[2] An ingenious method of accomplishing this suggests itself. Since women do not sit in the House of Lords, suppose that all Peers’ wives, following the example of the Duchess of Atholl, stand for Parliament where their husbands have estates. This would obviate the necessity, now felt by Conservatives, of restoring the veto of the House of Lords. A joke, you say? No, no, my poor Medea, it is a man called Rousseau, risen from the dead. Not long ago he preached this sort of thing to women who pinched their waists and wore a dozen petticoats. They were not educated enough to follow Voltaire, so they listened to what Rousseau called the Voice of Nature. Soon thereafter, they found they were being abused for being less civilized, more ape-like than the male, irrational and unsuited to take a part in public life. So they tried again, poor things, and then there was an awful thing called the Industrial Revolution, and the food got into tins. They may be pardoned, as may all of us, if at this point they became a little bewildered. Some people blamed science, some civilization, some the meat-trusts and the millers, but the true culprit, as ever, was Woman. A thousand voices cried her down――she hadn’t enough children; she had too many; she was an ape; she was a dressed-up doll; she was a Puritan; she was an immoral minx; she was uneducated; they had taught her too much. Her pinched waist was formerly abused――now it was her slim and boyish body. Eminent surgeons[3] committed themselves to the view that the boyish figure with its pliable rubber bust-bodices and corselets would be the ruin of the race, that race which had been superbly undegenerate through four centuries of armour-plate corset and eighteen-inch waists, that race which, then or now, can hardly compete in toughness with the Chinese, among whom the boyish figure has been for centuries the ideal, and whose women cannot conceivably be accused of shirking any of the responsibilities of maternity. Others told us that the woman-doctor has no nerve to tend confinements, and conveniently forgot that, since the world began, and until quite modern times, it is women who have ministered to one another in that agony which now as in the past is the lot of every mother. Is there truth in the words of Jason? Is there truth or justice in the passion of Medea? Let us not ask the protagonists, but let us summon the inquiring intelligence of Hypatia to find us a way out of the intolerable tangle in which their quarrelling has landed us. [3] Sir Arbuthnot Lane, for whom I have hitherto entertained an entirely unqualified admiration, in a recent article. _Vide The Weekly Dispatch_, December 28, 1924. II ARTEMIS _The Early Struggles of Feminism_