This problem needed to be
solved in one generation of American women, and was the most
vital of all problems of force.
The American woman at her best -- like most other women --
exerted great charm on the man, but not the charm of a primitive
type. She appeared as the result of a long series of discards,
and her chief interest lay in what she had discarded. When
closely watched, she seemed making a violent effort to follow the
man, who had turned his mind and hand to mechanics. The typical
American man had his hand on a lever and his eye on a curve in
his road; his living depended on keeping up an average speed of
forty miles an hour, tending always to become sixty, eighty, or a
hundred, and he could not admit emotions or anxieties or
subconscious distractions, more than he could admit whiskey or
drugs, without breaking his neck. He could not run his machine
and a woman too; he must leave her; even though his wife, to find
her own way, and all the world saw her trying to find her way by
imitating him.
The result was often tragic, but that was no new thing in
feminine history. Tragedy had been woman's lot since Eve. Her
problem had been always one of physical strength and it was as
physical perfection of force that her Venus had governed nature.
The woman's force had counted as inertia of rotation, and her
axis of rotation had been the cradle and the family.
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