But it was not simply the energies that tended towards this particular type that were set free during the latter half of the nineteenth century.  Every sort of feminine energy was set free.  And it was not merely the self-reliant, independence-seeking women who were discontented.  The ladies who specialised in feminine arts and graces and mysteries were also dissatisfied.  They found they were not important enough.  The former type found itself insufficiently respected, and the latter type found itself insufficiently adored.  The two mingled their voices in the most confusing way in the literature of the suffrage movement before the war.  The two tendencies mingle confusingly in the minds of the women that this movement was stirring up to think.  The Vote became the symbol for absolutely contradictory things; there is scarcely a single argument for it in suffragist literature that cannot be completely negatived out of suffragist literature.

For example, compare the writings of Miss Cicely Hamilton, the distinguished actress, with the publications of the Pankhurst family.  The former expresses a claim that, except for prejudice, a woman is as capable a citizen as a man and differing only in her sex; the latter consist of a long rhapsody upon the mystical superiorities of women and the marvellous benefits mankind will derive from handing things over to these sacred powers.  The former would get rid of sex from most human affairs; the latter would make what our Georgian grandfathers called “The Sex” rule the world.

Or compare, say, the dark coquettings of Miss Elizabeth Robins’ “Woman’s Secret” with the virile common sense of that most brilliant young writer, Miss Rebecca West, in her bitter onslaught on feminine limitations in the opening chapters of “The World’s Worst Failure.”  The former is an extravagance of sexual mysticism.  Man can never understand women.  Women always hide deep and wonderful things away beyond masculine discovery.  Men do not even suspect.  Some day, perhaps—­It is someone peeping from behind a curtain, and inviting men in provocative tones to come and play catch in a darkened harem.  The latter is like some gallant soldier cursing his silly accoutrements.  It is a hearty outbreak against that apparent necessity for elegance and sexual specialisation that undercuts so much feminine achievement, that reduces so much feminine art and writing to vapidity, and holds back women from the face of danger and brave and horrible deaths.  It is West to Miss Robins’ East.  And yet I believe I am right in saying that all these four women writers have jostled one another upon suffrage platforms, and that they all suffered blows and injuries in the same cause, during the various riots and conflicts that occurred in London in the course of the great agitation.  It was only when the agitation of the Pankhurst family, aided by Miss Robins’ remarkable book “Where are you going to ...?” took a form that threatened to impose the most extraordinary restrictions on the free movements of women, and to establish a sort of universal purdah of hostility and suspicion against those degraded creatures, those stealers and destroyers of women, “the men,” that the British feminist movement displayed any tendency to dissociate into its opposed and divergent strands.