“All that you say,” replied Mr. Lister, “has been more or less true of woman’s character in the narrow conditions into which she has been forced in the past, but you must bear in mind that man as yet has never seen woman in her deepest and truest character. The warped and distorted exhibition of woman which has been given up to this day, has been, in the main, like the acting of fantastically dressed puppets in a children’s show. It is for the future, dating from this great Woman’s Strike to show the sublime possibilities of woman’s real character. And how in Heaven’s name could woman have shown any strength of purpose in the past? Robbed of all other means of employing her brilliant faculties, and bowed down to the doctrine that to look pretty was the chief end of her being, what wonder that her taste for the trappings and frivolities of life should have become abnormally developed? What wonder that being denied all distinction but a vain and showy social distinction, to be obtained only through marriage, she should have aimed at the tinsel stars in that firmament? If you bring up a child on bon-bons and charlotte russe to the exclusion of a more natural diet, you will have a very different kind of being from what you would have if a less artificial regimen were adopted. But after all it was the sudden discovery of her hitherto unsuspected power that transformed, or, rather, gave vent to woman’s true character, as quickly as the turning of a wheel. So long as she felt, as she had done for centuries, that she was a beggar, beholden to man’s bounty for everything she had, she submitted to being cajoled and wheedled by the airy trifles which he prescribed for her, and which developed only one side of her character. But when woman realized that she was in very truth a queen, that she was man’s indispensable complement, and that as such she had an equal right to the free development of all her faculties, and that she possessed the means for enforcing that right, the scales fell from her eyes. She struck so quickly that it was like the sudden stopping of a clock, but it was the world’s pendulum that ceased to move.” “But I cannot conceive,” I said, “what woman should want more than you have told me has already been given her. As I understood you, she already has every political and economic right that pertains to man. Does she wish to compel man to do penance for the blackness of his past sins toward her? Does she wish to make man acknowledge that he is inferior to woman?”