When anti-feminist men prophesy that men will love their mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters less when pitted against them as political opponents or competitors, they prophesy certainly in many cases the truth. Politics have already estranged fathers from sons, brothers from brothers. But this demonstrates only either that the personal feelings were weaker than the political passions or that these latter have destroyed the attributes which made the personality lovable. But if men are really able to love and women remain lovable, even as political personalities, then a man will not cease to love a woman, even if she votes for a different congressional candidate! Such prophecies have not been verified in other spheres from which men sought to intimidate women by similar warnings. For woman retains her power over man. if she retains her womanly charm, created out of peace, harmony, and kindness. Not that _of which_ a woman speaks, not that _for which_ she works, determines man’s feeling and conduct; but _how_ she does it. A woman may charm a man by a political speech, and drive him away by her table talk. A poor working woman can, without a word, induce the same man to give her his seat in a street car who the next minute can be brutal to an assuming and incapable fellow workwoman. In a word, what a woman makes of her rights and what they make of her—that alone determines the measure of veneration, sympathy, love, which she may expect from a man.
That women have lost their equilibrium cannot be denied. How could it be otherwise? Not only have they in the last half century experienced, together with man, Naturalism and the New Romantic movement, Neo-Kantianism, the Higher Criticism, Bismarck and Bebel, Darwin and Spencer, Wagner and Nietzsche, Ibsen and Tolstoi, Haeckel and von Hartmann, and still many, many more, but they themselves in dizzy haste have been hurled out of their position in society, protected by the family, which they had occupied for centuries. It is obvious that at the present moment the spiritual mobility of women must be greater than their harmony; that the raw culture material which they possess must be richer than that which they can utilise; their life experiences more significant than their art of life. The modern woman must appear for the present less symmetrical, more uncertain, than man’s ideal woman in earlier times. But enduring cultural progress cannot be measured by comparison with the ideal figures of the poetry or of the life of earlier times. It must be estimated according to the _average type_ in a certain period. And the average woman of our time is, in the fullest significance of the word, more full of vitality and adaptability, more individually developed, more beneficial socially, than the average woman of fifty years ago. With the freedom of movement the social feeling has increased; with the participation in universal human culture, the richness of content: the spiritual life has become more complex, and the possibilities of expression of this new soul-life, more numerous.