Usually one is inclined to think that when a book voices with truth and passion the needs and thoughts of even a portion of humanity, it has a real claim to be classed as literature, though it fails of the immortality which is the meed only of such writings as express with beautiful verity the immortal, unchanging needs of life. But already one regards with amused indifference yesterday's crop of novels written by women, with their vague ecstasies of longing, their confused cries of discontent, their indistinct moans and reproaches, though such a very short time since those books faithfully expressed the mental state of the sex, as one could not doubt, seeing the greediness with which editions were called for of "The Heavenly Twins," "Keynotes," "A Superfluous Woman," and their like, or listening to the echoes awaked by their inchoate sentiments in the feminine mind. Yet the sum of the protest of all these books by women was like the cry of an infant—suffering but inarticulate.
I suppose the truth is that even so short a time since free thought and free speech were still so new to women that, struggling in the swaddling bands of ignorance and convention, it was small wonder that she could not state with precision, or even define clearly to herself, where her pain lay, nor how she would allay it. She knew she was in revolt against what had been. She could not yet choose what she would change in the future. Some of them cried out for larger political rights, others were convinced that the abolition of stays and the introduction of trousers was all that was needed to produce a feminine millennium.
"Latch-keys!" cried the browbeaten English girls—"and freedom to be out after dark like our own brothers. Look at the men. They are quite happy. It must be the possession of latch-keys that makes them so: give them also to us."
"No," roundly declared a certain Mona Caird, "what we really need is a latch-key to let us out of the lifelong oppressive bond of marriage. It weighs too heavily upon us—let us go free!"
"Nonsense!" contradicted Sarah Grand. "Marriage is all right. What is wrong is man. He comes to the marriage altar with stained and empty hands, while he demands that ours be spotless, and heaped with youth, health, innocence, and faith. He swindles us. Reform man if you would make us happy!"
"Higher education"—"Equal wages"—"Physical development"—"No household drudgery"—"Expansion of the ego," cried the conflicting voices; each with a quack panacea for the disease of discontent.
Can it be that all this was but ten years ago? How quickly ideas are changing!
I think that this noise among the women was the last wave of the democratic ideal expending itself. It was their restlessness under a sense of their inferiority to man. Until the nineteenth century, woman had been content to accept the male of her kind, with his mental and physical endowments, as the true standard of human excellence, and to humbly admit that she permanently failed to reach that standard.
The universality of the democratic ideal aroused in her at last an unwillingness to admit her innate inferiority, and drove her to a desperate search for some fountain of Salmacis that should transmute her to an exact likeness of her long-time lord and superior. The search, of course, was delayed and confused by that furious and debasing fin de siecle demand for happiness at all cost. She heard no talk anywhere of courage, submission, or duty. The later decades of the democratic century had refused to contemplate the world-old riddle of the blind Fates who create one vessel to honour and another to dishonour. So woman, no more than her fellows, would consider the caprices of destiny which from the union of one man and one woman will produce an heir to beauty, talent, and success, and from the same union—without volition or intention upon anyone's part—brings forth a cripple, an idiot, or the helpless Inadequate, who is foredoomed to failure with a grim gravitation no human laws or institutions can arrest. The nineteenth century was a sentimental one; unwilling to consider unpleasant truths. "All men are born equal," it stubbornly persisted in asserting, and then was rather shocked when some of its offspring sought this equality of happiness at the sword's point or the bomb's fuse—as if content was a coin to be stolen and concealed about the person of the thief.
Of course, the women finally became infected with the bacillus of unsound ideas, and struggling against the immutable burden of sex ran to and fro, crying "Lo, here!" and "Lo, there!" and wailing, "Where is my happiness? Who has my happiness? You men have stolen and are keeping it from me!"