likely to be regarded with
a passionate admiration not unmixed with awe. The traditional weakness
of women where men are concerned (which after all is but a cunning
device of Nature) may swamp their great opportunity. They may fight
over the surviving males like dogs over a bone, marry with sensations
of profound gratitude (or patriotic fervor) the armless, the legless,
the blind, the terrible face mutiles, and drop forever out of the
ranks of Woman as differentiated from the ranks of mere women. What
has hampered the cause of Woman in Great Britain and Europe so far is
the quite remarkable valuation put upon the male by the female. This
is partly temperamental, partly female preponderance, but it is even
more deeply rooted in those vanished centuries during which man
proclaimed and maintained his superiority. Circumstances helped him
for thousands of years, and he has been taken by the physically weaker
and child-bearing sex at his own estimate. It is difficult for
American women to appreciate this almost servile attitude of even
British women to mere man. One of the finest things about the militant
woman, one by which she scored most heavily, was her flinging off of
this tradition and displaying a shining armor of indifference toward
man as man. This startled the men almost as much as the window
smashing, and made other women, living out their little lives under
the frowns and smiles of the dominant male, think and ponder, wonder
if their small rewards amounted to half as much as the untasted
pleasures of power and independence.

It is always a sign of weakness to give one side of a picture and
blithely ignore the other. Therefore, let me hasten to add that it is
a well-known fact that Mrs. Pankhurst had borne and reared six
children before she took up the moribund cause of suffrage; and that
after a season's careful investigation in London at the height of the
militant movement I concluded that never in the world had so many
unattractive females been banded together in any one cause. Even the
young girls I heard speaking on street corners, mounted on boxes,
looked gray, dingy, sexless. Of course there were many handsome, even
lovely, women,--like Mrs. Cavendish-Bentinck and Lady Hall, for
instance--interested in "the movement," contributing funds, and giving
it a certain moral support; but when it came to the window smashers,
the jail seekers, the hunger-strikers, the real martyrs of that
extraordinary minor chapte