The Spartan Woman Ruined Sparta.
There was no womanhood in them, no more than in so many sticks. The Athenians said that they were very fine, but there was nothing feminine about them. They were far richer, too, than the men, for the men went to the wars and died, and the women thus became rich. Aristotle said that the Spartan woman was sure to ruin Sparta very quickly. And so she did, for we find Sparta trying to rule Greece in the fourth century b.c.; in the third century she was sinking; in the second century she had ceased to exist.
Modern British men and women, what are they? That is what I want to bring out. A nation can never survive with women of the Spartan type, which, as I have told you, is the American woman of to-day. The Romans were the same, and they ruined their empire. They had one idea, an all-absorbing idea which killed all ideas of religion, of art, of everything—the idea of empire. They spent their entire life in that one absorbing pursuit—domination; in such a country woman has no place.