I decline altogether to prophesy), of one thing we may be quite certain, their view will be prodigiously changed by the light. Women will not only obscurely feel, they will know; when they know, there is no power on earth that can prevent them from acting. The only question is whether they shall act freely, or whether their informed energy shall be thwarted, diverted and suppressed to the point of explosiveness and to the embitterment of their lives and characters. In Great Britain, at the present time, this question is acute; but it is being put all the world over, and different nations are answering it in different ways, and finding it amazingly difficult to learn from each other’s experience. Do we not even find English people prophesying direst results if the causes for divorce are made equal as between men and women, and these people are left open-mouthed when informed that in the northern portion of Great Britain they are so? While others declare that the mere notion of a woman being a Member of Parliament, of a jury, or of the police force, must be the cause of inextinguishable laughter, thereby convicting themselves of bad manners towards two European nations and the United States of America. The wisest among those who educate the young are disbelieving in the doctrine of original sin; they no longer regard education as violently forcing a child into moulds; they believe that in giving scope for natural energy the teacher is doing almost all that a teacher can profitably do; they think that as the human race has evolved into two sexes which are indispensable to one another, the better they understand one another the closer will be their sympathy and co-operation with each other, and that, therefore, the segregation of the sexes is bad. The subjection of one sex to the other is also bad, since the slave-owner never can really know the slave, while the knowledge the slave has of her owner is bitter fruit. In the art of medicine, doctors are more and more setting themselves to remove obstructions to health. Even the penal codes of the world are slowly becoming less and less retributive. Women, therefore, are in the direct line of progressive thought when they demand that their vital force shall not be circumscribed and shackled, but that men shall give them the same scope as they claim for themselves. And progressive women declare that liberty will tend to assuage the war of the sexes, which is as old as the domination of man. CHAPTER III THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN “’Tis such, a tender thoughtfulness! So exquisite a care! Not to pile on our fair shoulders what we do not wish to bear! But, oh, most generous brother! let us look a little more— Have we women always wanted what you gave to us before?” CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN.