Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/35

 of culture, he has read or heard enough to know that the burdens which women carry and the wrongs from which they suffer, in this country at least, are not to be compared, for weight and cruelty, with the burdens and wrongs of the women of the dark ages. History does not record that any considerable number of the women of the past have organised to protest against any specific wrong to their sex. They appear to have borne with surprising equanimity the really cruel tortures they were called upon to endure. There may, of course, be sufficient reasons for this. Perhaps the physical strength of their male conquerors was too much for them. Or perhaps they were, for reasons of their own, genuinely content to suffer. Perhaps custom, tradition, and religion had too firm a hold upon them, so that, whilst they groaned, they yielded.

What the plain man cannot understand, and what he wants to know, is exactly why this century and the last have been chosen for the organisation of masses of women on their own behalf; why the women's movement should choose to emerge at a time and in a world where more freedom is enjoyed by a larger number of women than during any previous period of the history of woman.

To reply to this question is an obligation which lies upon every sincere supporter of