clear thought. It seems to be a fact that men are as a rule far more conscious than women of the existence of sex in every relation of life, and if there be something in the speculations of biologists concerning the presence of male and female elements in the human female, there may be a very profound reason for this difference in outlook; but it seems like midsummer madness to say that the one of the two sexes who is most homogeneous in the elements of sex shall be the only one who shall have freedom to know and speculate and experiment, for it is clear that that one would be the one less likely to have sympathies wide enough to include both sexes. What is the line the scientific reactionaries adopt? They abandon Ideal Woman; they offer you Normal Woman, and she turns out, on investigation, to be no other than average woman. They take from each woman what is peculiar or individual, what marks her out as different from other women; they select what is common to women, sex and motherhood, and they proceed to say that for sex and motherhood women must live and be trained. When some half-crazy Strindberg or wholly crazy Weininger asserts that woman does not exist as a person, he is really only putting clearly the logical result of this tyranny of thought. It simplifies the side of life which has no obvious reference to themselves if they can make pigeon-holes all of one size and shape, label them Normal Woman and stuff in all the women indiscriminately. But the cruelty and the waste is seen if we understand how the norm is arrived at. Procrustes’ bed was for normal persons. If you measured all the feet of humanity and then found the average and made one boot—the average boot—for men, women and children, they would all suffer, but the severest sufferings would be those of the men with the largest feet. So with the wretched insistence on making all life to fit the average woman. She doesn’t exist; she is a figment of men’s minds, and every single woman suffers in her degree from the tyranny of the average, but the woman who suffers most is the biggest woman. The world suffers too, from the stunting or warping or exasperation of its strongest and most original female minds. One has only to think of the agony of loneliness of a Charlotte Brontë, of the limiting of her opportunities for equal friendships, for which she had so rare a genius, of her starvation in experience and in knowledge, and of the cruel tyranny of hated, because uncongenial, toil. A normal woman loves children, it is said. Well, Charlotte Brontë did not love children; yet she was forced to teach them, and to wear out her heart over them, and she cannot even have done it at all well. The children would have been better taught by someone else. If Charlotte Brontë had been given the same scope to shape her life as Branwell had—merely because he was a man—her work might have gained by contact with wider life, and she herself might have lived longer to give us more of it. The stubborn