, after all, the prose
is not that which women are best endowed to succeed in.

A book review (written by a woman) which I have at hand contains some
generalizations which bear on the subject. "This is a woman's book [says
the reviewer], and a book which could only have been written by a woman,
though it is singularly devoid of most of the qualities which are
usually recognized as feminine. For romance and sentiment do not
properly lie in the woman's domain. She deals, when she is herself, with
the material facts of the life she knows. Her talent is to exhibit them
in the remorseless light of reality and shorn of all the glamour of
idealism. Great and poetical imagination rarely informs her art, but
within the strictness of its limits it lives by an intense and
scrupulous sincerity of observation and an uncompromising recognition of
the logic of existence."

If that is true, shall we not then expect a future more largely
influenced by women to have more of the hard, matter-of-fact quality,
the splendid realism characteristic of woman "when she is herself"?

CHAPTER VI

MARGARET DREIER ROBINS

The work of Margaret Dreier Robins has been done in the National Women's
Trade Union League. It might be supposed that the aim of such an
organization is sufficiently explicit in its title: to get higher wages
and shorter hours. But I fancy that it would be a truer thing to say
that its aim is to bring into being that ideal of American womanhood
which Walt Whitman described:

They are not one jot less than I am,
They are tann'd in the face by shining suns and blowing winds,
Their flesh has the old divine suppleness and strength,
They know how to swim, row, ride, wres