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.
It was inevitable, but unfortunate, that this movement should have sometimes tended to take the form of an attempt on the part of women to secure, not merely equality with men, but actual imitation of men.
These women said that since men had attained mastery in life, captured all the best things, and adopted the most successful methods of living, it was necessary for women to copy them at every point. That was a specious plea which even had in it a certain element of truth.
But the fact remained that women and men are different, that the difference is based in fundamental natural functions, and that to place one sex in exactly the same position as the other sex is to deform its outlines and to hamper its activities.
From the present point of view we are only concerned with the influence of the woman's movement on love. On the traditional conception of romantic love inherited from medieval days there can be no doubt that this influence has been highly dissolvent. Medieval romantic love, in its original form, had been part of a conception of womanhood made up of opposites, and all the opposites balanced each other. The medieval man laid his homage at the feet of the