When the feminist struggle began during the last century, ignorance and beauty were the two qualities most admired in women. It is necessary to remind our masculine critics what was the soil from which the feminist movement sprang and what the current morality which influenced its direction. It was customary in those days to make fun of old or ugly women and to scorn those who showed any signs of intelligence. A man chose a young, beautiful, and blushing creature for his bride, and transformed her by one year of marriage and one childbirth into a gentle and submissive matron. Ugly or intelligent women, for the most part, paid a heavy price. Not only were they rejected in youth, and starved of all their natural joys, but as “old maids” they were the object of general scorn and derision. Small wonder that women adopted artificial aids to beauty and artificial hindrances to their native intelligence. Strongest of all the taboos laid by masculine custom and religion on feminine minds was that regarding sex-knowledge. Their purity was to be preserved only by ignorance, and even as matrons and mothers it was scarcely decent for them to refer to any of the physical changes of their bodies. It is impossible to over-estimate the strength of this tradition, or the harm which has been worked by it to the cause of women. The feminists were, and are still, howled down by men on the pretence that they invented chastity and scorn of bodily values. History disproves such a ridiculous assertion. The early feminists were what history and tradition made them, and could not at the time of their rebellion have been otherwise. The origin of the stupid ideal of womanhood against which men as well as women to-day are still fighting was the asceticism of the Christian religion; and, unless St. Paul was a woman in disguise, I fail to see how woman is to be blamed for a conception of her place and duty from which she has suffered more than anybody else. Before the conversion of the West to Christianity, barbarian women of the North enjoyed a certain rough equality with their husbands. They stride through the sagas, these fierce women, brides of heroes, glad to reward the warrior with their favours, quick to avenge an insult or a wrong. They had no need to stoop to cajolery. Savage and untamed, they were the fit and equal mates of savage men.