these things shall not be decided without women assessors, and to be so "womanly" as to incur the charge of brazenness and immodesty in defending the woman's interest, which in such matters is also the interest of the race.
But it is only very gradually—and in the face of immemorial discouragement—that this communal or social spirit, when it began to draw woman outside her own domesticity, has fought down and silenced the reproach raised against it, of "unwomanliness," of an intrusion by woman into affairs which were outside her sphere. The awakening of the social conscience in women is one of the most pregnant signs of the time. But see what (in order to make itself effective) it has had to throw over at each stage of its advance—things to which beautiful names have been given, things which were assumed all through the Victorian era to be essential to womanliness, and to be so engrained in the woman's nature, that without them womanliness itself must perish. The ideal of woman's life was that she should live unobserved except when displayed to the world on the arm of a proud and possessive husband, and the height of her fortune was expressed in the phrase enviously quoted by Mrs. Norton, "Happy the woman who has no history." Now that ideal was entirely repressive of those wider activities which during the last fifty years have marked and made happy, in spite of struggle, the history of woman's social develop-
