Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/38

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CHAPTER II


WHAT IS THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT?

"Ole Uncle S., sez he, 'I guess
 It is a fact,' sez he,
  'The surest plan to make a Man
 Is, Think him so, J. B.,
 Ez much ez you or me!'"


IT is often said that the women's movement is chaotic, that no one knows whither the modern woman is going, nor even whither she wants to go; woman is, in fact, adrift, having lost her helm (or perhaps only the helmsman), and is going, full steam, all round the compass.

It is very much easier to make such assertions, at least they sound less preposterous, if one keeps to the rhetorical singular and begs the whole question at issue by assuming that women are one in need, capacity and character, and that this eternal feminine has been once for all dissected, understood and catalogued, and that all variations are merely caprice. But let us drop the singular and we shall see that although women want as many different things as there are different women, there are two things which the women in the movement consciously

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