Page:Marriage as a Trade.djvu/212

 will have a perfect right to declare that woman is what he has always believed and desired her to be, that she is the chattel, the domestic animal, the matron or the mistress, that her subjection is a subjection enjoined by natural law, that her inferiority to himself is an ordained and inevitable inferiority. Then he will have that right; but not till then.

Some of us believe and hope with confidence that, given such wider life and freer choice, he would have to admit himself mistaken, would have to confess that the limitations once confining us were, for the most part, of his own invention. And we base that belief and very confident hope on the knowledge that there are in us, and in our sisters, many qualities which we are not supposed to possess and which once were unsuspected by ourselves; and on the certainty that the needs and circumstances of modern life are encouraging, whether or no we will it, the development of a side of our nature which we have heretofore been strictly forbidden to develop—the side that comes in contact with the world. Economic pressure and the law of self-preservation produced the "