Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/166

 and shape, label them Normal Woman and stuff in all the women indiscriminately. But the cruelty and the waste is seen if we understand how the norm is arrived at. Procrustes' bed was for normal persons. If you measured all the feet of humanity and then found the average and made one boot—the average boot—for men, women and children, they would all suffer, but the severest sufferings would be those of the men with the largest feet. So with the wretched insistence on making all life to fit the average woman. She doesn't exist; she is a figment of men's minds, and every single woman suffers in her degree from the tyranny of the average, but the woman who suffers most is the biggest woman. The world suffers too, from the stunting or warping or exasperation of its strongest and most original female minds. One has only to think of the agony of loneliness of a Charlotte Brontë, of the limiting of her opportunities for equal friendships, for which she had so rare a genius, of her starvation in experience and in knowledge, and of the cruel tyranny of hated, because uncongenial, toil. A normal woman loves children, it is said. Well, Charlotte Brontë did not love children; yet she was forced to teach them, and to wear out her heart over them, and she cannot even have done it at all well. The children would have been better taught by someone else. If Charlotte Brontë had been given the same scope to shape her life as Branwell had—merely because he was a man—her work might have gained by contact with wider life, and she herself might