you attempt to determine the woman’s capabilities merely by her past record, and to fix the meaning of “womanliness” in any way that forbids flux and development, then you are making the meaning and the use of the word very doubtful. Now, obviously, if to be “womanly” means merely to “strike an average,” and be as like the majority of women as possible--womanliness as a quality is not worth thinking about; it will come of its own accord, and exists probably a good deal in excess of our social need for it. It stands on a par with that faculty for submission to the unconscionable demands of others which makes a sheep sheepish and a hen prolific. To be what Henry James calls “intensely ordinary” is, from the evolutionary point of view, to be out of the running. We see this directly we start applying the word “manly” to men. For we do not take that to mean merely average quality--if it did, over-eating, over-drinking, and that form of speech which I will call over-emphasis--would all be manly qualities--and the evolution of the race would, according to that doctrine, lie on the lines of all sorts of over-indulgence. But when we say “manly,” we mean the pick and polish of those qualities which enable a man to possess himself and to develop all his faculties; and if it denotes discipline it also denotes an insistence on freedom--freedom for development, so that all that is in him may be brought out for social use. Now, the great poverty which modern civilization suffers from, is the undevelopment or the under-development of the bulk of its citizens. And the great wastage that we suffer from lies in the misdirection toward the over-indulgence of our material appetites--of the energies which should make for our full human development. And you may be quite sure that where in a community of over-population and poverty such as ours, the average man, as master, is demanding for himself more of these things than his share, there the average woman (where she is in economic subjection) is getting less than her share. Yet there are many people who (viewing this problem of woman’s subjection where the savage in man is still uppermost) will tell you that it is “womanly” to be self-sacrificing and self-denying; they will say that it is the woman’s nature to be so more than it is the man’s; for, like Milton, in his definition of the ideal qualities of womanhood, they put the word “subjection” first and foremost. That condition, which, according to Scripture, only followed after the curse as its direct product, was, you will remember, predicated by Milton, quite falsely, as essential even to the paradisal state; and when in _Paradise Lost_ he laid down this law of “subjection” as the right condition for unfallen womanhood, he went on to describe the divinely appointed lines on which it was to operate. The woman was to subject herself to man-- “with submission, And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay.”