When this theory is generally accepted, and when the world's ideas have been rearranged in accordance with it, we shall find ourselves looking at a new life—with new eyes.
All our social questions will require new reading, and will find new answers.
It furnishes a key to the whole "woman question," which unlocks every long-barred door and ironbound chest; it cuts the ground from under the feet of the most ancient prejudice, and makes tradition seem but a current rumor of to-day.
This book was published in 1893.
When I read it I was so impressed with its colossal possibility that I went to the publishers and asked to see the reviews—expecting to find some recognition of a world-lifting truth.
I found nothing of the sort. The reviewers reviewed the book in general with respect, with varying insight and intelligence, and one or two dwelt fot a moment on this special theory; but not one recognized its measureless importance.
This is not remarkable. In proportion to the far-reaching value of a truth is the difficulty of popular recognition. With almost all of us the mind is constantly used upon immediate facts and their short-distance relations; a man may be an expert lumber-jack, for instance, or a successful lumber-dealer, yet utterly fail to grasp the importance of forest conservation.
Even those most interested in the woman's movement of to-day were little impressed by this new view.
"What difference does it make?" they said. "We are dealing with conditions of to-day—not with questions of primitive biology!"
Nevertheless, when a great truth is born into the world's mind, it does not die. This, though not widely hailed, has grown and spread and influenced our common thought, and minor books are springing up in its train—among them Thomas's "Sex and Society," and my own "Androcentric Culture."