I speak, of course, of the mass of women, and do not forget that already the intellect of alert and thoughtful women is equal to that of men of the corresponding class. The majority will be, as it were, differently orientated toward life by these changes. A saner muscular activity will restore the balance of the system, and will rid them of the excessive nerve-energy, particularly of the sympathetic system, which finds expression in facile and explosive emotion. There will assuredly always be a bias toward sentiment in woman, and we have no reason to fear a deterioration of the distinctively feminine sentiments of tenderness, refinement, and sympathy. The relief from the more irritating domesticities ought to accentuate them. On the other hand, the idea of obeying the male or practising self-sacrifice for his undue benefit, will certainly disappear; and it is quite time that it did. Self-sacrifice, in case of need, comes instinctively to either sex, but the kind of self-sacrifice which a selfish masculine tradition has pressed on women is degrading to the man and unjust to wife and daughter. All that is attractive and really beneficent in woman will be fostered, but on the emotional side it will become less and less characteristic of one sex. The sharp contrast of the sexes tends to disappear. There is something grotesque about the traditional idea that the human male must be distinguished by a greater capacity for taking alcohol and using meaningless expletives and telling sexual stories. Even in physical strength and athletic skill the sexes are approaching; nor does one find any loss of charm or grace in some of the finest women athletes.
These changes are proceeding, and, apart from inevitable errors and excesses, on which caricaturists fasten with their genial unscrupulousness, the result is promising. Contemporary expressions of alarm are often ludicrous. Thousands of ladies who are horrified at the emergence of "a new sex" are themselves contriving, by means which would have caused their prolific grandmothers to raise white hands to heaven, to limit their families to two children. We take our reform in small doses, as if complete social health were a thing to be considered very seriously. Yet if one patiently traces in imagination the effect of all these changes on the womanhood of the race, one foresees a generation of women which recalls Shelley's lines: