d of some reduction
of its importance, and she makes the boldest experimental suggestions
for the achievement of that end. But she comes slowly to recognize that
there is a justification for an indirect attack, that sex and the
position of women do not constitute the primary problem in that
bristling system of riddles that lies like a hostile army across the
path of mankind. And she realized too that through art, through science
and literature and the whole enquiring and creative side of man's
nature, lies the path by which those positions are to be outflanked, and
those eternal-looking impossibles and inconceivables overcome. Here is a
fragment--saturated with the essence of her thought. Three-quarters of
her earlier letters are variations on this theme....

"What you call 'social order,' Stephen, all the arrangements seem to me
to be _built_ on subjection to sex even more than they are built (as you
say) on labor subjection. And this is an age of release, you say it is
an age of release for the workers and they know it. And so do the women.
Just as much. 'Wild hopes' indeed! The workers' hopes are nothing to the
women's! It is not only the workers who are saying let us go free,
manage things differently so that we may have our lives relieved from
this intolerable burthen of constant toil, but the women also are saying
let us go free. They are demanding release just as much from their
intolerable endless specialization as females. The tramp on the roads
who won't work, the swindler and the exploiter who contrive not to work,
the strikers who throw down their tools, no longer for twopences and
sixpences as you say but because their way of living is no longer
tolerable to them, and we women, who don't bear children or work or
help; we are all in one movement together. We are part of the General
Strike. I have been a striker all my life. We are doing nothing--by the
hundred thousand. Your old social machine is working without us and in
spite of us, it carries us along with it and we are sand in the
bearings. I'm not a wheel, Stephen, I'm grit. What you say about the
reactionaries and suppressionists who would stifle the complaints of
labor and crush out its struggles to be free, is exactly true about the
reactionaries and suppressionists who would stifle the discussion of the
woman's position and crush out her hopes of emancipation...."

And here is a page of the peculiar doubt that was as characteristic of
her as the qu