Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/167

 have lived longer to give us more of it. The stubborn courage of this woman of genius during years of soul-imprisonment and starvation should surely help to break down these stupid and wasteful cruelties.

The enthusiasts for Normal Woman do not entirely deny that here and there an exceptional woman may suffer from the restrictions of a woman's life, but they suggest that these sufferings are exaggerated, and affect only the exceptional women, and in any case only matter to the sufferer herself. It is wonderful with what complacency people can contemplate the sufferings of others; wonderful, too, the assumption that "exceptional" women are negligible, as if it were not, after all, only among the exceptional that we might hope to find genius. These people will tell you that women have never done anything which the world would have missed, except the one work of mothering the race. Therefore to this work they should be restricted. Women will never, so they say, be anything but third-rate in arts or sciences or crafts; they can be superlative mothers; let them concentrate on that. If they do not, it is darkly suggested that they will lose even the capacity for mothering, and then, where will they be? And, what is worse, where will men be?

Sometimes these views are advanced with all the thunders of an angry prophet; sometimes, more in sorrow than in anger, it is suggested that woman will sooner or later return to weep on the breast of man, and beg to be allowed, like Katharine, the