Meantime, for good or ill, women have eaten, and are eating of the tree of knowledge as they will.  If this has driven them out of the little paradise of the past, they are in a fair way to make the whole world into a paradise of the present.  Only through training their minds could they have broken away from an outworn past.  In this time of readjustment there must be many mistakes and many tragedies.[26] The fool-killer will gather a rich harvest, but if we are open-minded and eager to see the truth, each martyr will teach her sisters, and the future generations of women will conserve the values of the past and add to them new treasures and new graces of knowledge and understanding.

[26] See chapter on Education of Adolescent Girls, in Adolescence, by G. STANLEY HALL.  New York:  D. Appleton & Co., 1904.

It is most unfortunate that these real issues should be obscured by sex rivalry.  There can be no real rivalry between a man’s soul and his body, between science and religion, between man and woman.  Such antagonisms rest back in the failure to realize the incompleteness of man or woman alone, for any purposes of life.  And there is, too, that evil notion which still affects economics, that when two trade one must lose.  The fact is that in all honest exchange buyer and seller gain alike, and all who participate become rich.  It is so in all honest relations between these half-creatures we call men and women.  In agreement, association, cooeperation, lies strongest significant life for both.  In separation, competition and antagonism lie arid, poor, mean lives, conceited and egotistic, vapid and contemptible.

IV

The Feminizing of Culture

With the weakening of sex prejudices and the removal of legal restrictions on women’s freedom it was inevitable that they should invade fields of activity where formerly only men were found.  Since women must eat every one knew that they must work, and the sight of a woman at work was no new experience.  Even in the days when they were most secluded and protected, the number kept in ease was always very small compared with the women slaves and servants who spun, cooked and served.  Hence men were used to seeing women at work; and while industrial adjustments have not been easily made, they have still been accepted as a matter of course.  But who, fifty years ago, could have imagined that to-day women would be steadily monopolizing learning, teaching, literature, the fine arts, music, the church and the theater?  And yet that is the condition at which we have arrived.  We may scoff at the way women are doing the work, and reject the product, but that does not alter the fact that step by step women are taking over the field of liberal culture as opposed to the field of immediately productive work.