Points of Friction
ship was an obstacle in their path. Self-love has prompted them to overrate their imposed, and underrate their inherent, disabilities. "Whenever you see a woman getting a high salary, make up your mind that she is giving twice the value received," writes an irritable correspondent to the "Survey"; and this pretension paralyzes effort. To be satisfied with ourselves is to be at the end of our usefulness.
M. Émile Faguet, that most radical and least sentimental of French feminists, would have opened wide to women every door of which man holds the key. He would have given them every legal right and burden which they are physically fitted to enjoy and to bear. He was as unvexed by doubts as he was uncheered by illusions. He had no more fear of the downfall of existing institutions than he had hope for the regeneration of the world. The equality of men and women, as he saw it, lay, not in
190
