Then, having been rebuked for her critical attitude toward the woman suffrage organization, she showed herself in no mood to take orders from even that source. She subjected the attitude of the members of the organization to an examination, and found it tainted with sentimentalism. "Of all the corruptions to which the woman's movement is now open," she wrote, "the most poisonous and permeating is that which flows from sentimentalism, and it is in the W. S. P. U. [Women's Social and Political Union] that sentimentalism is now rampant.... It is this sentimentalism that is abhorrent to us. We fight it as we would fight prostitution, or any other social disease."
She called upon women to be individuals, and sought to demolish in their minds any lingering desire for Authority. "There is," she wrote, "a genuine pathos in our reliance upon the law in regard to the affairs of our own souls. Our belief in ourselves and in our impulses is so frail that we prefer to see it buttressed up. We are surer of our beliefs when we see their lawfulness symbolized in the respectable blue cloth of the policeman's uniform, and the sturdy good quality of the prison's walls. The law gives them their passport. Well, perhaps in this generation, for all save pioneers, the law will continue to give its protecting shelter, but with the younger generations we believe we shall see a stronger, prouder, and more insistent people, surer of themselves and of the pureness of their own desires."
She did not stick at the task of formulating for women a new moral attitude to replace the old. "We are seeking," she said, "a morality which shall be able to point the way out of the social trap we find we are in. We are conscious that we are concerned in the dissolution of one social order, which is giving way to another. Men and women are both involved, but women differently from men, because women themselves are very different from men. The difference between men and women is the whole difference between a religion and a moral code. Men are pagan. They have never been Christian. Women are wholly Christian, and have assimilated the entire genius of Christianity.
"The ideal of conduct which men have followed has been one of self-realization, tempered by a broad principle of equity which has been translated into practice by means of a code of laws. A man's desire and ideal has been to satisfy the wants which a consciousness of his several senses gives rise to. His vision of attainment has therefore been a sensuous one, and if in his desire for attainment he has transgressed the law, his transgression has sat but lightly upon him. A law is an objective thing, laid upon a man's will from outside. It does not enter the inner recesses of consciousness, as does a religion. It is nothing more than a body of prohibitions and commands, which can be obeyed, transgressed or evaded with little injury to the soul. With women moral matters have been wholly different. Resting for support upon a religion, their moral code has received its sanction and force from within. It has thus laid hold on consciousness with a far more tenacious grip. Their code being subjective, transgression has meant a darkening of the spirit, a sullying of the soul. Thus the doctrine of self-renunciation, which is the outstanding feature of Christian ethics, has had the most favorable circumstances to insure its realization, and with women it has won completely--so completely that it now exerts its influence unconsciously. Seeking the realization of the will of others, and not their own, ever waiting upon the minds of others, women have almost lost the instinct for self-realization, the instinct for achievement in their own persons."