Thirdly, “The woman gets her living by getting a husband. The man gets his wife by getting a living.” Putting aside for the moment the question of the truth of this statement, I agree with Mrs. Stetson that in any social group of which such a statement is true the moral tone of women, and therefore of men, will be a low one. In such a state of society also it would be necessary, as Mrs. Stetson says, for a woman, in order to earn her living, to make herself sexually attractive. But before passing on I would point out that, at this stage of the argument, the only part of this result which I would on the face of it admit to be bad is that the woman in such a case frequently falsely assumes attractive qualities which she does not really possess, or conforms to a masculine standard of what is womanly which she at heart despises. It is, in fact, the development of the human qualities of fraud and hypocrisy which is to be deprecated, rather than the development of feminine attraction. But Mrs. Stetson makes the universal statement that women have been developing femininity to a harmful degree, and to the injury of the human attributes which should be common to both sexes. At first imagining that Mrs. Stetson, like most women, was confining her attention to the present and the near past, I was extremely puzzled at this assertion. It seemed especially strange that it should come from America, where even more than in England women have been supposed to be developing their individuality in all kinds of occupations hitherto supposed to be only suitable for men. But suddenly Mrs. Stetson announces that after all she is only arguing in favour of what many women are already doing, and have been doing for the last half century or so. Now to decide whether femininity has become excessive, we must first know what group of women we are studying, and also with what other group of women we are comparing them. Mrs. Stetson is not apparently describing the present century as ending with a great development of purely feminine qualities, and even if she were, we might fairly ask her to tell us whether she includes Americans, Turks, Hindoos, and Hottentots under the same category. But there is no hint given of any great differences between women rendering it necessary to limit the nations coming under review, nor do I find it possible to date exactly the epochs chosen for comparison. On p. 129 we have the following condonement of the treatment of woman in past ages:-- With a full knowledge of the initial superiority of her sex, and the sociological necessity for its temporary subversion, she should feel only a deep and tender pride in the long patient ages during which she has waited and suffered that man might slowly rise to full racial equality with her. She could afford to wait. She could afford to suffer.