the eternal, the maternal, the plantlike (for the plant ever has something female in it), the cultureless history of the generation-sequence, which never alters, but uniformly and stilly passes through the being of all animal and human species, through all the short-lived individual Cultures. In retrospect, it is synonymous with Life itself. This history, too, is not without its battles and its tragedies. Woman in childbed wins through to her victory. The Aztecs — the Romans of the Mexican Culture — honoured the woman in labour as a battling warrior, and if she died, she was interred with the same formulæ as the fallen hero. Policy for Woman is eternally the conquest of the Man, through whom she can become mother of children, through whom she can become History and Destiny and Future. The target of her profound shyness, her tactical finesse, is ever the father of her son. The man, on the contrary, whose centre of gravity lies essentially in the other kind of History, wants that son as his son, as inheritor and carrier of his blood and historical tradition.
Here, in man and in woman, the two kinds of History are fighting for power. Woman is strong and wholly what she is, and she experiences the Man and the Sons only in relation to herself and her ordained rôle. In the masculine being, on the contrary, there is a certain contradiction; he is this man, and he is something else besides, which woman neither understands nor admits, which she feels as robbery and violence upon that which to her is holiest. This secret and fundamental war of the sexes has gone on ever since there were sexes, and will continue — silent, bitter, unforgiving, pitiless — while they continue. In it, too, there are policies, battles, alliances, treaties, treasons. Race-feeling of love and hate, which originate in depths of world-yearning and primary instincts of directedness, prevail between the sexes — and with a still more uncanny potency than in the other History that takes place between man and man. There are love-lyrics and war-lyrics, love-dances and weapon-dances, there are two kinds of tragedy — Othello and Macbeth. But nothing in the political world even begins to compare with the abysses of a Clytæmnestra's or a Kriemhild's vengeance.
And so woman despises that other History — man's politics — which she never comprehends, and of which all that she sees is that it takes her sons from her. What for her is a triumphant battle that annihilates the victories of a thousand childbeds? Man's history sacrifices woman's history to itself, and no doubt there is a female heroism too, that proudly brings the sons to the sacrifice (Catherine Sforza on the walls of Imola), but nevertheless there was and is and ever will be a secret politic of the woman — of the female of the animal world even — that seeks to draw away her male from his kind of history and to weave him body and soul into her own plantlike history of generic succession — that is, into herself. And yet all that is accomplished in the man-history is accomplished under the battle-cries of hearth and home, wives and children, race and the like, and its very object is the covering and upholding of
