We try to soothe our consciences; we try to slur over our social mistakes; we sneakingly pretend to ignore the fact that our social life is wrong; and we, and even some women themselves, preach the accursed doctrine that there is a true Womanhood to be sought and found in women alone, by women alone, for women alone! We have not, cannot, will not, do our duty by Women, and we assuage their blind and often unconscious misery by this damnable falsehood which thousands of them in their trustfulness believe. We tell them that somewhere in the Far Away, in the Never-Never-Land—not in the Backwoods of Superior Bunkum—there is a True Woman, a hybrid of a misunderstood Joan of Arc and a glacier. She is alone glorying in her True Womanhood. No man has fashioned her. She has no fashioning—or fashion either, for that matter!—and she simply sits and exults in her manless, childless, splendid independence! Towards this ideal we bid our sisters strive—nay, some of our sisters themselves bid their sisters strive; and we have not enough decency left to blush at our perfidy, at our blackguardly deception! The problem is out of hand; its difficulties have proved too much for us, otherwise we could not have the barefaced duplicity to settle it in this transparently farcical manner. What should we think of a cattle-farmer, who, on discovering that he had not enough pasture-land for all his sheep, taught the pastureless ones, when they had grown thin and wan for want of their proper food, that there was a True Sheephood somewhere, a lofty ideal—a Sheephood that could go without pasture-land and without grass altogether; a Sheephood that was self-contained and self-reliant, independent and indisputable, and that they were to go in search of that True Sheephood, and if necessary grow thinner and less attractive every day in their search for it? We should feel that they would have to be very inferior sheep to believe this story, or, rather, very real sheep indeed! Everything in their body, from their cud-chewing molars to their long grass-digesting gut, would surely tell them that the Ideal of True Sheephood was arrant nonsense, and _cruel_ arrant nonsense too. No, it is impossible to accept the “True Womanhood” ideal of woman gloriously alone, emancipated from man, independent and “discovered.” Inasmuch as we have not fashioned her, and could not do so if we tried, woman is as her rôle in the course of evolution has made her. She is certainly more unhappy, more tormented, more unwell, than she ever need have been; but that is because her principal adaptation—her relation to man—is now so often entirely wrong, or alas! non-existent. I point out again: if, as some presumptuously maintain, _we_ have been fashioning her all through the ages, she would have followed us contentedly to our present stage—a thing she has _not_ done. There is something essentially idiosyncratic in woman then, something that defies our clumsy “fashioning” hands.