But the general trend of mankind towards intelligence and reason has been also a trend away from a superstitious treatment of sexual questions and a recognition, so to speak, that a woman’s “a man for a’ that,” that she is indeed as entitled to an independent soul and a separate voice in collective affairs.  As brain has counted for more and more in the human effort and brute strength and the advantage of not bearing children for less and less, as man has felt a greater need for a companion and a lesser need for a slave, and as the increase of food and the protection of the girl from premature child-bearing has approximated the stature and strength and enterprise of the woman more and more to that of the man, this secular emancipation of the human female from the old herd subordination and servitude to the patriarchal male has gone on.  Essentially the secular process has been an equalising process.  It was merely the exaggeration of its sustaining causes during the plenty and social and intellectual expansion of the last half-century that had stimulated this secular process to the pitch of crisis.

There have always been two extreme aspects of the sexual debate.  There have always been the oversexed women who wanted to be treated primarily as women, and the women who were irritated and bored by being treated primarily as women.  There have always been those women who wanted to get, like Joan of Arc, into masculine attire, and the school of the “mystical darlings.”  There have always been the women who wanted to share men’s work and the women who wanted to “inspire” it—­the mates and the mistresses.  Of course, the mass of women lies between these extremes.  But it is possible, nevertheless, to discuss this question as though it were a conflict of two sharply opposed ideals.  It is convenient to write as if there were just these two sorts of women because so one can get a sharp definition in the picture.  The ordinary woman fluctuates between the two, turns now to the Western ideal of citizenship and now to the Eastern of submission.  These ideals fight not only in human society, but in every woman’s career.

Chitra in Rabindranath Tagore’s play, for example, tried both aspects of the woman’s life, and Tagore is at one with Plato in preferring the Rosalind type to the houri.  And with him I venture to think is the clear reason of mankind.  The real “emancipation” to which reason and the trend of things makes is from the yielding to the energetic side of a woman’s disposition, from beauty enthroned for love towards the tall, weather-hardened woman with a spear, loving her mate as her mate loves her, and as sexless as a man in all her busy hours.