society about me. When I was eighteen I had a conversation with a Kafir
woman still in her untouched primitive condition, a conversation which made
a more profound impression on my mind than any but one other incident
connected with the position of woman has ever done. She was a woman whom I
cannot think of otherwise than as a person of genius. In language more
eloquent and intense than I have ever heard from the lips of any other
woman, she painted the condition of the women of her race; the labour of
women, the anguish of woman as she grew older, and the limitations of her
life closed in about her, her sufferings under the condition of polygamy
and subjection; all this she painted with a passion and intensity I have
not known equalled; and yet, and this was the interesting point, when I
went on to question her, combined with a deep and almost fierce bitterness
against life and the unseen powers which had shaped woman and her
conditions as they were, there was not one word of bitterness against the
individual man, nor any will or intention to revolt; rather, there was a
stern and almost majestic attitude of acceptance of the inevitable; life
and the conditions of her race being what they were. It was this
conversation which first forced upon me a truth, which I have since come to
regard as almost axiomatic, that, the women of no race or class will ever
rise in revolt or attempt to bring about a revolutionary readjustment of
their relation to their society, however intense their suffering and
however clear their perception of it, while the welfare and persistence of
their society requires their submission: that, wherever there is a general
attempt on the part of the women of any society to readjust their position
in it, a close analysis will always show that the changed or changing
conditions of that society have made woman's acquiescence no longer
necessary or desirable.

Another point which it was attempted to deal with in this division of the
book was the probability, amounting almost to a certainty, that woman's