This is not the way to deal with hysteria, granted that the diagnosis be cor

rect.

After all, it is not the tactics of the English militants that concern us; and their present, single-hearted goal, "Votes for Women," is near and insignificant compared with the stretches that lie beyond that simple, first step. Many women of this generation will stop short, in their path to self-realization, with their enfranchisement, calling it a good fight won, and the battle ended. Others will discover, as men have discovered, that the ballot is a clumsy method of gaining what they want, and will seek, as many men are seeking, other and better ways. Our concern is not with militant tactics or with its first goal. But we are greatly concerned with the militant spirit that is developing in these and many other women. For, of all the evils in the world, the helplessness of women is the greatest; not their material or political helplessness, but their spiritual helplessness, upon which all their other ineptitudes gather like barnacles. This spiritual militancy in women is the ringing, singing note of the world to-day, and what lies back of it and what lies ahead may not wisely be ignored.

First of all, the men and women who do not know the degraded status of women before the English courts are set apart, in their ignorance, from the right to condemn the women of England who are steadily executing a campaign of planned, political violence. For this is true, that the roster of those laws is enough to make any intelligent woman who comes into conflict with them go down to the Woman's Union, and, on the bare chance that action will help, say, "Here am I, to use."

One of the "wild women" sat talking to me not long ago, sometimes humorously, always earnestly and calmly. Finally, because I knew her to be a happy woman in her home, I asked her the old, inevitable question.

"It was such a little thing," she told me, "that turned me to the militants-just the necessity of a form to be signed by my child's 'parent.' I said I would sign it, that I was the boy's mother. 'But it must be signed by the parent,' said the doctor, smiling tolerantly as he explained English law to me; that 'A mother, as

such, is entitled to no power, only to reverence and respect.' That night I asked my husband-he is a barrister-to tell me the English law for women, and for days after that I went about feeling degraded and unutterably resentful. The new militancy had begun, and I had condemned it; now I began to wonder, and I went to the W. S. P. U., and got its literature. I was in Albert Hall, during the Third Woman's Parliament in 1907, when Mrs. Pankhurst, unexpectedly released from Holloway Prison, came in, and took the vacant chair that waited for her on the platform. I heard her say that men have had control of women's and children's lives long enough, and that in England it must be stopped, and that it was on its way to being stopped. 'We have done what they hoped and what they believed was impossible: we women are roused,' she said.

"I stood up with the rest of them, roused for the rest of my life. Then I went home and told my boy and my husband that I must help. My husband did n't want it, and I waited a little longer, for, you see, I was a happy woman. But the injustice of it ate into me. I was ashamed to have my boy know I was staying outside only because some one I loved wanted me to; women have done that for ages, and that has to be stopped. So I joined them. When I was sent out to throw my first stone, I was sick-sick. I did n't think I could go through with it. One woman told me she prayed all the time. The thing that nerved me at last was the chance memory of that doctor's tolerant, uncomprehending, unspeakably insulting smile as he denied me, under the law, any voice in my boy's life."

SUPERFLUOUS WOMEN

SIR Almroth WrigHT, one of England's distinguished scientific men, disclosed another cause for English militancy when he published, in his famous "Times" letter, the results of his mighty research into the psychology of England's superfluous women. Said he:

"The recruiting-field for the militant. suffragist is the half-million of our excess female population, that half-million which had better, long ago, have gone out to mate with its complement of men, beyond

the seas. Then Sir Almroth Wright lists the types, as he sees them, of this halfmillion excess: "A class of women who have been strangers to joy, in whom instincts, long suppressed, have broken into flame. They are the sexually embittered women, in whom everything has turned to gall, and bitterness of heart, and hatred of men . . . the incomplete. One side of their nature has undergone atrophy, with the result that they have lost touch with their living fellow-men and women . . . the women who are affronted, when man avers that, for him, the glory of woman lies in her power of attraction, in her capacity for motherhood, and in unswerving allegiance to the ethics which are special to her sex. I have heard such an intellectually embittered woman say, though a man had taken her to wife, that 'never, in the whole course of her life, had a man ever so much as done her a kindness.'" The italics are not Sir Almroth Wright's, but special thought is bespoken for them.

Now, the lot of these superfluous women of England, most of them of the deadly middle class, denied marriage, since their circle, limited at best, may not be overstepped; denied their children; forbidden economic independence; refused any individual life of their own; dependent on the male head of the house, and subordinate to his will let these women tell if they will what their lives are. Their group is the recruiting-ground from which doctors' offices are filled. Hysterics, many of them. But a physician who stops short at diagnosis, as Sir Almroth Wright stops, whose only suggested remedy is to send them out. of the country, whose solution is that, as a militant, "the state would be well rid of her if she were crushed under the soldiers' shields, like the traitor woman at the Tarpeian rock," is a pseudo-scientist who, where women's ills are concerned, refuses to follow the terrible effect to its more terrible cause; nor can his imagination compass the appalling waste of creative energy in these half-million human beings, nor the tremendous strength of that energy, too long suppressed, bursting into flame, nor the incalculable value of it, set free, to the remaking of a badly made world.

In childless homes, and in homes of only one child or two children lies another great reservoir of waste energy

among women. The cost of living and the persistent, outlawed, but irresistible, spread of scientific knowledge have directly lowered the world's birth-rate, and England, in common with other nations who still feel the chief end of life is to spawn soldiers, is annoyed, but, as usual, over the wrong thing. Creative energy, suppressed in men, or in women with no healthful outlet in human activities, is waste, waste, waste. Even if care of a home and a child or two does take all a woman's time, it should not. And it does

not.

THE WORLD AND THE HOME

FOR woman's work-this is old and so trite!-has gone from her on the rolling wave of the industrial age that has swept her work and often her and her children into factories. Specialized, outside industries have taken her old handicrafts from her, and have left in the home only the stupid forms of drudgery that possess not even the creative interest that was attached to the old primitive arts of spinning and weaving and sewing all that a family might need for clothing and covering. Even in the kitchens there used to be genuine opportunity for creative art; today the work of the average family kitchen means generally the mere hasty serving of food, already wholly or partly prepared outside, and the uninteresting clearing away of debris. Yet women must keep busy in the home; perhaps this nervous need of theirs is one reason, though it is not the only reason, why women have never studied conservation of energy, working efficiency, or the elimination of unnecessary steps and movements. And then, where prolonged, crude methods of work fail to fill in time, this nervous energy, if it does not go outside the home for self-expression, reaches out in desperation, and snatches the old handicrafts back under the guise of definite art. If this needs proof, the women's magazines to-day furnish it, filled with revivals of the old handicrafts: hand-quilted quilts, hand-knitted counterpanes and curtains, eyelet-embroidery, and beadwork. It is likely that the spinning-wheel and the loom may be the next futile scheme for keeping women busy in the modern home.

But the world has come in, brought through the home doorway by the same

merciless agent that took the home handicrafts out. The industrial age has developed rapid transit, the telephone, telegraph, wireless, newspapers, increasing club and social life, the yeasty ferment of cities. Women in the house get the history of things as they happen, not dead details after history is made; and as their minds have quickened to a more cosmic interpretation of life, more and more they feel a tremulous eagerness to "do" something themselves, to be a part of the world that is so much more interesting than the home's dull round. For there is rising revolt among women against the unspeakable dullness of unvaried home life. It has been a long, deadly routine, a life-servitude imposed on her for ages in a manmade world. No honest woman will deny -man's opinion is valueless here-that there is nothing in the home alone to satisfy woman's human longing for variety, adventure, romance. But any man will tell you strongly that home is not enough, a mate is not enough, children are not enough, to fill a human being's life, if that human being is to be himself. Women, singly, to themselves, have thought this for a long time, and now that they are beginning to talk freely to women, they are discovering that what they have thought involuntarily and rebelliously other women have thought just as wickedly and unideally, next door to them, across the street from them, in the church pews behind them, and at the cardtables.

Then perhaps this happens-it must happen, if a woman thinks. She sees at last, as the world comes more and more into the home, and as her children and she herself, perhaps, are swept out into the industrial treadmill, that the world is not the beautiful, kindly place she dreamed it was in her protected days. She hears the revolutionary "La-la” of industrial unrest, and she discovers that human life, compared with output, is zero to the owners of the world's wealth. She sees her husband's flagging vitality with new eyes, and shudders at her children's early exhaustion under toil. Until to-day women, in their walled cells, have been able to stupefy their own souls in dreams for their children; now they know that those dreams are dead things, and their most powerful sedative has lost its cunning.

LXXXVII-3

THE SUPPRESSED SEX

FOR women are thinking at last not in men's terms, but in their own, and thought in a slave class is always dynamic. Furthermore, as women talk to women with increasing freedom, and discover a communal mental restlessness among them, they come to perceive this: that they are not "the mysterious sex," but the suppressed sex; that the reason men are not mysteries to women is because men are living in a world created by men for men, more or less favorable for the development of personality and individuality among men, since the restrictions on men's freewilling are comparatively few; that the reason women are mysteries to men is because women have never lived in an environment created by themselves for themselves, but in this man's world, under codes not their own, according to ideals set up for them in no way borne out by facts, and not for themselves ever, but for others. To be called the mysterious sex can never flatter them again, once they have perceived the stupidity of the epithet. Men have said for ages, and women have repeated it like parrots, "Women are thus and so." There is no physician or psychologist or scientist to-day who knows what women are.

Perhaps the new psychology of the human race will have for its starting-point neither male nor female, but the individual and its own.

Now, we find, as definite causes for dynamic thought among women to-day—and dynamic thought is militancy-unfair laws made for her by men who have understood neither her own nor her children's natures and needs; an unmeasured creative energy suppressed by economic, and moral, and class codes, none of which she has shared in making; a suppression of human instinct to adventure and romance and idealism; a suppression of all her instincts to action outside a fixed and dull routine; the coming of the world into the home; the discovery, as she and her children go out into the world, that it is not a place to dream of, but to act in; finally, the illuminating perception that the great reason for the troubles of women, perhaps the basic one, is that the world has been made by men for themselves, and that the women in it have been set aside from life,