Now this world-old restlessness of the women has a sound and a tragic cause.  Nature lays a compelling hand on her.  Unless she obeys freely and fully she must pay in unrest and vagaries.  For the normal woman the fulfillment of life is the making of the thing we best describe as a home—­which means a mate, children, friends, with all the radiating obligations, joys, burdens, these relations imply.

This is nature’s plan for her; but the home has got to be founded inside the imperfect thing we call society.  And these two, nature and society, are continually getting into each other’s way, wrecking each other’s plans, frustrating each other’s schemes.  The woman almost never is able to adjust her life so as fully to satisfy both.  She is between two fires.  Euripides understood this when he put into Medea’s mouth a cry as modern as any that Ibsen has conceived:—­

    Of all things upon earth that grow,
    A herb most bruised is woman.  We must pay
    Our store of gold, hoarded for that one day,
    To buy us some man’s love; and lo, they bring
    A master of our flesh!  There comes the sting
    Of the whole shame.  And then the jeopardy,
    For good or ill, what shall that master be;
    ’Tis magic she must have or prophecy—­
    Home never taught her that—­how best to guide
    Toward peace this thing that sleepeth at her side. 
    And she who, laboring long, shall find some way
    Whereby her lord may bear with her, nor fray
    His yoke too fiercely, blessed is the breath
    That woman draws!

Medea’s difficulty was that which is oftenest in the way of a woman carrying her business in life to a satisfactory completion—­false mating.  It is not a difficulty peculiar to woman.  Man knows it as often.  It is the heaviest curse society brings on human beings—­the most fertile cause of apathy, agony, and failure.  If the woman’s cry is more poignant under it than the man’s, it is because the machine which holds them both allows him a wider sweep, more interests outside of their immediate alliance.  “A man, when he is vexed at home,” complains Medea, “can go out and find relief among his friends or acquaintances, but we women have none to look at but him.”

And when it is impossible longer to “look” at him, what shall she do!  Tell her woe to the world, seek a soporific, repudiate the scheme of things, or from the vantage point of her failure turn to the untried relations of her life, call upon her unused powers?

From the beginning of time she has tried each and all of these methods of meeting her purely human woe.  At times the women of whole peoples have sunk into apathy, their business reduced to its dullest, grossest forms.  Again, whole groups have taken themselves out of the partnership which both Nature and Society have ordered.  The Amazons refused to recognize man as an equal and mated simply that they might rear more women like themselves.  Here the tables were turned and the boy baby turned out—­not to the wolves, but to man!  The convent has always been a favorite way of escape.