In many other ways women feel the antagonism less, and one improvement of the utmost importance to them is the enormous increase in their liberty of going about without molestation from men. When I was a girl, it was considered rather a bold thing for a lady to walk unescorted within the precincts of the City of London, and there were very few restaurants where she would have been safe from rudeness. Consider who offered this rudeness: men. And why? because, though the woman was doing an absolutely harmless thing, she was singular, and it was assumed that she did it from an improper motive and was therefore fair game; or still more simply, because the cruel lust of tormenting a helpless creature was irresistible. What woman who has moved an inch out of shelter, but has encountered this? Still, the antagonism is much less than it was. How is it that we hear more of it? The chief reason is a very simple one: women’s griefs have become reasoned and articulate. Whereas women were fighting man by wiles and arts, they are now appealing to his reason and finding words for their appeal, while a few, exasperated, are hitting out rather wildly with man’s own weapons. In order to appeal to men’s reason, women have had to find words for their grievances and their differences, and to give words to a thing always makes it ten times as important as it was. The unreasonable man points to the inarticulate women and invites you to note how satisfied they are; he then points to the articulate ones and cries shame on them for fomenting sex-war. To the unreasonable man, it is impossible ever to demonstrate women’s grievances, for to do so is at once to be reproached with being “anti-man”; yet surely even he might admit that to err is human. If he had a little of the gift of humour, he might profitably consider the eighteenth-century treatment of women, and ask himself if it is really not rather funny that he should be so hurt when women at last find tongue to say what they think of the rare old sport of woman-baiting. When the admirable Sir Charles Grandison ejaculates, “Were it not, my dear ladies, for male protectors, to what insults, to what outrages, would not your sex be subject?” he was not overstating the case against the men of that day. It was not against the other forces of nature, against hunger or cold, or wild beasts that women most needed protection; it was against insult and outrage from man. Man was, by far, woman’s most formidable enemy and most terrible danger. Women are frequently invited to bewail the death of chivalry. What chivalry meant, in these days, was the protection by individual men of their own women against the depredations of other men. If a woman had no “protector” of her own, or if he chanced to be a tyrant, she remained unprotected by the State. The growth of a healthier opinion among men has now greatly reduced the number of men who desire to “outrage and insult” women, and has greatly increased the State protection of women.