slaves, a dependent of the abjectly poor. When men passed through the
stage where woman's life might be taken at a whim, she remained a
creature without rights of the wider kind. Men debated whether she had a
soul, made cynical proverbs about her, called her the "weaker vessel,"
and debarred her from political and economic equality, classing her up
to this very moment in rights with the idiot, the imbecile, and the
criminal. Worse than this, they gave her a spurious homage, created a
lop-sided chivalry, and caused her to accept as her ideal goal of
womanhood the achievement of beauty and the entrance into wifehood.
After they tied her hand and foot with restrictions and belittling
ideals, they capped the climax by calling her weak and petty by nature
and even got her to believe it!

It is not my intention to trace the rise of feminism. Brave women arose
from age to age to glorify the world and their sex, and men here and
there championed them. Man started to emancipate himself from slavery,
and noble ideals of the equality of mankind first were whispered, then
shouted as battle cries, and finally chiseled with enduring letters into
the foundations of States. "But if all this was good for men, why not
for women--why should they be fettered by illiteracy, pettiness,
dependence; why should they be voiceless in the state and world?" So
asked the feminists. The factory called for women as labor; they became
the clerks, the teachers, the typists, the nurses. Medicine and the law
opened their doors, at least in part. And now we are on the verge of
universal suffrage, with women entering into the affairs of the world,
theoretically at least the equals of man.

But with the entrance of woman into many varied professions and
occupations, with a wider access to experience and knowledge, arose
what may be called the era of the "individualization of woman." For if