pruderies and her pathological delusions. As Ibsen observed long
ago, this is a man's world. Women have broken many of their old
chains, but they are still enmeshed in a formidable network of
man-made taboos and sentimentalities, and it will take them another
generation, at least, to get genuine freedom. That this is true is
shown by the deep unrest that yet marks the sex, despite its recent
progress toward social, political and economic equality. It is almost
impossible to find a man who honestly wishes that he were a
woman, but almost every woman, at some time or other in her life,
is gnawed by a regret that she is not a man.


Two of the hardest things that women have to bear are (a) the
stupid masculine disinclination to admit their intellectual superiority,
or even their equality, or even their possession of a normal human
equipment for thought, and (b) the equally stupid masculine
doctrine that they constitute a special and ineffable species of
vertebrate, without the natural instincts and appetites of the
order--to adapt a phrase from Hackle, that they are transcendental
and almost gaseous mammals, and marked by a complete lack of
certain salient mammalian characters. The first imbecility has
already concerned us at length. One finds traces of it even in works
professedly devoted to disposing of it. In one such book, for
example, I come upon this: "What all the skill and constructive
capacity of the physicians in the Crimean War failed to accomplish
Florence Nightingale accomplished by her beautiful femininity and
nobility of soul." In other words, by her possession of some
recondite and indescribable magic, sharply separated from the
ordinary mental processes of man. The theory is unsound and
preposterous. Miss Nightingale accomplished her useful work, not