Page:The Genius of America (1923).pdf/120

 How the newly augmented powers of women and their quickened class consciousness will affect the situation in the future remains to be seen; but all experience indicates that these new powers and this quickened class consciousness will tend to fortify the alliance of popular philosophy and military discipline against a personal and internally centered morality. Women in masses are, or always have been, servile under the tyranny of social opinion, and subject to a very gross superstition. Whenever two or three of them are gathered together, the great goddess. They is in the midst of them with Her arrogant foot on their necks. There is no woman's club or tea or sewing circle or even domestic fireside where Her voice is not heard and where Her words are not solemnly quoted as oracles, ending with absolute finality all masculine dissent.

It is perhaps within the domestic circle that the tyranny of this deity is most ruthlessly imposed and substituted for the free and natural dictates of the private heart. I will illustrate the procedure. The average man might conceivably dispute, let us assume, with his own wife on fairly equal terms. He has devoted the better part of a to studying her special tactics and strategems, and knows how to meet them. But the average man is never per-