nception of woman's emancipation, and its tragic
effect upon the inner life of woman. In her work Laura Marholm
speaks of the fate of several gifted women of international fame: the
genius, Eleonora Duse; the great mathematician and writer, Sonya
Kovalevskaia; the artist and poet-nature, Marie Bashkirtzeff, who
died so young. Through each description of the lives of these women
of such extraordinary mentality runs a marked trail of unsatisfied
craving for a full, rounded, complete, and beautiful life, and the
unrest and loneliness resulting from the lack of it. Through these
masterly psychological sketches, one cannot help but see that the
higher the mental development of woman, the less possible it is for
her to meet a congenial mate who will see in her, not only sex, but
also the human being, the friend, the comrade and strong
individuality, who cannot and ought not lose a single trait of her
character.

The average man with his self-sufficiency, his ridiculously superior
airs of patronage towards the female sex, is an impossibility for
woman as depicted in the CHARACTER STUDY by Laura Marholm. Equally
impossible for her is the man who can see in her nothing more than
her mentality and her genius, and who fails to awaken her woman
nature.

A rich intellect and a fine soul are usually considered necessary
attributes of a deep and beautiful personality. In the case of the
modern woman, these attributes serve as a hindrance to the complete
assertion of her being. For over a hundred years the old form of
marriage, based on the Bible, "till death doth part," has been
denounced as an institution that stands for the sovereignty of the
man over the woman, of her complete submission to his whims and
commands, and absolute dependence on his name and support. Time and
again it has been conclusively proved that the old matrimonial
relation restricted woman to the function of a man's servant and the
bearer of his children. And yet we find many emancipated women who
prefer marriage, with all its deficiencies, to the narrowness of an
unmarried life; narrow and unendurable because of the chains of moral
and social prejudice that cramp and bind her nature.

The explanation of such inconsistency on the part of many advanced
women is to be found in the fact that they never truly understood the
meaning of emancipation. They thought that all that was needed was
independence from external tyrannies; the internal tyrants, far m