matters so closely affecting themselves, their sisters, their children and their husbands. We are sometimes told that women must be kept out of dealing with these things, because of their emotionalism: yet is it not the passions and appetites of men which largely create the whole problem, and are we to believe that men, when they come to making laws and regulations, forget their passions and appetites, and become as gods? We all know they do not, and the feeling of women is every bit as respectable and deserving of attention. So we must feel, and we do well to feel, when we come to act; but when we are studying the facts,—the deeds of men and of women, and their consequences,—it is well to banish feeling for a time, so that we may know first.
It has been the easy custom of most men to divide women crudely into good and bad. The good woman is superhuman, and she is a very homogeneous and monotonous sort of person; the bad woman is subhuman, but often very amusing and attractive. The good woman is put on a pedestal, where she finds life very restricted and dull; the bad woman is segregated, either literally or metaphorically, into compounds, where the delusion is nursed that she will not infect the good woman, either with her wickedness or her diseases. This is all unreal and tiresome and stupid and harmful enough, but there is little to choose between it and a view of woman which is too often put forward by women themselves, and that is the
