WOMAN AND FREEDOM IN WHITMAN 379 
adjust them to new combinations, our own days.” He de¬ 
scribes the community he conceives of, a possibility for to¬ 
day, where “perfect personalities without noise meet;” where 
“best men and women of ordinary worldly status have by 
luck been drawn together, with nothing extra of genius or 
wealth, but virtuous, chaste, industrious, cheerful, resolute, 
friendly, and devout.” He conceives “such a community organ¬ 
ized in running order, powers judiciously delegated, farming, 
building, trade, courts, mails, schools, elections all attended 
to, and then the rest of life, the main thing freely branching 
and blossoming in each individual;” and he sees there in 
“every young and old man — and in every woman — a true 
personality developed, exercised proportionally in body and 
mind and spirit;” and this case he imagines “in buoyant 
accordance with the municipal and general requirements of 
our times.” 
It is not possible to pass over in silence the practical side 
of woman’s life on matters of equality, which our poet asks 
for her, though, in view of present-day systems, Whitman is 
silent in directing her how she is to obtain this equality. He 
says, “I seek less to state or display any scheme or thought, 
and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the 
theme or thought, there to pursue your own flight.” 
To discuss the rhythmic rise and fall in woman’s develop¬ 
ment through the times is beyond these bounds, nor can these 
limits include a review of woman’s history from any point of 
view. It conceded, as a wise biologist has said, that man is 
the result of what woman has made him; likewise is it true 
that man has not been entirely inactive in woman’s construc¬ 
tion. We must take woman, in any consideration of the sub¬ 
ject, as we find her to-day, in the light of a modern civiliza¬ 
tion, as the resultant of a long series of conditions, as more 
or less the creature of her environment, — physically, men¬ 
tally, and spiritually. 
I have to omit, for want of space, the discussion in any de¬ 
tail of woman’s inequalities, and I will merely mention those 
upon which Whitman dwells. However, it would scarcely be 
fair to my subject to leave out mentioning one other inequal- 
