Chapter I: Introduction

Since every age has its own great discovery, who will deny “Woman” her laurels as the Discovery of this Century?

Opinions are still divided as to how and why Woman as a Force actually made her first appearance. Some declare that she had been seeking enfranchisement for over sixty years; others maintain that the Woman Movement began with militancy.

The truth is that no one noticed her first coming. Apparently without warning, she burst the fetters of domesticity and sprang from obscurity into the blazing sun. Wakening the dullest and the most awkward of the centuries, she stepped, one might say, bounded, into Freedom.

Like radium or electricity, Woman the Force was always there, and the age that needed her discovered her. We believe that Nature intended this Force to balance the Force of Man. The scales must be even; and where one of the sexes has been either atrophied or over-developed, the State falls.

But _the scales must be even_. We are too near our subject, and events now happening are not sufficiently in perspective for it to be possible to write even a résume of the Woman’s Movement, but it must be evident to everyone that there is something fundamentally wrong with the situation as it stands at present.

Nothing has happened to weaken our faith in the possibilities of the great Discovery, but it cannot be denied that Woman as a Force has been and is being mishandled by many a clumsy engineer.

It is our purpose, in these pages, to examine their mistakes.