Page:The Woman Socialist - Snowden - 1907.djvu/30

 whole condition of woman’s bondage, political, economic, and sexual (the last two being the offspring of the first), are the chains of a decrepit and soul-destroying orthodoxy and conventionality with which time and centuries of training have tamed her spirit, dulled her intellect, and crippled her body. It is this which has made so disastrously against her in every effort which has been made for her enfranchisement. It is this which seems to offer a justification for the taunt of her mental inferiority; to people, at least, who are not able to see in this condition an effect as well as a cause of her slavery. She has allowed herself to be cramped and baffled and hindered by rules imposed upon her by a man-governed society. She cannot escape from the dominion of the proprieties. "How do I look? What shall I wear? What ought I to do? What will people say?" And the men who have made this slavish code of morals and manners for women, and who insist on their observance, despise the women who obey them, and show their contempt for their own regulations by consistently and absolutely refusing to be governed by these themselves.