Mrs. Pankhurst has called upon women to be like herself, to display her own Amazonian qualities. She called upon shop girls and college students and wives and old women to make physical assaults on cabinet ministers, to raid parliament and fight with policemen, to destroy property and go to prison, to endure almost every indignity from the mobs and from their jailers, to suffer in health and perhaps to die, exactly as soldiers suffer and die in a campaign.

And they did. They answered her call by the thousands. They have fought and suffered, and some of them have died. If this had been the result of individual genius in Mrs. Pankhurst, transforming peaceful girls into fighters out of hand, she would be the most extraordinary person of the age. But it is impossible to believe that all this militancy was created out of the void. It was simply awakened where it lay sleeping in these women's hearts.

Mrs. Pankhurst has performed no miracle. She has only shown to us the truth which we have blindly refused to see. She has had the insight to recognize in women generally the same fighting spirit which she found in herself, and the courage to draw upon it. She has enabled us to see what women really are like, just as Miss Addams has by her magnificent anomalies shown us what women are not like.

Can anyone doubt this? Can anyone, seeing the lone eminence of Miss Addams, assert that imaginative sympathy, patience, and the spirit of conciliation are the ordinary traits of women? Can anyone, seeing the battle frenzy which Mrs. Pankhurst has evoked with a signal in thousands of ordinary Englishwomen, deny that women have a fighting soul?

And can anyone doubt the effect which the emergence of women into politics will have, eventually, on politics? Eventually, for in spite of their boasted independence the decorous example of men will rule them at first. But when they have become used to politics—well, we shall find that we have harnessed an unruly Niagara!

In women as voters we shall have an element impatient of restraint, straining at the rules of procedure, cynical of excuses for inaction; not always by any means on the side of progress; making every mistake possible to ignorance and self-conceit; but transforming our politics from a vicious end to an efficient means—from a cancer into an organ.

This, with but little doubt, is the historic mission of women. They will not escape a certain taming by politics. But that they should be permanently tamed I find impossible to believe. Rather they will subdue it to their purposes, remold it nearer to their hearts' desire, change it as men would never dream of changing it, wreck it savagely in the face of our masculine protest and merrily rebuild it anew in the face of our despair. With their aid we may at last achieve what we seem to be unable to achieve unaided—a democracy.

Meanwhile let us understand this suffrage movement. Let us understand that we have in militancy rather than in conciliation, in action rather than in wisdom, the keynote of woman in politics. And we males, who have so long played in our politics at innocent games of war, we shall have an opportunity to fight in earnest at the side of the Valkyrs.

top

CHAPTER IV

OLIVE SCHREINER AND ISADORA DUNCAN

I hope that no one will see in the conjuncture of these names a mere wanton fantasy, or a mere sensational contrast. To me there is something extraordinarily appropriate in that conjuncture, inasmuch as the work of Olive Schreiner and the work of Isadora Duncan supplement each other.

It is the drawback of the woman's movement that in any one of its aspects (heightened and colored as such an aspect often is by the violence of propaganda) it may appear too fiercely narrow. That women should make so much fuss about getting the vote, or that they should so excite themselves over the prospect of working for wages, will appear incomprehensible to many people who have a proper regard for art, for literature, and for the graces of social intercourse. It is only when the woman's movement is seen broadly, in a variety of its aspects, that there comes the realization that here is a cause in which every fine aspiration has a place, a cause from which sincere lovers of truth and beauty have nothing really to fear.

Mrs. Olive Schreiner stands, by virtue of her latest book, "Women and Labor," as an exponent of the doctrine that would send women into every field of economic activity; or, rather, the doctrine that finds in the forces which are driving them there a savior of her sex from the degradation of parasitism. In behalf of this doctrine she has expended all that eloquence and passion which have made her one of the figures in modern literature and a spokesman for all women who have not learned to speak that hieratic language which is heard, as the inexpressive speech of daily life is not heard, across space and time.

Miss Isadora Duncan stands as representative of the renaissance in dancing. She has brought back to us the antique beauty of an art of which we have had only relics and memento in classic sculpture and decoration. She has made us despise the frigid artifice of the ballet, and taught us that in the natural movements of the body are contained the highest possibilities of choregraphic beauty. It has been to many of us one of the finest experiences of our lives to see, for the first time, the marble maiden of the Grecian urn come to life in her, and all the leaf-fringed legends of Arcady drift before our enamored eyes. She has touched our lives with the magic of immemorial loveliness.

But to class Olive Schreiner as a sociologist and Isadora Duncan as a dancer, to divorce them by any such categories, is to do them both an injustice. For they are sister workers in the woman's movement. They have each shown the way to a new freedom of the body and the soul.

The woman's movement is a product of the evolutionary science of the nineteenth century. Women's rebellions there have been before, utopian visions there have been, which have contributed no little to the modern movement by the force of their tradition and ever-living spirit. No Joan of Arc has led men to victory, no Lady Godiva has sacrificed her modesty—nay, even, no courtesan has taught a feeble king how to rule his country—without feeding the flame of feminine aspiration. But it is modern science which, by giving us a new view of the body, its functions, its needs, its claim upon the world, has laid the basis for a successful feminist movement. When the true history of this movement is written it will contain more about Herbert Spencer and Walt Whitman, perhaps, than about Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin. In any case, it is to the body that one looks for the Magna Charta of feminism.

The eye—that is to say—is guarantor for the safety of art in a future régime under the dominance of women; and the ear for poetry. These have their functions and their needs, and the woman of the future will not deny them.

It is the hand that Olive Schreiner would emancipate from idleness. She knows the significance of the hand in human history. It was by virtue of the hand that we, and not some other creature, gained lordship over the earth. It was the hand (marvelous instrument, coaxing out of the