Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/160

 says (Woman Adrift, p. 234): "The relations between man and woman are not political or even social, they are personal in the highest degree, and in a kind that exists in no other relation of life whatever." Such a mistake, like another of which mention has already been made, is only possible by the use of the rhetorical singular, and even then it does not follow that, because a man and a woman may have personal relations, there are not social and political matters of the greatest moment involved in those relations. That there are/ man has acknowledged ages back, by making laws to regulate the relations of men and women. We know that a woman has no personal relations at all with the millions of men who govern the world she has to live in, and we resent the misplaced appeal to sentiment of a personal kind in such a connection. Social, political, racial sentiment there may be, but personal sentiment can only exist between individuals, and all sentiment is not good either,—the sentiment of power and ownership, for instance, when they are held over human beings.

The reactionary man is very fond of asserting that women don't want this, that or the other. He generally can give no reason for this statement; enough that he knows it. When it is pointed out to him that all articulate and organised women do want it and say so, he declares contemptuously that these women don't count. It is not womanly to organise. Everyone knows that the traditional