They demanded also, political, social, and marital equality between the sexes; for they averred that women were being cramped and crippled by old-time conventionalities, the outcome of the customs and prejudices of mediæval ignorance and tyranny, which had invariably relegated their sex to a lower platform of liberty.
As citizens it placed them in the position of minors and lunatics, they averred, and as wives it gave them but little more authority than what their children possessed from a legal point of view, however talented and cultivated they might be.
Loud and bitter were the railings of the dominant sex against the movement. Men scoffed and derided ‘the new woman,’ as they mockingly termed her.
She became the subject of epigram, pun, and pleasantry generally; the butt of every shallow humorist, and dubbed ‘the new darn on the old bluestocking,’ whatever that might mean. She was told that her aspirations were bold and offensive in the extreme; that they ‘unsexed’ her.
Nor was she spared by her own sex. If a lady novelist had the courage to make a stand for social purity the critics would pounce upon her, condemning her work as ‘improper.’
Mostly those following this calling were males; but there were to be found feminine monstrosities among writers, who to curry favour with the multitude, stooped to the unworthiness of writing down those devoted champions of liberty for their own sex.
It was a long battle and a hard, this struggle for equality. Man’s dominance and woman’s subjugation had not been a healthy influence throughout the ages, for either sex.
Society taught, and the laws of the realm favoured the theory, that the code of morality for the man was widely different to that which should guide the woman.
But the new woman saw whence this incongruity sprang, and showed that it had its birth and continued existence in the coarser instincts of the male, whose desires it tended to foster and encourage.
‘Truly,’ she exclaimed, ‘the arrogance and selfishness of man is not difficult to discover, although veiled by the hypocritical excuse of keeping intact the sweet delicacy and spirituality of woman. Men demand that we should continue to repose a child-like confidence in their goodness; well, we shall be only too ready to grant it as soon as we are assured that they have made themselves worthy of our trust.’