PLAIN WORDS ON THE WOMAN QUESTION. 175 



pride, they ought to keep it dark, and to be ashamed of it as 

 ashamed as a man in a like predicament would be of his impo- 

 tence. They ought to feel they have fallen short of the healthy 

 instincts of their kind, instead of posing as in some sense the 

 cream of the universe, on the strength of what is really a func- 

 tional aberration. 



Unfortunately, however, just at the present moment, a con- 

 siderable number of the ablest women have been misled into 

 taking this unfeminine side, and becoming real " traitors to their 

 sex " in so far as they endeavor to assimilate women to men in 

 everything, and to put upon their shoulders, as a glory and privi- 

 lege, the burden of their own support. Unfortunately, too, they 

 have erected into an ideal what is really an unhappy necessity of 

 the passing phase. They have set before them as an aim what 

 ought to be regarded as a pis-aller. And the reasons why they 

 have done so are abundantly evident to anybody who takes a 

 wide and extended view of the present crisis for a crisis it 

 undoubtedly is in the position of women. 



In the first place, the movement for the higher education of 

 women, in itself an excellent and most praiseworthy movement, 

 has at first, almost of necessity, taken a wrong direction, which 

 has entailed in the end much of the present uneasiness. Of course, 

 nothing could well be worse than the so-called education of women 

 forty or fifty years ago. Of course, nothing could be narrower 

 than the view of their sex then prevalent, as eternally predestined 

 to suckle fools and chronicle small beer. But when the need for 

 some change was first felt, instead of reform taking a rational 

 direction instead of women being educated to suckle strong and 

 intelligent children, and to order well a wholesome, beautiful, 

 reasonable household the mistake was made of educating them 

 like men giving a like training for totally unlike functions. 

 The result was that many women became unsexed in the process, 

 and many others acquired a distaste, an unnatural distaste, for the 

 functions which Nature intended them to perform. At the pres- 

 ent moment a great majority of the ablest women are wholly dis- 

 satisfied with their own position as women, and with the position 

 imposed by the facts of the case upon women generally ; and this 

 as the direct result of their false education. They have no real 

 plan to propose for the future of women as a sex ; but in a vague 

 and formless way they protest inarticulately against the whole 

 feminine function in women, often even going the length of talk- 

 ing as though the world could get along permanently without 

 wives and mothers.* 



* A short time ago I received an angry letter from a correspondent in Iowa, full of 

 curious bluster about " doing without the men altogether." Apparently this lady really 

 imagined that the human race could be recruited from the gooseberry bushes. 



