in the face.

The world often puts the artificial before the actual; but under the
dispensation of the Christian civilization--derived from the Hebraic--the
family requiring a head, headship is assigned to the male. This male is
commonly not much to speak of for beauty of form or decency of behavior.
He is made purposely tough for work and fight. He gets toughened by outer
contact. But back of all are the women, the children and the home.

I have been fighting the woman's battle for equality in the things that
count, all my life. I would despise myself if I had not been. In contesting
precipitate universal suffrage for women, I conceived that I was still
fighting the woman's battle.

We can escape none of Nature's laws. But we need not handicap ourselves
with artificial laws. At best, life is an experiment, Death the final
adventure. Feminism seems to me its next of kin; still we may not call the
woman who assails the soap boxes--even those that antic about the White
House gates--by the opprobrious terms of adventuress. Where such a one is
not a lunatic she is a nuisance. There are women and women.

We may leave out of account the shady ladies of history. Neither Aspasia
nor Lucrezia Borgia nor the Marquise de Brinvilliers could with accuracy
be called an adventuress. The term is of later date. Its origin and growth
have arisen out of the complexities of modern society.

In fiction Milady and Madame Marneffe come in for first honors--in each the
leopard crossed on the serpent and united under a petticoat, beautiful
and wicked--but since the Balzac and Dumas days the story-tellers and
stage-mongers have made exceeding free with the type, and we have between