Before the war, in the British community as in most civilised communities, profound changes were already in progress, changes in the conditions of women’s employment, in the legal relations of husband and wife, in the political status of women, in the status of illegitimate children, in manners and customs affecting the sexes.  Every civilised community was exhibiting a falling birth-rate and a falling death-rate, was changing the quality of its housing, and diminishing domestic labour by organising supplies and developing, appliances.  That is to say, that primary human unit, the home, was altering in shape and size and frequency and colour and effect.  A steadily increasing proportion of people were living outside the old family home, the home based on maternity and offspring, altogether.  A number of us were doing our best to apprehend the summation of all this flood of change.  We had a vague idea that women were somehow being “emancipated,” but just what this word meant and what it implied were matters still under exploration.  Then came the war.  For a time it seemed as if all this discussion was at an end, as if the problem itself had vanished.

But that was only a temporary distraction of attention.  The process of change swirled into new forms that did not fit very easily into the accepted formulae, swirled into new forms and continued on its way.  If the discussion ceased for a time, the process of change ceased not at all.  Matters have travelled all the farther in the last two years for travelling mutely.  The questions between men and women are far more important and far more incessant than the questions between Germans and the rest of mankind.  They are coming back now into the foreground of human thought, but amended and altered.  Our object is to state the general nature of that alteration.  It has still been “emancipation,” but very different in quality from the “emancipation” that was demanded so loudly and incoherently in that ancient world—­of 1913!

Never had the relations of men and women been so uneasy as they were in the opening days of 1914.  The woman’s movement battered and banged through all our minds.  It broke out into that tumult in Great Britain perhaps ten years ago.  When Queen Victoria died it was inaudible; search Punch, search the newspapers of that tranquil age.  In 1914 it kicked up so great a dust that the Germans counted on the Suffragettes as one of the great forces that were to paralyse England in the war.

The extraordinary thing was that the feminist movement was never clearly defined during all the time of its maximum violence.  We begin to perceive in the retrospect that the movement was multiple, made up of a number of very different movements interwoven.  It seemed to concentrate upon the Vote; but it was never possible to find even why women wanted the vote.  Some, for example, alleged that it was because they were like men, and some because they were entirely different.  The broad facts that one could not mistake were a vast feminine discontent and a vast display of feminine energy.  What had brought that about?