Two statistical factors are to be considered here.  One of these was the steady decline in the marriage rate, and the increasing proportion of unmarried women of all classes, but particularly of the more educated classes, requiring employment.  The second was the fall in the birth-rate, the diminution in size of the average family, the increase of sterile unions, and the consequent release of a considerable proportion of the energy of married women.  Co-operating with these factors of release were the economic elaborations that were improving the appliances of domestic life, replacing the needle by the sewing machine, the coal fire and lamp by gas and electricity, the dustpan and brush by the pneumatic carpet cleaner, and taking out of the house into the shop and factory the baking, much of the cooking, the making of clothes, the laundry work, and so forth, that had hitherto kept so many women at home and too busy to think.  The care of even such children as there were was also less arduous; creche and school held out hands for them, ready to do even that duty better.

Side by side with these releases from duty was a rise in the standard of education that was stimulating the minds and imaginations of woman beyond a point where the needle—­even if there had been any use for the needle—­can be an opiate.  Moreover, the world was growing richer, and growing richer in such a way that not only were leisure and desire increasing, but, because of increasingly scientific methods of production, the need in many branches of employment for any but very keen and able workers was diminishing.  So that simultaneously the world, that vanished world before 1914, was releasing and disengaging enormous volumes of untrained and unassigned feminine energy and also diminishing the usefulness of unskilful effort in every department of life.  There was no demand to meet the supply.  These were the underlying processes that produced the feminist outbreak of the decade before the war.

Now the debate between the sexes is a perennial.  It began while we were still in the trees.  It has its stereotyped accusations; its stereotyped repartees.  The Canterbury Pilgrims had little to learn from Christabel Pankhurst.  Man and woman in that duet struggle perpetually for the upper hand, and the man restrains the woman and the woman resents the man.  In every age some voice has been heard asserting, like Plato, that the woman is a human being; and the prompt answer has been, “but such a different human being.”  Wherever there is a human difference fair play is difficult, the universal clash of races witnesses to that, and sex is the greatest of human differences.