impulse of self-expression; and being, as we have seen essentially and
continually "the sex;" they have impressed that sex upon this art
overwhelmingly; they have given the world a masculized literature.

It is hard for us to realize this. We can readily see, that if women
had always written the books, no men either writing or reading them,
that would have surely "feminized" our literature; but we have not in
our minds the concept, much less the word, for an overmasculized
influence.

Men having been accepted as humanity, women but a side-issue; (most
literally if we accept the Hebrew legend!), whatever men did or said was
human--and not to be criticized. In no department of life is it easier
to contravert this old belief; to show how the male sex as such differs
from the human type; and how this maleness has monopolized and
disfigured a great social function.

Human life is a very large affair; and literature is its chief art. We
live, humanly, only through our power of communication. Speech gives us
this power laterally, as it were, in immediate personal contact. For
permanent use speech becomes oral tradition--a poor dependence.
Literature gives not only an infinite multiplication to the lateral
spread of communion but adds the vertical reach. Through it we know the
past, govern the present, and influence the future. In its servicable
common forms it is the indispensable daily servant of our lives; in its
nobler flights as a great art no means of human inter-change goes so
far.

In these brief limits we can touch but lightly on some phases of so
great a subject; and will rest the case mainly on the effect of an