A Word to Women

NOVEMBER 1931

VOLUME 148

BY ALBERT JAY NOCK

ALONG time ago — all of three years, perhaps longer — I saw , a floating item in a periodical to the effect that 41 per cent of our national wealth is controlled by women, and that the percentage is rising. Curiously, this bit of news did not make much of an impression on me at the time, but the recollection of it kept coming back to me afterward, and more frequently as time went on. After being pestered in this way for three years or more, I bethought myself of an acquaintance who has facilities for looking up data on such matters, and asked him to get chapter and verse for me, which he very kindly did.

It appears that a firm of investment bankers operating in Chicago and New York had made an investigation into the division of our national wealth between the sexes. They did this purely in the way of business, of course, to determine the amount of stress that could profitably be laid on female clientage. The general conclusion was that at the time the survey was made, say four years ago, nearly half our national wealth was controlled by women, and that the proportion was tending to increase steadily and rather rapidly.

Some of the incidental findings turned up by the investigation are interesting. It found that ninety-five billion dollars’ worth of life-insurance policies were in force in this country, and that 80 per cent of their beneficiaries were women. This alone would considerably help along the rising proportion of female control unless there were somewhere some offset which the survey did not show. An even more interesting finding is that by wills probated in New York City, over a given period, fifty estates out of seventy were left by men to women, and forty-four out of sixty-nine were left by women to women. It found that women were taxed on three and a quarter billion dollars of income annually; men, on four and three quarters. One hundred and thirty-nine women paid taxes on incomes in excess of a half million, as against one hundred and twenty-three men; while forty-four women paid on net incomes in excess of a million, as against forty-two men. Women were found to be majority or almost majority shareholders in some of our largest corporations, for instance the Pennsylvania Railway, American Telephone and Telegraph, United States Steel, Westinghouse Air Brake, and National Biscuit Company.

Copyright 1931, by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.

It should be remembered, too, that American women have a good deal more purchasing power than this survey shows, because many of those who legally own nothing are on fairly liberal allowances from male members of their families, and many more are wage earners who spend their wages as they please. Women’s collective virtual control is thus considerably larger than their legal ownership indicates. This surplus of petty wage earning and of what might be called delegated control is not a matter of interest to investment bankers, so the survey did not attempt to take account of it; yet its aggregate must be quite large. There seems little ground for doubt that, taking virtual control with legal control, our women now have more purchasing power than our men have. Four years ago they were within 9 per cent of equality in legal control, and quite rapidly on the rise; and surely the amount of delegated control which they exercise, plus their wage earnings, would be enough to carry the sum of their purchasing power well over the mark of 50 per cent.

II

In Europe one notices a general prevalence of the notion that our country is a paradise for womankind. Europeans think we operate our institutions greatly to the advantage of the female sex. Some years ago a highly placed English dignitary — I think it was the present Dean of St. Paul’s — spoke of the United States as ‘an ice-waterdrinking gynecocracy.’ The popular idea on the Continent appears to be that our women do as they please without let or hindrance, and that they have reduced our men to the Levitical status of hewers of wood and drawers of water, if not to that of mere skulkers upon the face of the earth. Continental women — those, at least, with whom I am acquainted — indulge this notion with interested curiosity, in which one sometimes discerns a touch of envy. A more conservative opinion is that, while our women have managed to gain an unshakable ascendancy, they have also managed to establish a roughly satisfactory relation of live-and-let-live with their male entourage, mostly by way of concession, which is not as a rule too onerous and not perhaps utterly degrading; a relat ion, however, which, with all the good will in the world, a male European would find hard and repugnant.

The wonderment is how the American woman has done it. This more than anything, I think, is what has always made our women an object of special interest to the European mind. I never saw anything to make me suspect that Europeans of either sex like our womenfolk or admire them especially or even much respect them, but they have always showed great curiosity about them, somewhat like our curiosity about the habits of the sea bear or the peculiarities of the lemming, or the traits in other creatures whose main interest for us is that they keep us wondering how they accomplish what they do, and do it apparently with no great fuss or effort, nor any consciousness that they are doing something unusual and striking.

One sees Europeans regarding casual specimens of our petticoated produce, more often than not pretty poor specimens, and wondering what on earth they have in them to have worked themselves into their highly privileged status, and to have got this status accepted without objection or complaint. The European would say that such a notable collective manœuvre betokens first-rate ability somewhere, and he cannot see that they have it; his own womenfolk, by and large, seem much abler, wiser, more mature of mind. Cleverness will not answer; he acknowledges that American women are very clever, but no one can be that clever. Nor can such a piece of strategy be put through nation-wide on the strength of feminine fascinations, even granting that American women are endowed with these beyond all other women, which he thinks highly doubtful. All the horde of foreign ‘observers,’ novelists, dramatists, journalists, lecturers and the like, who beset our shores, usually with some sort of axe to grind, always show that this problem is in the forefront of their minds. They treat it with gingerly deftness, as a rule, and hence their observations are seldom valuable, but they always exhibit a lively curiosity about it.

The best that European opinion has done with this problem, as far as I know, amounts to saying more or less kindly that our women are shockingly spoiled and that our men spoil them. In its view the American man of family appears, by his serious side, as a kind of composite of Silas Lapham and Mr. Potiphar. By his lighter side, he appears when on parade with his frolicsome daughter (or wife or sister, as the case may be) much as he does in Mr. Georges Lauwerijns’s utterly delightful ballet called Hopjes and Hopjes, which anyone going to Brussels should time his visit to see and hear. European opinion holds what it regards as our men’s weakness, their easy-going good nature, their sense of essential inferiority, responsible for letting themselves be choused out of their natural and Scriptural rights over the women of their households.

There is something in this, of course, and there was formerly much more in it than there is now. Mr. Potiphar and Silas Lapham are real enough, but they belong to an earlier day. Mr. Lauwerijns’s figures are modern and not greatly exaggerated — the simplehearted and likable old boy who never learned how to play, out on a lark with his gay daughter who is rather fond of him in her careless fashion, is on good terms with him, and exploits him scandalously. Mr. Sinclair Lewis has perhaps a little over-vulgarized a somewhat similar pair, in his excellent portrait of Mr. Lowell Schmaltz and his daughter Delmerine. But there is no longer any point in discussing the distribution of responsibility. In citing the American man’s traditional easiness with women, European opinion may have had everything on its side in the days of Daisy Miller, and may still have something on its side. What it has or has not, however, is no longer of more than academic interest, because a new factor has come into the situation since Silas Lapham’s and Daisy Miller’s day — the factor of economic control. It may be said, no doubt, that men were culpably shortsighted not to foresee this factor’s coming in and to take measures against it; but that is little to the point now, because the mischief, if mischief it be, is done, and there is no help for it.

The thing now, I take it, is to measure the strength of this new factor, and to observe some of its bearings. I venture to suggest this because no one, as far as I know, has ever taken the American woman’s proportion of ownership and her probable preponderance of purchasing power into account as affecting her freedom of action, and as in consequence putting certain definite marks upon our society which do not appear on any other. I am no such hidebound disciple of the Manchester school as to pretend that the American woman’s position is to be accounted for in economic terms alone. I say only that her economic status has a great deal to do with defining and establishing her social status, her social privileges and immunities, and that in this relation her economic status has never, as far as I am aware, been competently considered by any critic, native or foreign; and since one magazine article will hardly go around the whole subject, it may properly devote itself to this single aspect of it, even at the risk of appearing limited and partial.

III

To-day processes the refractory raw material of yesterday’s heresy into the standard tissue of orthodoxy; and tomorrow re-processes its remnants into the shoddy of commonplace. Side by side with this procedure, and apparently related to it, go odd changes of fashion concerning delicacy and indelicacy of speech. A dozen years ago, it was most indecorous to say anything suggesting the doctrine that those who own rule, and rule because they own. We all knew that the doctrine was sound, but, like a sound doctrine of certain biological functions, there was a convention against speaking of it, above all against letting anything about it appear in print. The correct thing was to say that those who vote rule, and rule because they vote — standard eighteenth-century political theory. The fashion has changed now, and everybody speaks quite freely of the relation between ownership and rulership. Even our more progressive institutions of learning no longer make any difficulties about the fact that actual rulership of a population rests finally in the control of its means of livelihood, and that this is vested in ownership.

Our government ‘buys,’ we say, an island from a foreign government. One flag is hauled down, another is hauled up; one set of officeholders decamps, another comes in. But the island is actually owned by three men, and the same three men who owned it under the foreign government continue to own it under ours. They are the actual rulers of the island’s population, because they can make it do what they please, — which is the essence of rulership, — since they control the source of its livelihood. Some years ago a Greenbacker or free-silverite, I forget which, discussing private land monopoly with Henry George, said, ‘Give me all the money in the world, and you may have all the land.’ ‘Very well,’ said George, ‘but suppose I told you to give me all your money or get off — what then ?’

Ownership means the ability to make people obey your will under the implicit menace of shutting off their supplies, or what we call in war time an economic blockade. I do not suggest this as an academic definition, but we all know that it is what ownership comes to. It seems clear, therefore, that the distinctive character of a preponderating ownership would be pretty faithfully reflected by the society in which that ownership was exercised. Hence, when Europeans see our society as deeply effeminized and wonder why it should be so, the most competent answer, surely, is found in the amount of economic control that is in our women’s hands. How it got there is of no present consequence; it is there, and apparently there to stay. How is it possible for a society not to be effeminized when its women have so large a power of imposing upon it their collective wall, of impressing upon it the distinctive mark of their collective character, their criteria of intelligence, taste, and style?

I suspect that the extent to which women direct our national development in the realm of the spirit is quite imperfectly realized. Putting it bluntly, they control education, they control the church, the forum, publishing, drama, music, painting, sculpture. That is to say, in the United States the musical director, preacher, publisher, lecturer, editor, playwright, schoolmaster, always instinctively addresses himself to the quality and character of interest peculiar to the female portion of his constituency. In Europe he is under no pressure to do so. In fact, this is the most noticeable difference between the practice of these activities here and in Europe, and I think the most significant as well. It is surely more than a coincidence that the increase of women’s control of our practice has gone on in a fairly direct ratio to their increase in purchasing power. A study of woman’s rise to her present position discloses too many such coincidences for us to take stock in the presumption of coincidence. Her demand for political equality, for instance, was pushed hard and earnestly for nearly a century, but one observes with interest that nothing came of it until the time, almost to the day, that she arrived at equality in purchasing power; and then she got what she wanted with relatively little effort.

Now, in any society, the status of the pursuits I have just mentioned, the status of what goes on in the realm of the spirit, is the measure of that society’s actual civilization. Exercise of the instinct of workmanship alone, no matter how energetic, is not civilizing; there must go on with it a balanced and harmonious exercise of the instinct of intellect and knowledge, of religion and morals, of beauty and poetry, of social life and manners. A society may be very rich, it may have any number of industries, railways, hygiene establishments, sport centres, banks, newspapers, telephones, finance companies and the like, and remain quite uncivilized. These things are in a sense the apparatus of civilization, because under proper direction they make for a diffused material well-being, and civilization can get on better if it has this as a basis; but they do not in themselves constitute civilization or even make directly and immediately toward it.

IV

My main design in writing this article is to address a word of exhortation to our feminists. Modern feminism has contented itself with asserting the thesis of women’s ability and right to do everything that men can do. Perhaps some of our more thoughtful feminists have looked beyond this thesis, but I know of none, from the days of Fanny Wright and Susan B. Anthony on to the present, who has done so. Feminism has been content with demanding the right to vote, to practise politics and hold public office, as men do, and to enter commerce, finance, the learned professions, and the trades, on equal terms with men, and to share men’s social privileges and immunities on equal terms. Its contention is that women are able to do as well with all these activities as men can do, and that the opportunity to engage in them is theirs by natural right.

This thesis is wholly sound. Every objection I ever heard raised against it has impressed me as ex parte and specious— in a word, as disingenuous. There is no doubt whatever that women can do everything that men can do: they have always done it. In the thirteenth century, women were not only studying and practising, but also lecturing, in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Salerno. Joan of Arc made no special impression on the people of France as a military figure; they were quite used to seeing women under arms in the mediæval wars. As late as the sixteenth century, Louise Labé got a bit bored with the routine life of a well-to-do merchant’s daughter at Lyon, so she reached down the gun, sallied forth in men’s dress, and fought through the siege of Perpignan. Then, having had her little fling at an active outdoor life, she went back to Lyon, married, and made her home the centre of a brilliant literary society, and wrote some of the most beautiful verse ever done in the French language, or, for that matter, in any language. She also wrote an excellent manual of housekeeping in a practical and sententious style rather reminding one of Cato’s treatise; which seems to show that she was quite as handy with the broom and the rolling-pin as she was with the pen and the smooth-bore.

Then, as a type of the first-class executive and diplomat, there was Saint Radegonde, in the sixth century. Our feminists ought to look her up as the patron saint of feminism, and I say no more about her in the hope that they will do so; she will be a rich find for them. In the realm of public affairs, the women of the French and Italian Renaissance are too well known to need mention. Even the gun-moll, generally supposed to be a product peculiar to our time and country, has a very early prototype. In the sixth century two spirited hussies, mere youngsters, princesses named Chrodhilde and Basine, pranced out of Saint Radegonde’s convent at Poitiers in dudgeon against the management, gathered a band of cutthroats around them, and shot the town to rags. The streets of Poitiers ran red with blood, and the forces of law and order had a frightful time putting down the riot. Indeed, the two princesses never were put down. They rode off somewhere beyond the reach of extradition — some mediæval Miami, probably — and lived to a green old age, full of ginger, and wearing the halo of popular renown. That was many centuries ago, but even to this day the Nuns’ War is mentioned with uneasy respect throughout the Poitou.

At any period in history, I think, one may find women ‘living their own lives’ in the feminists’ sense, about as satisfactorily as men were living theirs; doing, if they chose, just what men did, and doing it just about as well. One must observe, however, that these women were relatively few, they were always exceptional, and — here is, I think, the important thing — they were all marked by one sole invariable differentiation: they were economically independent. I say ‘all’ rather inadvisedly, perhaps, for I have not looked into the pocketbooks of all the notable women in the world, from Semiramis down; but out of curiosity I have lately examined the circumstances of a great many, here and there, and have found but one exception, Joan of Arc. She was a poor girl; but her enterprise was of a very special kind, not likely to be affected by her economic status, though if she had been well-to-do she might not, quite probably would not, have lost her life in the way she did. Given a certain amount of resolution, women who were economically independent seem never to have had much trouble about ‘living their own lives’; nor, apparently, do they now.

It may therefore be said, I think, that the efforts of feminism have never been, strictly speaking, in behalf of the rights of women, but in behalf of the rights of poor women; and all the greater honor to feminism that this is so! Those who were not poor or dependent seem always to have been able pretty well to do as they liked with themselves, and, as our expressive slang goes, ‘to get away with it.’ It must be remarked that, for our present purposes, the wage-earning woman is not to be classed as economically independent, for she holds her place on sufferance of an employer. By economically independent I mean those who are fixed quite securely in the owning class, as were the eminent women of the Renaissance, for instance.

It would appear, however, that feminism in America has not many more fish to fry in the way of its historic contention. If our women of the owning class very much want anything, they are able to concentrate upon it an amount of purchasing power which constitutes an economic demand hardly to be resisted; and their getting it would be likely to accrue to the benefit, if it were a benefit, of the dependent members of their sex as well. A rather trivial instance of this is seen in the latter-day style of dress. We remember that when women took to the wholesome fashion of wearing almost no clothes at all, especially on our beaches in summer, all the institutional voices of our society spoke out against them. The police and our prurient and officious local Dogberrys made trouble for them, and employers held a blanket threat of dismissal over the head of girls who would not conform to more conservative notions of propriety in dress. But there was enough purchasing power concentrated on the style to hold it in force and to bring all objectors to terms; and the poor and dependent women profited accordingly. Putting it broadly, Fourteenth Street could not have held up the style, but Park Avenue could and did, and Fourteenth Street shared the benefit.

Hence feminism can no longer get up an argument on the thesis that women can do anything that men can do. All interest in that contention has died out; everybody has stopped thinking in those terms, and our militant feminists are reduced to pushing minor issues, to smoothing out relatively petty inequalities of legal status, and the like. This is important and should be done; but I suggest that while it is being done the more progressive and thoughtful spirits among our feminists should consider the thesis that women can do something which men cannot do.

V

Women can civilize a society, and men cannot. There is, at least, no record that men have ever succeeded in civilizing a society, or even that they have made a strong collective endeavor in this direction; and this raises a considerable presumption upon their inability to do either. They can create the apparatus of a civilization, the mechanics of that diffused material well-being upon which a civilization is founded. Men are good at that; they are first-rate at founding industries, building railways, starting banks, getting out newspapers, and all that sort of thing. But there is no record of their handiness at employing this apparatus for a distinctly civilizing purpose. Indeed, it is very doubtful whether, left strictly to themselves, they would employ the greater part of it, the part that bears on what we call the amenities of life, for any purpose; they would incline to let it drop out of use. The standard cartoons and jokes on the subject all tend to show that when the missus goes away for the summer, the gent lapses contentedly into squalor and glories in his shame; and these may be taken as an allegory reflecting matters of larger consequence.

In the greater concerns of life it is the absence of the impulse toward civilization that justifies women in their complaint that men are forever children. Men feel no more natural, unprompted sense of responsibility than children feel for the work of civilizing the society in which they find themselves; hence in respect of all life’s concerns, even its very greatest, women have been figuratively cuffing and coaxing this sense into their heads, figuratively overhauling them, not so much for unwashed ears and unblown noses as for the persistent tendency toward these, the indefeasible disposition to accept a general régime of unwashed ears as normal and congenial, and to regard any complaint of it as exorbitant.

A while ago I took occasion to write something which bore on this point, and it elicited a very tart letter from a lady, asking me what I meant by ‘civilizing a society.’ I have no notion that the letter was written in good faith; still, the question is a fair one. Words, as Homer says, ‘ may tend this way or that way,’ and nothing is ever lost by making sure that one’s use of terms is always perfectly clear. We have already mentioned mankind’s five fundamental social instincts — the instinct of workmanship, of intellect and knowledge, of religion and morals, of beauty and poetry, of social life and manners. A civilized society is one which organizes a full collective expression of all these instincts, and which so regulates this expression as to permit no predominance of one or more of them at the expense of the rest; in short, one which keeps this expression in continual harmony and balance.

To civilize a society, then, means that when this harmony is imperfect, when the expression of one or more of these instincts is over-stressed, the civilizing force should throw its weight in favor of the under-expressed instincts and steadily check the over-stress on the others, until a general balance is restored. Social development under these conditions is, properly speaking, a civilized development; and a civilized person is one who manages the expression of his individual five instincts in just this way, and directs himself into just this course of orderly individual development.

Men have, of course, managed this individual development in themselves; though even here, unfortunately, it is seldom clear what part a distinctly feminine influence has played in its direction. Men apparently, however, have neither the ability nor the aptitude to organize and direct a collective development of the kind; and women seem to have both. Men’s collective influence has never, that I can discover, even tended significantly in this direction; women’s often has. It would therefore appear as certain as any generalization can be that, while women can do everything that men can do, they can also do this one thing that men cannot do: they can civilize a society.

The correspondent whom I mentioned a moment ago intimated that in my interest in this matter I was entertaining myself with a mere logomachy, and that my reflections upon it were all moonshine. In a personal view, one does not mind this; one should be always glad of criticism, just or unjust. But the personal view is unimportant. The important thing is to observe that in the long course of human experience, whenever a society has gone on the rocks, as sooner or later all have done, it was invariably the collective over-stress on one or more of these fundamental instincts that turned it out of its course and wrecked it. One may look back upon any of these societies, — England of the Commonwealth, France of the Grand Siècle, any you please, — identify at once the overstressed and the neglected instincts, and follow through the record of progressive over-stress and progressive repression, running directly on to final disaster. Similarly, one may work out the prospects of an existing society with almost actuarial exactness by observation of these symptoms, as critics have often done. Hence one is concerned with the degree of civilization attained by the society in which one lives, not on such grounds as my correspondent might regard as more or less fanciful, but upon the solid ground of security. An uncivilized society has in it the seeds of dissolution, it is insecure; and the lower the degree of its civilization, as measured by the means I have indicated, the greater its insecurity. The race is always instinctively in pursuit of perfection, always looking beyond an imperfect society, putting up with it perhaps for a long time, but in the long run invariably becoming dissatisfied with it, letting it disintegrate, and beginning anew with another.

Our American society, mainly on account of its wealth and material prosperity, has always come in for an uncommon amount of observation and criticism. Every complaint of it on the part of both native and foreign critics, as far as I am aware, is reducible to the simple thesis that it is not a civilized society. These critics do not use this precise formula, — not all of them, at least; some of them do, — but it is the sum of what they have to say, and this is as true of our most kindly critics as well as the most unkindly. It is the sum of Mrs. Trollope’s observations at one end of the long array, and of Mr. Dreiser’s and Mr. Sinclair Lewis’s at the other. There is a complete consensus that our society leaves the claims of too many fundamental instincts unsatisfied; in fact, that we are trying to force the whole current of our being through the narrow channel set by one instinct only, the instinct of workmanship; and hence our society exhibits an extremely imperfect type of intellect and knowledge, an extremely imperfect type of religion and morals, of beauty and poetry, of social life and manners.

I am not concerned, at the moment, to comment on the soundness of this criticism; I say only that this is the sum of every criticism that has been passed on our society. Try this formula on any observer, native or foreign, and you will find, I think, that it covers the content of his opinion.

VI

Thus one is led rather seriously to wonder whether, in encouraging our women to do only the things that men can do, our feminists have not been encouraging them to take quite the wrong way with themselves. For my own part, I suspect it may be so. One may easily see how our society, if it had to, might get on without women lawyers, physicians, stockbrokers, aviators, preachers, telephone operators, hijackers, buyers, cooks, dressmakers, bus conductors, architects. I do not say we should get on without them; that is another matter entirely. I say only that we could get on. We cannot get on, however, without woman as a civilizing force. We cannot get on — at least, I see no way whereby we can get on — unless women apply the faculty which they have, and which men apparently have not, to the task of civilizing our society.

In encouraging women to do only what men can do, our feminists have encouraged them to put still greater stress on the instinct of workmanship, the one instinct which all critics say is already over-stressed to the breaking point; and this virtually decreases the stress on those which are already intolerably under-stressed. It causes a still more violent disturbance of balance between the claim of workmanship and the claims of intellect and knowledge, religion and morals, beauty and poetry, social life and manners. Considering the available indexes of these several claims, it would appear that our critics (I venture, after all, to give my opinion in the matter) have a good deal on their side. The development of a sense of spiritual activity as social, as something popular and common, in which everybody may and everyone naturally does take some sort of hand — this development seems really not to have got very far.

There is, for example, a great deal of music in America; yet compare the development of our sense of music as a social expression with that which you perceive at work naturally and spontaneously in almost any German village! Similar observations may be made with regard to our literature. We all remember Mr. Duffus’s examination of the state of the book market, and we are all aware of the extremely exiguous and fear-ridden existence of anything like a serious periodical literature among us; well, compare this state of things with what one finds in France, or indeed in any Continental country, for I believe our rating is reckoned lower than any of them — as I remember, we stand eighteenth on the list of nations in this particular, though I am not sure of the exact figure; it is, at any rate, shockingly low. So one may go on, through the whole roster of spiritual activities. It appears, then, that further stress on the over-stressed instinct, and further repression on the others, are not what will do us any good.

Here, I think, comes in the point that feminism is in a position not only to direct interest, but, for the first time in the world’s history, to direct as much purchasing power as men have, or perhaps somewhat more. We have already seen that, in a commercial sense, women’s interest controls all our organized expressions of spiritual activity. Take the advertising matter in any newspaper or magazine, and consider the proportion of it that is aimed directly at women’s purchasing power, and you can see at once how far publishing policy must reflect specifically feminine views of life. Consider the proportion of woman’s purchasing power represented on the boards of our orchestras, in the contributions to churches, in the maintenance of schools, forums, lectureships, and you will see at once the direction that their policies must take. It is a commonplace of the theatre that the verdict of women will instantly make or break any production, instantly establish any general mode or tendency, instantly reverse one already established. Test the question of women’s commercial control of organized expression anywhere in the realm of ethics, manners, art, anywhere in the realm of general culture, and your findings will be the same.

Hence it would seem that there is here a great social force out of which our society is at present getting but little good. I believe it is a much greater force than our feminism has any idea of; and this is my justification for suggesting so directly to feminism that it should recognize and measure this force, and then do everything possible to give it a better direction. Our society cannot be civilized through women’s attainment of the ends that feminism has hitherto set before them, laudable and excellent as those are. It can be civilized by giving an intelligent direction to the interest and the purchasing power of women. At present these are exercised very irresponsibly and casually in the direction of civilization, largely because women have been over-preoccupied with the idea of doing what men can do. Modern feminism has unquestionably encouraged and abetted them in this preoccupation; and hence it seems competent to suggest that feminism should henceforth concern itself with recommending a higher and much more rational ideal of social usefulness.