Barbara winced a little, but she said, “What have you men accomplished all these years by your everlasting compromises? If you were really in earnest to solve the liquor problem, and the social evil, as you call it, and all the other abuses which exist in civilized and uncivilized society, you would certainly have been able to do more than you have. You have had free scope; we haven’t been consulted; we have stood aside and let you have your innings; now we merely wish to see what we can do. We shall make mistakes I dare say; even one or two of us may be torn to pieces or maimed for life; but the modern woman feels that she has the courage of her convictions and that she does not intend to let herself be thwarted or cajoled by masculine theories. That accounts largely for our apparent sniffiness. I say ‘apparent,’ because we are not really at bottom so contemptuous as we seem--even the worst of us. I suppose you are right in declaring that the proud, superior, and beautiful young person of the present day is a little disdainful. But even she is less severe than she looks. She is simply a nineteenth-century Joan of Arc protesting against the man of the world and his works, asking to be allowed to lead her life without molestation from him in a shrine of her own tasteful yet simple construction--rooms or a room where she can practise her calling, follow her tastes, ambitions, or hobbies, pursue her charities, and amuse herself without being accountable to him. She wishes him to understand that, though she is attractive, she does not mean to be seduced or to be worried into matrimony against her will, and that she intends to use her earnings and her property to pay her own bills and provide for her own gratification, instead of to defray the debts of her vicious or easy-going male relations or admirers. There is really a long back account to settle, so it is not surprising that the pendulum should swing a little too far the other way. Of course she is wrong; woman can no more live wholly independent of man than he of her--and you know what a helpless being he would be without her--and the modern woman is bound to recognize, sooner or later, that the sympathetic companionship of women with men is the only basis of true social progress. Sexual affinity is stronger than the constitutions of all the women’s clubs combined, as eight out of ten young modern women discover to their cost, or rather to their happiness, sooner or later. Some brute of a man breaks into the shrine, and before she knows it she is wheeling a baby carriage. Even the novelist, with his or her fertile invention, has failed to discover any really satisfactory ending for the independent, disdainful heroine but marriage or the grave. Spinsterhood, even when illumined by a career, is a worthy and respectable lot, but not alluring.”