of the weak,
ignorant, inexperienced woman--the cross between an angel and an idiot,
as I have elsewhere described her[84]--no longer fulfilled any useful
purpose. Civilized society furnishes the conditions under which all
adult persons are socially equal and all are free to give to society the
best they are capable of.

It was inevitable, but unfortunate, that this movement should have
sometimes tended to take the form of an attempt on the part of women to
secure, not merely equality with men, but actual imitation of men. These
women said that since men had attained mastery in life, captured all the
best things, and adopted the most successful methods of living, it was
necessary for women to copy them at every point. That was a specious
plea which even had in it a certain element of truth. But the fact
remained that women and men are different, that the difference is based
in fundamental natural functions, and that to place one sex in exactly
the same position as the other sex is to deform its outlines and to
hamper its activities.

From the present point of view we are only concerned with the influence
of the woman's movement on love. On the traditional conception of
romantic love inherited from medieval days there can be no doubt that
this influence has been highly dissolvent. Medieval romantic love, in
its original form, had been part of a conception of womanhood made up of
opposites, and all the opposites balanced each other. The medieval man
laid his homage at the feet of the great lady in the castle hall, but he
himself lorded it over the wife who drudged in his own home. On his
knees he gazed up in devotion at the ethereal virgin, but when she
ceased to be a virgin, he asserted himself by cursing her as a demon
sent from hell to seduce and torment him. All this was possible because
the woman was outside the orbit of the man's life, never on the same
plane, necessarily higher or lower. It became difficult if woman was
man's equal, absurdly impossible if she was of identical nature with
him.

The medieval romantic tradition has come down to us so laden with beauty
and mystery that we are apt to think, as we see it melt away, that human
achievements are being permanently depreciated. That illusion occurs in
every age of transition. It was notably so in the eighteenth century,
which represented a highly important stage in the emancipation of women.
To some that century seems to have been given up to empty gallan