Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/168

 Shrew, to lay her hand beneath his foot. To do otherwise would argue in the fair sex (to use the denunciatory language of Sir James Fitz James Stephen) a "base, mutinous disposition," which we sincerely hope she has not. In the words of Mr. Garvin (Pall Mall Gazette, 30th July 1913), "we can only hope that, whatever the woman of the future may prove to be, some of the womanliness which we knew when Victoria was Queen will remain in her, and that, when the first force of revolt is spent, she will once more realise the full glory of wifehood and motherhood. On that point we have no great fear, for, whatever her vagaries, woman will remain woman at heart." I should like to rescue this exquisite piece of fatuity from oblivion, to make merry the hearts of future generations of men and women.

Now, as regards genius, we may know how much genius women have in some hundreds of years, when they have been free to develop according to their natures. The kind of emotional tyranny to which women have been subjected is the most crushing of all, and men have never had to undergo this particular sort of tyranny, so that it is not in the least true to say that if women had had any genius it would have overcome tyranny, as men's genius has done. No man has ever known what it is to be born of the more sensitive, sympathetic, conscientious and affectionate sex, and to be reared in an atmosphere where insult and hate followed on any expression of genius, where cold discouragement was the best that a woman could