My object in writing so far has been to set forth reasons for my belief that woman, as we know her to-day, is largely a manufactured product; that the particular qualities which are supposed to be inherent in her and characteristic of her sex are often enough nothing more than the characteristics of a repressed class and the entirely artificial result of her surroundings and training. I have tried to show that, given such surroundings and training, the ordinary or womanly woman was the kind of development to be expected; that even if it be the will of Providence that she should occupy the lower seat, man has actively assisted Providence by a resolute discouragement of her attempts to move out of it; and that it is impossible to say whether her typical virtues and her typical defects are inherent and inevitable, or induced and artificial, until she has been placed amidst other surroundings and subjected to the influence and test of a different system of education. Until such an experiment has been tried no really authoritative conclusion is possible; one can only make deductions and point to probabilities.
If, after four or five generations of freer choice and wider life, woman still persists in confining her steps to the narrow grooves where they have hitherto been compelled to walk; if she claims no life of her own, if she has no interests outside her home, if love, marriage and maternity is still her all in all; if she is still, in spite of equal education, of emulation and respect, the inferior of man in brain capacity and mental independence; if she still evinces a marked preference for disagreeable and monotonous forms of labour, for which she is paid at the lowest possible rate; if she still attaches higher value to the lifting of a top hat than to the liberty to direct her own life; if she is still untouched by public spirit, still unable to produce an art and a literature that is individual and sincere; if she is still servile, imitative, pliant—then, when those four or five generations have passed, the male half of humanity will have a perfect right to declare that woman is what he has always believed and desired her to be, that she is the chattel, the domestic animal, the matron or the mistress, that her subjection is a subjection enjoined by natural law, that her inferiority to himself is an ordained and inevitable inferiority. Then he will have that right; but not till then.
