Men, when alone, become selfish, coarse, and reckless; their judgments become extravagant and their pursuits remorseless.

Thus it is certainly true that men and women supplement each other in the subjective as in the objective life.  Man creates, woman conserves; man composes, woman interprets; man generalizes, woman particularizes; man seeks beauty, woman embodies beauty; man thinks more than he feels, woman feels more than she thinks.  For new spiritual birth, as for physical birth, men and women must supplement each other.

To be a woman then, is to be for twenty-five years a girl and then a young woman, capable of feeding and protecting herself, possessed of preparing and conserving powers superior to her brothers.  After that, for twenty-five years, she is a human being primarily devoted to romanticism, finding her largest fulfilment only in wifehood and motherhood, direct or vicarious; in the last twenty-five years, she should be a wise woman, of ripe experience, carrying over her gathered training and powers to the service of the group.  All this time she is, like the man, an incomplete creature, realizing her greatest power and her greatest service only when working in loving association with the man of her choice.

II

Woman’s Heritage

So thoroughly have modern men fastened their attention upon the problems of the immediate present, that one feels driven to justify oneself in taking up an historical investigation of any subject presented in a popular manner.  And yet it takes little argument to show that what we shall be depends in large measure on what we are; and that what we are rests back on what we have been.  In anything we try to think or feel or do, we quickly reach a limit; and this limit is determined by the original quality of our nervous system plus the training it has received.  For here is the curious fact about this instrument of thought and feeling which at once takes it away from comparison with mechanical instruments.  Whatever it does, becomes a part of itself, and then helps to determine what it will do the next time and how it will do it.  With the making easy of mental operations through repetition, and with the formation of associations based on our choices, it may be truly said that we become whatever we habitually think and feel and do.

Every choice we make is thus literally built into our character and becomes a part of ourselves.  After that, the old choice will help determine the new, and we shall find ourselves being directed by all of our past choices, and even by the choices of our ancestors.  Since, then, all our earlier selves are continued in us and make us what we are, we are simply studying ourselves when we study the history of our ancestors.  If we would go forward, we must first look backward; for we must rise on stepping-stones of our dead selves.