like Beatrice and Abla and Roxane; now a sorceress who reads the future and announces calamities before they befall, like the priestesses found among the ancient Romans and among the Arabs and the Indians; and now an obscure riddle, like the Sphinx or the mermaid, toying with men's souls and captivating their minds — they try to fathom her secret, and turn back from it baffled.

The woman of popular legend lives on today in the souls of many of the educated and the lettered. Her descendant is the doll-woman who presides over gatherings and salons, adorns the clubs of pleasure and amusement, distrib-utes diplomatic smiles upon those around her, and puts the fluency of her tongue and the grace of her movements at the service of every kind of propaganda.

The woman of legend is a goddess or a genie, an angel or a devil — that is, in either case she is not counted a normal human being, and cannot equal man in rights. And in either case she is wronged, for she does not hold the reins of her own affairs: if she is a worshipped idol, man can smash her whenever he wishes; and likewise, if she is a sorceress or a devil, he rids himself of her evil with charms, or meets her with malice and enmity. But if he treated woman as he treats him-self, the veils would be lifted from her, and he would see that she is an ordinary person, differing from him neither in mystery nor in strangeness.

Of the same kind as these obsessed men is a class of despots who wish to confine woman's work within the circle of the home and believe that her function is limited to procreation and motherhood. It is they who, after the fashion of the philosophers of force and the advocates of war — Napoleon, Nietzsche, and Hitler — wish to sacrifice woman for the sake of the species and to restrict her work

to the multiplication of offspring and the bearing of the warriors and soldiers by whose means the state achieves mastery over its neighbors and sweeps across the world. And in order to make this function attractive to woman, they have resorted to magnifying motherhood, deifying the mother, and holding her love the greatest of loves and her sacrifice the noblest of sacrifices and the worthiest of sanctification. Among their sayings: "Woman cannot be a hero, but she gives birth to heroes, and therein lie her pride, her greatness, and her immor-tality." Here we ask: why can woman not be a hero? Is it not because they have stood between her and heroism?

The fettering of woman in the manner we have described, and the regarding of her as a deficient creature who must be supported and protected, is nothing but a vestige of the slavery that played its part in history. And this age of ours is witnessing society's emer-gence from the phase in which slavery was held to be a social necessity: the bondage of the individual to the tribe, of the van-quished to the victor, of woman to man, of minors to adults, of the worker to his master, and of the black to the white.

In the last century, and at the opening of this one, woman con-centrated her efforts on winning the right to learning and to work, and the political right, and she often sacrificed her biological functions in this cause. Today, however, she seeks to exercise all her rights together: she wants to found a family and play the mother's part, and at the same time she wants to hold posts and do work. For she wants to live a full life, complete in all its parts.

And here is what a girl of sev-enteen, who has lately completed her secondary studies, says on this subject:

"We college graduates differ in our inclinations and in our ways of living, and our ambitions and dreams likewise diverge. Among us are those who would delight in teaching mathematics or literature, and those who will take up acting, or hostessing on airplanes. There are those among us whose ambition goes no fur-ther than managing a home and raising children, and others who dream of exploring the South Pole or the wilds of Africa. But all of us want travel and move-ment, knowledge and discovery, adventure and love and work and play. And all of us want for our daughters in the future, and for our younger companions, a life of wider scope, and an independent upbringing that respects the girl's rights, gives her a greater mea-sure of freedom, and is pervaded by an atmosphere of understand-ing, frankness, and confidence."