directing will an ever-increasing subtlety) that made possible the human brain, and all the vistas of reason and imagination by which our little lives gain their peculiar grandeur.

And this hand, if it be a woman's in the present day, is doomed to the smallest activities. "Our spinning wheels are all broken ...Our hoes and grindstones passed from us long ago.... Year by year, day by day, there is a silently working but determined tendency for the sphere of women's domestic labors to contract itself." Even the training of her child is taken away from the mother by the "mighty and inexorable demands of modern civilization." That condition is to her intolerable; and it is on behalf of women's empty hands that she makes her demand: "that, in that strange new world that is arising alike upon the man and the woman, where nothing is as it was, and all things are assuming new shapes and relations, that in this new world we also shall have our share of honored and socially useful human toil, our full half of the labor of the Children of Woman."

And what of Miss Duncan—what is her part in the woman's movement? In her book on "The Dance" she tells a story: "A woman once asked me why I dance with bare feet, and I replied, 'Madam, I believe in the religion of the beauty of the human foot'; and the lady replied, 'But I do not,' and I said: 'Yet you must, Madam, for the expression and intelligence of the human foot is one of the greatest triumphs of the evolution of man.' 'But,' said the lady, 'I do not believe in the evolution of man.' At this said I, 'My task is at an end. I refer you to my most revered teachers, Mr. Charles Darwin and Mr. Ernst Haeckel—' 'But,' said the lady, 'I do not believe in Darwin and Haeckel—' At this point I could think of nothing more to say. So you see that, to convince people, I am of little value and ought not to speak."

But rather to dance! Yet it is good to find so explicit a statement of the idea which she nobly expresses in her dancing. For, as the hand is the symbol of that constructive exertion of the body which we call work, so is the foot the symbol of that diffusive exertion of the body which we call play. Isadora Duncan would emancipate the one as Olive Schreiner would emancipate the other—to new activities and new delights.

And if such work is not a thing for itself only, but a gateway to a new world, so is such play not a thing for itself only. "It is not only a question of true art," writes Miss Duncan, "it is a question of race, of the development of the female sex to beauty and health, of the return to the original strength and the natural movements of woman's body. It is a question of the development of perfect mothers and the birth of healthy and beautiful children." Here we have an inspiriting expression of the idea which through the poems of Walt Whitman and the writings of various moderns, has renovated the modern soul and made us see, without any obscene blurring by Puritan spectacles, the goodness of the whole body. This is as much a part of the woman's movement as the demand for a vote (or, rather, it is more central and essential a part); and only by realizing this is it possible to understand that movement.

The body is no longer to be separated in the thought of women from the soul: "The dancer of the future will be one whose body and soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul will have become the movement of the body. The dancer will not belong to a nation, but to all humanity. She will dance, not in the form of nymph, nor fairy, nor coquette, but in the form of woman in its greatest and purest expression. She will realize the mission of woman's body and the holiness of all its parts. She will dance the changing life of nature, showing how each part is transformed into the other. From all parts of her body shall shine radiant intelligence, bringing to the world the message of the thoughts and aspirations of thousands of women. She shall dance the freedom of woman.

"She will help womankind to a new knowledge of the possible strength and beauty of their bodies, and the relation of their bodies to the earth nature and to the children of the future. She will dance, the body emerging again from centuries of civilized forgetfulness, emerging not in the nudity of primitive man, but in a new nakedness, no longer at war with spirituality and intelligence, but joining itself forever with this intelligence in a glorious harmony.

"Oh, she is coming, the dancer of the future; the free spirit, who will inhabit the body of new women; more glorious than any woman that has yet been; more beautiful than the Egyptian, than the Greek, the early Italian, than all women of past centuries—the highest intelligence in the freest body!"

If the woman's movement means anything, it means that women are demanding everything. They will not exchange one place for another, nor give up one right to pay for another, but they will achieve all rights to which their bodies and brains give them an implicit title. They will have a larger political life, a larger motherhood, a larger social service, a larger love, and they will reconstruct or destroy institutions to that end as it becomes necessary. They will not be content with any concession or any triumph until they have conquered all experience.

top

CHAPTER V

BEATRICE WEBB AND EMMA GOLDMAN

The careers of these two women serve admirably to exhibit the woman's movement in still another aspect, and to throw light upon the essential nature of woman's character. These careers stand in plain contrast. Beatrice Webb has compiled statistics, and Emma Goldman has preached the gospel of freedom. It remains to be shown which is the better and the more characteristically feminine gift to the world.

Beatrice Potter was the daughter of a Canadian railway president. Born in 1858, she grew up in a time when revolutionary movements were in the making. She was a pupil of Herbert Spencer, and it was perhaps from him that she learned so to respect her natural interest in facts that the brilliancy of no generalization could lure her into forgetting them. At all events, she was captured permanently by the magic of facts. She studied working-class life in Lancashire and East London at first hand, and in 1885 joined Charles Booth in his investigations of English social conditions. These investigations (which in my amateur ignorance I always confused with those of General Booth of the Salvation Army!) were published in four large volumes entitled "Life and Labor of the People." Miss Potter's special contributions were articles on the docks, the tailoring trade, and the Jewish community. Later she published a book on "The Coöperative Movement in Great Britain." Then, in 1892, she married Sidney Webb, a man extraordinarily of her own sort, and became confirmed, if such a thing were necessary, in her statistical habit of mind.

Meanwhile, in 1883, the Fabian Society had been founded. But first a word about statistics. "Statistics" does not mean a long list of figures. It means the spreading of knowledge of facts. Statistics may be called the dogma that knowledge is dynamic—that it is somehow operative in bringing about that great change