far more importance than muscular strength. The emancipation of women has simply been the later and more conscious phase of the process by which women have entered into this field and sought their share of its rights and its responsibilities.
The woman movement of modern times, properly understood, has thus been the effort of women to adapt themselves to the conditions of an orderly and peaceful civilization. Education, under the changed conditions, can effect what before needed force of arms; responsibility is now demanded where before only tutelage was possible. A civilized society in which women are ignorant and irresponsible is an anachronism, and, however great the wrench with the past might be, it was necessary that women should be adjusted to the changing times. The ideal of the weak, ignorant, inexperienced woman—the cross between an angel and an idiot, as I have elsewhere described her
16—no longer
fulfilled any useful purpose. Civilized society furnishes the conditions under which all adult persons are socially equal and all are free to give to society the best they are capable of.