in the midst of a far deeper discussion of woman’s nature and position than ever occurred before.
The discussion is passing through the three phases which are customary in these controversies. At first the clergy and the Conservative quoted the Bible and the Fathers. Then, when women began to show that they were disposed to examine a little more closely the authority of documents which taught so obvious an injustice, it was pleaded that in this case the religious view coincided with “sound” science and sociology. In that phase we are to-day, discussing claims that “nature” and our social interest are on the side of the old ideal. In a few more decades, when the battle is won, the Bishop of London of the time will be demonstrating that the reform was anticipated by the Fathers sixteen hundred years ago and was contained, in germ, in the New Testament.
At present the controversy about woman’s position turns largely on the question of her “nature,” and the literature of the subject is prodigious. Woman has different organs and functions than those of man, and it is natural to suppose that they will give her a different character. Here is the opportunity of the male: he has a solid scientific fact to build upon.
He sagely examines the intellectual life of woman and pronounces it inferior to that of man: he measures her brain and finds it smaller than that of man, and thus discovers the scientific basis of her inferiority; and he never reflects that, since he,
