CONTENTS
[BOOK I Being Born]
[BOOK II Being]
[BOOK III Becoming]
INTRODUCTION
A splendid book in which a soul lives so profoundly human and so purely feminine that any words of introduction seem leaden and intrusive. You feel as though you were violating the essential delicacy and powerful life of this soul to comment upon the remarkable revelation of it between the very covers that contain the revelation.
Yet, as a modest friend of letters, I should like to express an opinion here—the author did not ask me for it—and pay homage to the brilliant originality of this work. I want to give myself the pleasure of saying how important I think it is.
It expresses—and this is a fact of considerable literary and moral import—what has never been exactly expressed before. It expresses Woman.
The more woman has been spoken about, you might say, the less she has been revealed. She has been hidden under a plethora of words. The supreme vision rising up out of these pages is as luminous as a heavenly revelation. From the author's tone, so simple and penetrating, you perceive that women feel differently about the things that we men see and proudly proclaim.
The thought and spirit of Woman will be a surprise and a shock to the old masculine traditions, in which women also acquiesce, probably because of their old traditions of slavery. But we know that always and everywhere the opposition such thought arouses is sublimely lacking in truth.
Here is a woman who cries out with magnificent impressive sincerity against the fallacy of the maternal instinct—the "call of the blood"—against the exclusiveness of love; who knows and asserts that death kills only the dead, and not those who are left behind; who recreates in new forms the law and the creed of the relations between man and woman, motherhood, and suffering. And this new expression of woman—a new expression, therefore, of the whole of life—this striking gospel, young and strong, which overcomes artificial, unnatural ideas, resounds at the very time when woman is at last entering humanity and is preparing to change her rôle of breeder of children and handmaid in common.