It is hard to see why Mr. Wells, in seeking "to express the resentment and distress which many women feel nowadays" at their dependence; and in showing sympathy with their natural right of choice, should have burdened himself with all this unnecessary complication of special foolishness on the part of his heroine which alienates our sympathy; and special illegality on the man's position. Perhaps this is to add heroism to her effort to secure the right mate, to indicate how small are any other considerations in comparison to this primary demand of life.
Waiving all objections to this framework of the story, there remains the painful exhibition of Mr. Wells's misapprehension of the larger causes of the present unrest among women. What later historians will point out as the most distinguishing feature of our time, its importance shared only by the movement towards economic democracy, is the sudden and irresistible outburst of human powers, human feeling, human activities, and in that half the world hitherto denied such experiences.
Ann Veronica, as at first portrayed, shared in this world impulse. She wanted to be human, and tried to be. Her masculine interpreter, seeing no possible interests in the woman's life except those of sex, dismisses all that passionate outgoing as comparable to the mating impulse of insects. He overestimates the weight of this department of life, a mistake common to most men and some women.
When opposed, the protagonists of this position cry that their opponent wishes to unsex women; to repudiate motherhood; and see in all the natural development of the modern woman only a threat of decreased population.
Cannot Mr. Wells, as one acquainted with zoology, see that both male and female of a species are alike in the special qualities of that species, although differing in sex? Can he not see that the area of human life, the social development of humanity, is one quite common to both men and women; and that a woman, however amply occupied in wife and mother-hood, suffers from lack of human relation, if denied it, even as a man would, whose activities were absolutely limited to husband- and father-hood?
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If you are a believer in women's voting why don't you take the best equal suffrage paper in the country? Not the Forerunner—which is only a suffrage paper because of its interest in women, and only a woman's paper because of its interest in humanity, but this one:
Vol. XL.
The Woman's Journal
FOUNDED BY LUCY STONE AND HENRY B. BLACKWELL
A weekly newspaper published every Saturday in Boston, devoted to the interests of women—to their educational, industrial, legal and political equality, and especially to their right of suffrage