mother and son, brother and sister, husband and wife, may sometimes be
found to intervene not merely years, but even centuries of social
evolution.

It is not man as man who opposes the attempt of woman to readjust herself
to the new conditions of life: that opposition arises, perhaps more often,
from the retrogressive members of her own sex. And it is a fact which will
surprise no one who has studied the conditions of modern life; that among
the works of literature in all European languages, which most powerfully
advocate the entrance of woman into the new fields of labour, and which
most uncompromisingly demand for her the widest training and freedom of
action, and which most passionately seek for the breaking down of all
artificial lines which sever the woman from the man, many of the ablest and
most uncompromising are the works of males.

The New Man and Woman do not resemble two people, who, standing on a level
plain, set out on two roads, which diverging at different angles and
continued in straight lines, must continue to take them farther and farther
from each other the longer they proceed in them; rather, they resemble two
persons who start to climb a spur of the same mountain from opposite sides;
where, the higher they climb the nearer they come to each other, being
bound ultimately to meet at the top.

Even that opposition often made by males to the entrance of woman into the
new fields of labour, of which they at present hold the monopoly, is not
fundamentally sexual in its nature. The male who opposes the entrance of
woman into the trade or profession in which he holds more or less a
monopoly, would oppose with equal, and perhaps even greater bitterness, the
opening of its doors to numbers of his own sex who had before been
excluded, and who would limit his gains and share his privileges. It is