a woman she is not in subjection to men’s law when this law does not allow that she is the parent of the child she has borne, and when men can at any time, and do, deprive her of the inviolability of her own body and of the right to earn an honest livelihood. No, it is not arguable whether women nearly all over the world (and certainly in England) are in subjection, and I do not intend to argue it. The only questions are, How came they so? Are the causes eternal and irremovable? Would it be well if they were removed? I confess to a much higher regard for the honest brutalitarian than for the sentimentalist; for the man or woman who says candidly that women are subject to men because they are inferior to men, either physically, or intellectually, or both. Even among these there is a tendency to allow, with a shrug, the moral superiority of women, and one is left wondering whether this admission shows the greater contempt for women or for morality. But a few thinkers, more robust and far more logical (for a fine morality is not separable from intellectual force) go the whole way and assert that women as a whole are morally inferior to men as a whole. They say women are notoriously less brave and less truthful than men; their unselfishness is weakness or slavishness, their continence is due to coldness or compulsion. I propose to deal with the physical superiority of men in the next chapter. With regard to their mental and moral superiority, it is an interminable discussion, which is mostly conducted entirely by the light of one’s predispositions, and which leads nowhere. There does not seem much that can be profitably said about it except this: that until the incubus of brute force is removed from those who have a smaller share of it, we shall never know what other force they may have. Some of the faults attributed to women are manifestly the faults encouraged by subjection. Men’s standards have been applied to women, and it may be that they do not suit women. As barriers have been removed, so many of the old confident assertions about women have evaporated that the scientific mind will suspend judgment for a while. It is quite true that in music, painting, sculpture, poetry, no woman has ever yet attained to the highest that men have attained. It may be that women’s lack of genius in the arts is due to some inferiority of mind, or it may be due to an essential incapacity for or an artificial prohibition of the passionate, concentrated egoism, which alone can produce the greatest works of imagination. The special pleader against women will declare that if they had any capacity at all, it would have shown itself in music and painting, for young ladies have always been encouraged to sing and to play and to sketch. And as for poetry, it is only necessary to have pencil and paper and—genius. As if the kind of parlour tricks that used to be expected of marriageable young ladies had any relation at all to creative art! The eighteenth century or early