The eloquence of those who led the underpaid and half-starved workers
could no longer, for me, at least, ring with conviction. Something
more than the purely economic interpretation was involved. The bitter
struggle for bread, for a home and material comfort, was but one phase
of the problem. There was another phase, perhaps even more fundamental,
that had been absolutely neglected by the adherents of the new dogmas.
That other phase was the driving power of instinct, a power uncontrolled
and unnoticed. The great fundamental instinct of sex was expressing
itself in these ever-growing broods, in the prosperity of the slum
midwife and her colleague the slum undertaker. In spite of all my
sympathy with the dream of liberated Labor, I was driven to ask whether
this urging power of sex, this deep instinct, was not at least partially
responsible, along with industrial injustice, for the widespread misery
of the world.

To find an answer to this problem which at that point in my experience
I could not solve, I determined to study conditions in Europe. Perhaps
there I might discover a new approach, a great illumination. Just before
the outbreak of the war, I visited France, Spain, Germany and Great
Britain. Everywhere I found the same dogmas and prejudices among labor
leaders, the same intense but limited vision, the same insistence upon
the purely economic phases of human nature, the same belief that if the
problem of hunger were solved, the question of the women and children
would take care of itself. In this attitude I discovered, then, what
seemed to me to be purely masculine reasoning; and because it was purely
masculine, it could at best be but half true. Feminine insight must be
brought to bear on all questions; and here, it struck me, the fallacy
of the masculine, the all-too-masculine, was brutally exposed. I was
encouraged and strengthened in this attitude by the support of certain