Her ferment went to the bottom of things this time.  Not since the age of the Amazon had a body of women broken more utterly with things as they are.  And like the Amazon, the revolt was against man and his pretensions.

It was no unorganized revolt.  It was deliberate.  It presented her case in a carefully prepared List of Grievances, and an eloquent Declaration of Sentiments[1] both adopted in a strictly parliamentary way, and made the basis of an organized revolt, which has gone on systematically ever since.  The essence of her complaint, as embodied in the above expression, is that man is a conscious tyrant holding woman an unwilling captive—­cutting her off from the things in life which really matter:  education, freedom of speech, the ballot; that she can never be his equal until she does the same things her tyrant does, studies the book he studies, practices the trades and professions he practices, works with him in government.

The inference from all this is that the Business of Being a Woman, as it has been conducted heretofore by society, is of less importance than the Business of Being a Man, and that the time has come to enter his world and prove her equality.

There are certain assumptions in her program which will bear examination.  Is man the calculating tyrant the modern uneasy woman charges?  Are her fetters due only to his unfair domination?  Or is she suffering from the generally bungling way things go in the world?  And is not man a victim as well as she—­caught in the same trap?  Moreover, is woman never a tyrant?  One of the first answers to her original revolt came from the most eminent woman of the day, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and it was called “Pink and White Tyranny!” “I have seen a collection of medieval English poems,” says Chesterton, “in which the section headed ‘Poems of Domestic Life’ consisted entirely (literally entirely) of the complaints of husbands bullied by their wives.”

Again, will doing the same things a man does work as well in stifling her unrest as she fancies it has in man’s case?  If a woman’s temperamental and intellectual operations were identical with a man’s, there would be hope of success,—­but they are not.  She is a different being.  Whether she is better or worse, stronger or weaker, primary or secondary, is not the question.  She is different.

And she tries to ease a world-old human curse by imitating the occupations, points of views, and methods of a radically different being.  Can she realize her quest in this way?  Generally speaking, nothing is more wasteful in human operations than following a course which is not native and spontaneous, not according to the law of the being.

If she demonstrates her points, successfully copies man’s activities, can she impress her program on any great body of women?  The mass of women believe in their task.  Its importance is not capable of argument in their minds.  Nor do they see themselves dwarfed by their business.  They know instinctively that under no other circumstances can such ripeness and such wisdom be developed, that nowhere else is the full nature called upon, nowhere else are there such intricate, delicate, and intimate forces in play, calling and testing them.