voluntary socialization of previously individualistic democracy will be
the next great forward movement of the human spirit_.





XIII

THE WAR AND FEMINISM

Of all consequences of the War, perhaps none is more significant than
its effect upon the position of women. Militarism and feminism are
counter currents in the tide of history. All recrudescence of brute
force carries the subjugation of women. In the degree to which
professional militarism prevails in any society, women are forced into
hard industrial activities, despised because fulfilled by women. On the
other hand, a group of carefully protected women is held apart as a fine
adornment of life. Both ways militarism accentuates the property idea in
reference to women: the one type, useful, the other, adorning, property.
The one shows in marriage by purchase, the other in the dowry system.
It is hard to say which is more dishonoring to women. It would,
perhaps, seem preferable and less offensive to be bought as useful,
rather than accepted with a money payment, as an adorning but expensive
possession, where, as with the automobile, "it is the upkeep that
counts." Surely, however, either attitude is degrading enough.

The accentuation, in the present War, of the notion of women as
property, is evident in more brutal form in the horrors of rape, in the
deliberate and organized use of women as breeders, with the same