Produced by Chris Curnow, Wayne Hammond and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) [Transcriber’s Note: Text delimited by equal signs is bold. Text delimited by underscores is italic.] REVOLTED WOMAN [Illustration: EMANCIPATED!] REVOLTED WOMAN PAST, PRESENT, AND TO COME BY CHARLES G. HARPER AUTHOR OF ‘THE BRIGHTON ROAD,’ ‘DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION,’ ‘THE MARCHES OF WALES,’ &C., &C. [Illustration] London: ELKIN MATHEWS VIGO STREET 1894 _LONDON: Printed by_ STRANGEWAYS AND SONS, _Tower St., Cambridge Circus, W.C._ I am ashamed, that women are so simple To offer war, where they should kneel for peace; Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway, When they are bound to serve, love, and obey. _Taming of the Shrew._ [Illustration: PREFACE] _It might have been supposed, having in mind her first and most stupendous_ faux pas, _that Woman would be content to sit, for all time, humbly under correction, satisfied with her lot until the crack of doom, when man and woman shall be no more; when heaven and earth shall pass away, and pale humanity come to judgment._ _But it is essentially feminine, and womanlike (and therefore of necessity illogical) that she should be forgetful of the primeval curse which Mother Eve brought upon the race, and that she should, instead of going in sackcloth and ashes for her ancestor’s disobedience, seek instead, not only to be the equal of man, but, in her foremost advocates--the strenuous and ungenerous females who periodically crucify the male sex in sexual novels written under manly pseudonyms--aspire to rule him, while as yet she has no efficient control over her own hysterical being._ _Humanity is condemned by the First Woman’s disobedience to earn a precarious livelihood by the sweat of its brow. All the toil and trouble of this work-a-day world proceed from her sex; and yet the cant of ‘Woman’s Mission’ fills the air, and the New Woman is promised us as some sort of a pedagogue who shall teach the ‘Child-Man’ how to toddle in the paths of virtue and content. How absurd it all is, when the women who write these things pander to the depraved palate which gained Holywell Street a living and an unenviable notoriety years ago; when they obtain three-fourths of their readers from their fellow-women who read their productions hopeful of indecency, and conceive themselves cheated if they do not find it. Let us, however, do these women writers, or ‘Literary Ladies,’ as they have labelled themselves--margarine masquerading as ‘best fresh’--the justice to acknowledge that they do not halt half-way on the road to viciousness, though to reach their goal they wade knee-deep in abominations. Here, indeed, they are no cheats, and it remains the unlikeliest sequel that you close their pages and yet do not find Holywell Street outdone._