pretensions.

It was no unorganized revolt. It was deliberate. It presented her case
in a carefully prepared List of Grievances, and an eloquent
Declaration of Sentiments[1] both adopted in a strictly parliamentary
way, and made the basis of an organized revolt, which has gone on
systematically ever since. The essence of her complaint, as embodied
in the above expression, is that man is a conscious tyrant holding
woman an unwilling captive--cutting her off from the things in life
which really matter: education, freedom of speech, the ballot; that
she can never be his equal until she does the same things her tyrant
does, studies the book he studies, practices the trades and
professions he practices, works with him in government.

The inference from all this is that the Business of Being a Woman, as
it has been conducted heretofore by society, is of less importance
than the Business of Being a Man, and that the time has come to enter
his world and prove her equality.

There are certain assumptions in her program which will bear
examination. Is man the calculating tyrant the modern uneasy woman
charges? Are her fetters due only to his unfair domination? Or is she
suffering from the generally bungling way things go in the world? And
is not man a victim as well as she--caught in the same trap?
Moreover, is woman never a tyrant? One of the first answers to her
original revolt came from the most eminent woman of the day, Harriet
Beecher Stowe, and it was called "_Pink and White_ Tyranny!" "I have
seen a collection of medieval English poems," says Chesterton, "in
which the section headed 'Poems of Domestic Life' consisted entirely
(literally entirely) of the complaints of husbands bullied by their