WOMAN nowadays. Poor dear! How she is abused, derided, called this, that, and the other—but she goes steadily on her own way, and she is forging ahead. This will be woman’s century.

Everything that is new, old age dubs “deterioration.” Because the modern girl is not early Victorian, does not wear low dresses and satin slippers by day, shriek at a mouse or faint, she is called “unwomanly.” Surely this is ridiculous. She is stronger mentally and physically, she is beginning to take her place in the world; and because in the transition stage she has forgotten how to make cordials—which she can buy so much cheaper at any Co-operative Stores—she is styled “undomesticated.” Every age has its own manners, and customs and ideals.

No, no, you dear old people, don’t think her unsexed. Woman’s sphere should be the home; but her horizon must be the world.

In one sense there is nothing new under the sun. In another everything changes, is renewed continually, and should be new. Therefore, to call re-arrangement deterioration is absurd. It is more often advancement. We can no more go back than we can do without the telephone, telegraph, or taxi-cab. We are all progressing, improving; the world is improving. Read Society books of a couple of centuries back, and note the change. Note the coarseness of Fielding or Smollett, and see the refinement of to-day.

It is a very good world that we live in, but youth must not be sacrificed to old age, any more than old age must be sacrificed to youth. Both must stand alone.

All this hue and cry about women’s work is very ridiculous. Since the world began women have worked. They have borne the greatest of all burdens—child-bearing; and they have cooked and washed and mended and made. They have ministered to the wants of man and home.

Worked? Why, of course they have worked, but they have not always been paid. Now is their day. They are strong enough to demand the recognition the world has been ungenerous enough to withhold.

Equality in all things for the sexes will make happier men and women, happier homes, and a more prosperous nation.

All women cannot be bread-winners any more than all men can be soldiers. Women are marching onward in every land, their advancement and the progress of civilisation are synonymous terms to-day.

The greater the women, the greater the country.

It is ridiculous to say that women workers oust men. This is hardly ever the case. In these days of endless change, when a machine is frequently introduced that does the work of four or five men, labour is constantly re-arranged. Then again, with increase of work, so there is incessant all-round shifting of the distribution of employment. Women do not take the place of men. They merely find their own footing in the general change. There is a niche for everyone ready to fill it.

Yes, women do work, and women must work, although a vast amount of misery might be, and ought to be, alleviated by their men-folk. The present disastrous state of things is largely due to men not providing for their wives or equipping their daughters to be wage-earners.

There are, of course, a few enthusiastic women who work for work’s sake, but they take the bread out of no man’s mouth. These are the writers of deep and profound books, who make as many shillings as they spend pounds in collecting their material—women who love research work in science; women who labour among the poor, organise clubs and homes, and devote their lives to charity and good deeds; but the cases are rare, almost nil, where women work for salary who do not need the money. Those who do certainly take the bread from the mouths of men and women alike; but the rich workers who accept pay are so few they do not count.

Many women with small incomes seek to increase those incomes in order to clothe their children, pay the butcher, or have more to spend on little luxuries, but these, again, are a small class. The large multitude of women who work are those who must do so, and they are the ones who require help, for theirs is an uphill fight against great odds. They have to contend with want of general education, want of special training, want of physical strength, want of positions open to women, when they enter the already overcrowded field of labour.

Women must work until men realise the responsibility of thrusting them unequipped into the sea of life to sink or swim on the tide of chance.

How bravely women do it too. Aching hearts and throbbing brows are forgotten in the fight for daily existence. Poor souls, how hard many of them toil, how lonely are their lives, and what a struggle it is for them to keep their heads above water. Many of them do so, however; and to them all honour is due.

Men and women should never be pitted as rivals in anything. Each sex has its own place to fill; but when the exigencies of fighting for existence occur, men should nobly help the courageous woman worker over the difficulties her men-folk have thoughtlessly placed before her.

I hate sex. Surely, in working, thinking, human beings—it does not matter whether one wears petticoats or trousers—there should be no sex as regards bread-earning. There are a million and a quarter too many women in England, and the gates of independence and occupation must not be shut in their faces. Personally, I should like boys and girls to be equal in everything. Forget sex, bring them up together, educate them together. Send them to public schools and Universities together, open all the trades and professions to women the same as to men. Let them stand shoulder to shoulder.

Many people thought that the heavens would descend if a woman became a doctor. They were wrong. Women are doing well in medicine and surgery, though they are still excluded from the Bar and the Church.

Yes, give girls just the same advantages as boys. Divide your incomes equally amongst all your children when you die, irrespective of sex. Give them equality in divorce. The world will be all the happier.

Women will find their own level—just as men do; they will make or mar their own lives—just as men do. But let men cease shutting gates of employment in their faces.

A nation’s power depends on the physical strength and character of its women, and not on its army of men, or its statesmen.

How I envy men with professions. They come down to comfortable breakfasts, without the least idea of what will be laid before them. They enjoy it, have a look at the papers, perhaps a pipe, and then they get into boots and top-coat, go off to their chambers, offices, studios, or their consulting-rooms, as the case may be. They throw themselves into their work, knowing that no interruptions will occur during the whole course of the morning.

They enjoy their luncheon, which they have not had the worry of ordering beforehand, and so by the time four, or five, or six o’clock arrives they have done a good day’s work without annoyance from outside. They have earned so much money, and not far off they see a tangible reward. Lucky men!

How differently things go with a woman like myself, with a small income, a house, servants, children, all as important as the daily round of wage-earning. By the time one gets settled down to one’s desk at nine-thirty or ten o’clock one has gone through the drudgery of it all. The orders and wants of cook, housemaid, parlourmaid, and nurse have all been attended to. The cheques for washing bills and grocers’ books have to be written, orders sent for coals, the soda-water telephoned for, with all the endless round of wearying details which every housekeeper knows. In the midst of one’s morning work, curtains return from the cleaners, and have to be paid for at the door, or a man comes to mend the bell, and one has to leave one’s desk to show him exactly what is wrong. In fact, the interruptions are incessant even in the best regulated households, and one has to bring one’s distracted mind back from domestic details to write important letters or articles for the Press.

A working woman’s life would be endurable were it not for the interruptions.

Yes! I have lived the ordinary woman’s life and the professional woman’s life as well, and I always say to myself that the professional part is a mere bagatelle, because of the larger rewards, in comparison with the ceaseless worries and endless interruptions that fall at the feet of every housekeeper.

Men do not half enough appreciate the amount of work (becoming every year more difficult), the extraordinary number of little details, necessary to run even the simplest home.

When one covers one’s own furniture, embroiders one’s own cloths, and trims one’s own hats into the bargain, the daily round becomes complicated indeed.

I believe in clubs for women. It is so heavenly to get away from an ordinary dinner. It is really a holiday to have a chop or a fried sole, that one has not ordered hours beforehand. Besides, at the club one sometimes learns new dishes, and certainly new ideas from the newspapers and magazines, all of which one could not afford to take in at home independently.

For the unmarried woman the club is absolutely indispensable. It gives her a place where she can receive her friends, and let it be known that women are more hospitable than men. They are poorer, but are more generous in giving invitations to tea or a meal. Men’s clubs are full of old women, and women’s clubs full of young men, nowadays.

A club is also a boon to the married woman, for there are days when country relations arrive in town, when, for instance, the sweep has been ordered at home; then the country or foreign friends can be taken to the club, and need not know that their hostess’s small household cannot tackle a luncheon because of the advent of the sweep.

I believe clubs encourage women to read, and I am sure that expands their ideas and opens their minds. Women’s clubs are certainly an advantage, and though I have been an original member of several, I always float back to my first love, the Albemarle, where our marble halls, once the Palace of the Bishop of Ely, receive both men and women members.

I love my own sex. They are the guiding stars of the Universe, and the modern girl tends to make the world much more interesting than it used to be. Youth must spread its wings, and if it is sound youth it will be gently guided by experience. Let the bird fly, or it will fret at the bars of its cage, break its wings, and languish.

No one ever profited by the experience of another, any more than any person inherited the learning of an ancestor. Alas and alack, we must acquire both for ourselves.

To our mothers and grandmothers, with their sweet but secluded and often sequestered lives, it would have seemed a deed of daring for a woman to lecture the public. Would they have thought it—would our grandfathers rather have held it “ladylike”?

It is curious how one acquires a reputation without the least foundation. For instance, I am always being asked to lecture; sometimes it is at a People’s Palace, sometimes before a learned society, or on behalf of various charities, or to address the blind, or deliver educational discourses; and even the famous Major Pond of America once tried to persuade me to go on a lecturing tour in the States.

Tempting as his money offer was, I dared not face that vast public.

This reputation is a chimera, for I have only lectured a few times in my life; and these occasions have chiefly been at the People’s Palace at Vauxhall, where an audience of two or three thousand persons, paying from one penny to sixpence, eat oranges, smoke pipes, and otherwise enjoy themselves after their manner, while the lecturer is doing his (or her) best to amuse them. To keep these people out of the public-houses and well occupied for an evening seems worth even the pain and nervousness of standing alone on a stage, nearly as big as that of Drury Lane, with footlights before, and a huge white curtain for one’s slides behind.

The first time I ever spoke in public was at a large meeting (seven or eight hundred) held in the St. Martin’s Town Hall, when at an hour or two’s notice I took the place of the late Earl of Winchilsea, and, in reply to his bidding by telegram, discoursed for fifteen minutes on the position of women in Agriculture, a subject in which I was much interested at the time. I spoke from notes only, having a horror of a read paper, which is always exasperating or inaudible. Most speeches are too low and too long. The fifteen minutes appeared to be nothing, but the moments of waiting were torture until the first words had come forth. When one’s knees shake, and one’s tongue seems to cleave to the roof of the mouth, when the audience dances like myriads of fireflies before one’s eyes, the misery is so awful that the result is not worth the effort.

Women are often excellent speakers, both in matter and style, and those who have an equal amount of practice are quite as good as the best men. Nevertheless, after-dinner speaking is, alas, far more often boring than entertaining, and one regrets a bell does not ring after five minutes, as a gentle hint to sit down. The poor speaker seldom knows when the right moment to end has arrived.

Everyone is shy about something. The rough-edged shyness of youth wears away, but we each remain tender somewhere. Shyness overpowers me when making a speech, or on hearing my name roared into a room full of people. The first makes me sick, in spite of having addressed an audience of three thousand people, which I find easier than thirty; the second makes me wish to run away.

“I’m shy,” is the excuse of youth to cover rudeness. Gauche, awkward, ill-mannered boys and girls call these delinquencies shyness. Being shy, however, is no extenuation of being discourteous. It is merely selfish self-conceit allowed to run rampant instead of being checked. How much easier it is to form a bad impression than to destroy one.

We are all imperfect, but the only chance of bettering ourselves is to realise the fact early and try self-reform.

I have been fighting faults all my life, and although I have overcome some of them—and I shan’t tell you what they are—a vast crop still remain to be mowed down by the scythe of Time.

The question of women and the suffrage is now so important that it is impossible for any thinking man or woman not to have an opinion on the subject. What a curious thing it is that Liberals who stand for Progress fear this onward movement. Is it because they think women in the main are conservative?

On the 6th of February, 1907, at the time when the Women Suffragists were being marched in scores to prison, and big processions were being organised, and endless fusses and excitements were in the air, Punch wrote an amusing article, sweeping away the House of Lords, and substituting for it a House of Ladies.

My name happened to be among the half-dozen elected Peeresses, and a funny crew we were. Miss Christabel Pankhurst was chosen because she was then considered the only good-looking suffragette. Madame Zansig because of her thought-reading propensities. Clara Butt because she could reduce chaos to harmony, and so on.

Anyway, the article was commented on tremendously in the Press, and was the subject of much amusement among my friends. It brought me many quibs, telegrams, and telephones of congratulation on my elevation to the Peerage.

The following letter is from a notable woman, written about two years later:

Later I wrote a long article in the Fortnightly Review, entitled “Women and Work,” on the strength of which I received the following note from the pioneer of the movement:

Every youthful person is a revolutionary at heart; anyway, I was, but as years have mounted up, even my radical tendencies have diminished. The real guides of a nation are the thinkers. Democracy must obey leadership, and leadership is the outcome of brains and learning. Here and there a great man rises from the millions; but the larger percentage of great men are to be found in the aristocracy and upper middle classes, not in the lower tenth, or even the lower middle class. I am becoming more conservative with years. It seems so much more easy to pull down than to build, and all this Socialistic cry is towards pulling down, upsetting, upheaving, without the slightest idea how to draw up a programme of reform or produce a single leader of worth.

It requires brains to appreciate brains. It requires talent to understand talent. It requires knowledge and experience to value the beautiful, and vast capacity to build, to organise, to make or to govern.

Many women nowadays have the full courage of their opinions. They say things and write things; lecture on them. But for myself—well, no!—not yet quite.

Something awful would happen to me if I wrote all the things I think. To suggest one finds it actually sinful to incubate miserable seedlings—the offspring of poverty, children conceived in drink, immorality, insanity, epilepsy, children doomed from birth—brings down denunciation. One hardly dare espouse such views, while it is considered more good, more noble, more moral to foster a population of degenerates than to prevent it. Our prisons are largely filled by drink or insanity, but we feed and keep the creatures and send them out to propagate their species, who in their turn fall upon the rates. Degenerates should never be allowed to marry.

We court adultery by our Separation Acts, tie unfortunate men and women to lunatics, instead of clearing the air by cheap divorce. We positively suggest infidelity by not making equal laws for men and women. We force women to work or starve, and then abuse them for entering men’s professions; but we hardly dare speak or write openly on these subjects, oh dear, no!

We see women neglecting their homes for bridge or men scattering their wits by wrongful indulgences, and yet Society does not revolt. Still we are waking up, and why? Simply because women are beginning to take an interest in the big questions of life; and once they take a thing up they generally manage to sift it to the bottom.

This is woman’s century. She is playing a bold game for the equality of the sexes, but she will win; and the world will be the purer and better for the part she plays.

Women don’t faint nowadays, and have vapours and migraine. They no longer make jams or weep. They are up and doing. They do things instead of talking of them. They are becoming the comrades of men. It is the women of the twentieth century who are going to revise Society.

Lord Emmott, the late Deputy Speaker, was one day pretending to me that all evil came through women.

“Look at the apple,” he cited.

“Oh, come now, that chestnut is too old,” I replied.

“Old but nevertheless evergreen,” he answered promptly.

If men are creating unrest and Socialism, women are spurring their sons to work and instilling into them morality. The immoral man will find every decent door shut in his face before another century dawns, just as the drunkard has been hounded from Society. Who would tolerate drunkenness at a dinner-party to-day? Men and women both shrink from it, and the same will be felt towards loose living. Women are free, no longer the slaves of men, and they are exercising their freedom in the purification of all things, ably helped by their comrades.

Women don’t grow old nowadays, they no longer put on caps when they marry, or leave the nursery to become matrons. They develop younger, marry later, are independent and self-respecting, and never grow old.

Old ladies and bonnets have gone out of fashion.

Dress—especially women’s dress—has in all ages and climes, so far back as we can trace by rifling tombs, and studying picture-writings and prehistoric carvings, formed subject of comment and satire, but also of invariable interest.

What of the dress of womanhood in this opening century? On one point all mankind cry out and many women join in the loud appeal. Here, so please you, is an exordium that—one woman unit—fain would publish.