Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/202

 men have been comparatively recent, there have been great artists, from the earliest times, who have held the mirror up to man and shown him his deeds towards woman. No feminist tract can compare for propaganda purposes with The Trojan Women, or Medea. Tell a woman she has no concern with the great imperial matters of peace and war, and then give her the first to read! She will have a whole armoury of answers. Or try to crush a woman who has read the second with reproaches concerning the treachery and falseness of womankind! If the sex-war is as old as history, there have been—and herein lies our chief hope—men in all times who have read its causes. If it were not so, we might despair of the true causes ever appearing to all.

If sex-war has existed because the majority of men were tempted by their superior physical force to enslave women, and because the majority of women have retaliated by using the only power available to them, the power of sex, to get some of their own back, it is clear that much of the war on the women's side was not overt. It is impossible, however, to believe that the women who have lied to men, and deceived them, and who have played upon their sex, have not in their hearts felt considerable contempt for the men they were entrapping through their grosser nature. It is a sorry picture that is presented to us, of the "womanly" woman cajoling and bamboozling a man into complaisance, and that state of things cannot