about, that roars outside our doors and mocks us or treads us under foot if we try to get into it, but a vast masculine realm of co-operative industries and activities, in which we have neither part nor lot, and whose masters do not wish us to have any? And why should they care for our thought and labour, except that they get them cheaper? They help and employ, they buy and sell with each other, each one taking what he can do best, and getting paid for it according to its value. However at times they may fight and quarrel, yet in the main they all hang together, stimulating and encouraging each other to the most gigantic enterprises, and compelling every man who would succeed to put forth the whole of his very best.
What an infinite contrast their unity and wealth and power and glory make to our isolation and poverty and weakness and obscurity! And yet, all feeble and poor as we are, we never seek to
"Climb nearer out of lonely Hell"
to each other, but, remaining apart, aloof, suspicious, and critical, we suffer ourselves, and see the whole sex suffer, from the most dreadful forms of human degradation, and never come together so much as to find out the reason, far less to decide on a remedy.
The primal Feminine Necessity.
I have said that men do not want us in their world, and our general indifference to the extension of manhood suffrage to women shows that we have very little desire to enter it. What we do need, however, is a world of our own, a place in the universe for ourselves,—one not so wide, so grand, so rich, or so varied, it may be, as that which they have created, but a free and cheerful sphere, where we can meet and help each other in work and play, can forget our present formal and stilted intercourse and narrow gossip in a busy round of important interests and a frank exchange of thought and sympathy,—can expand all
