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.
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.