“Yes, liberty to choose a calling that would suit their individual tastes and satisfy their growing ambition.”
“Excuse me,” I again interrupted, “but were not these women who exhibited so much restlessness unattached—that is, without many family ties? And were not the great majority so contented in the shelter of home and so engrossed in the care of husband and children that they were entire strangers to any such disturbing fancies, or ambitions as you call them? And, again, did not this large class of happy and busy wives and mothers resent the action of those self-appointed liberators who were fighting for an image of straw and crying themselves hoarse over imaginary wrongs?”
Zenith smiled again in that peculiar manner which told me, in the pleasantest possible way, that she was perfectly sure I was on the losing side, and with the smile she resumed:
“Your questions are so familiar to one who has studied this subject that they seem like another plagiarism, as it were, from our histories, but I will give you fair answers.
“It is true that the early protests came from the solitary women, unfortunately not a small class at that day, who, being without legal protectors, felt the inequalities of the law and the unjust restraints put upon their sex by society, but the truths they spoke came with added force because of their intimate acquaintance with their needs.
“You are wrong in your supposition that the mass of women were so shallow in mind as to know nothing of those longings for a fuller, more satisfying life. Deep in their nature, planted by the Creator himself, was the same lofty spirit with which man was endowed, and it could not be smothered by marriage. Taking a husband should not, and in reality does not now, change one’s ambition or aim in life any more than taking a wife does, but in those benighted days men, after marriage, could go forward with their plans just as if nothing had happened, while the women were supposed to forget their high hopes and aspirations and confine themselves entirely to the trivial round of domestic duties. The men, however, were much mistaken if they thought their wives were forgetting. They but bided their time.
“In your last question you are not altogether wrong, for there were a few unthinking ones who joined with some of the men in ridiculing the whole movement as unnecessary and foolish. But this class had not much influence, and, in spite of such opposition as they offered, the reform made steady progress.
“As a help to obtain what she was striving for, woman asked for the right of suffrage, and thereupon had to undergo a fusillade of cheap criticism from those who would not understand her, and who supposed she wanted this privilege as an end and not as a means. Men were slow to grant the right to vote, but after much discussion suffrage began to be allowed in matters where the women were particularly interested. With the first concession, however, men realized that the force of all their arguments was broken, and before many years the full right was bestowed.
“And now, Thorwald, I am sure our good friends did not come so far from home to hear me talk all the time. The rest of the subject concerns your sex as much as mine, and you had better take up the story at this point.”
“Oh, no,” replied Thorwald, “I shall not take the narrative away from you now, you may be sure, for what is left is just the part you can best relate. I shall enjoy it as much as our friends from the earth. But I propose that we hear the rest this afternoon, and that, in the meantime, we go out for a drive.”