It is commonplace of observation that the artist needs freedom for his development, and instructively adopts a life untrammelled by convention. Women are not free – they have never been free. When the winds of a new inspiration swept across European countries, or blew from Olympia through Greece, or stirred to high ideals the Taoists of China, they shook indeed the purdah curtain of humanity, behind which from age to age, woman everywhere has performed her menial tasks, or taken her dull ease, but they did not blow them wide. If the age of woman has dawned – and it has dawned – it is not to take a stand beside the great creative artists of the world that the prisoners of freedom cast aside their chains and step forth at last from their long seclusion – it is to lend a world-wide revolt against the prejudice and ancient tyranny that, in the teeth of nature and development, struggle ever to keep women the inferior creature they proclaim her….

Among the painters of large decorative designs who exhibit in England, Mary Sargant Florence surely stands in the first rank with her strange, bold, original figures, and admirable effects of calculated perspectives. 

It is hard indeed, at a time like the present, to detach oneself even for a moment from the duties which the common danger has imposed on us all–men and women in every country. But, sooner or later, our attitude to certain fundamental questions must be decided, lest the critical moment come upon us unprepared. Every movement that stands for progress raises such questions, and none is more important than the future of the women's movement in relation to war and militarism. Will–or should–its course be modified in the light of recent events? It is hardly too early to discuss this question, for the advocates of militarism are already busy in our midst, and it is easy to take a wrong turning or a short view. Opinions within the movement are divided. Yet it seems probable that there would be less disagreement if once the results of militarism were clearly understood.

We are faced by issues on which it seems not improbable that the ideals of most men are different from those of most women.. The difference has usually been obscured in feminist propaganda: the argument so often has to run, and quite truly, that on the majority of questions there will be no great split of society into two halves, the men wanting one thing and the women another. But militarism, as such, raises different problems.

For Feminism history has only one message on the question of war, and it is this: Militarism has been the curse of women, as women, from the first dawn of social life. Owing to the turmoil in which it has kept every tribe and every nation almost without exception, mankind has seldom been able to pause for a moment to set social affairs in order - and the first and most crying reform has ever been the condition of woman. Violence at home, violence abroad; violence between individuals, between classes, between nations, between religions; violence between man and woman: this it is which, more than all other influences, has prevented the voice of woman being heard in public affairs until almost yesterday. War has created Slavery with its degrading results for women, and its double standard of morality from which we are not yet completely free: War, and the consequent enslavement of women, has been the main inducement to Polygamy, with its conception of women as property, and its debasement of love to physical enjoyment: War has engendered and perpetuated that dominance of man as a military animal which has pervaded every social institution from Parliament downwards. In War man alone rules: when War is over man does not surrender his privileges. Militarist ethics have perverted the peaceful and individualising tendencies of Industry to which woman owes so much. Industry has united with competition to produce Industrial Warfare: Commerce has combined with Imperialism for the capture of markets and the exploitation of the lower races. Militarism has ruined Education with its traditions of discipline and its conception of history. Militarism has even left its blighting imprint on Religion - on Mohammedanism the religion of conquest with its depreciation of woman; on the religion of the Prince of Peace, so that the Churches can say what they are not ashamed to say to-day. War, and the fear of War, has kept woman in perpetual subjection, making it her chief duty to exhaust all her faculties in the ceaseless production of children that nations might have the warriors needed for aggression or defence. She must not have any real education - for the warrior alone required knowledge and independence; she must not have a voice in the affairs of the nation, for War and preparation for War were so fundamental in the life of nations that woman, with her silly humanitarianism, must not be allowed to meddle therewith! And so War, which the influence of women alone might have prevented, was used as the main argument against enfranchisement, as it had been the main barrier to emancipation in the past. The circle is complete.

War, Militarism, Imperialism; in every form they have proved her undoing, and yet women hesitate to-day on which side to throw their influence! Over and over again the greatest statesmen have said that peace was Utopian only because public opinion was not ready for it; and no one has said it more emphatically than Sir Edward Grey. But who is to create the new public opinion? Have women no better answer than hatred or despair? Over and over again Suffragists have seen that it was from militarists that their ideals met with the most bitter opposition. They have never been tired of pointing to the baleful influence on our social life of ex-Viceroys and of men accustomed to the military despotism of the East. Is it purely by chance that it is the countries which, by position or circumstances, have been most free from military domination and constant preparation for war that have felt able to listen to the demands of women? The United States, New Zealand, Norway, Finland, Iceland, and the rest–they are countries in which war plays but a small part. The conscriptionist countries, on the other hand, have always looked askance at women's claims, and who has not heard German women complain "It's all very well for you to talk, but you don't know what it means to live in a country where everything is secondary to the training of the warrior male"? On February 5th, Mr. Cloudesley Brereton wrote in The Common Cause, "Germany stands forth as the chief exponent of the patriarchal conception." But, and let us not be led astray, only as the chief exponent; and from her faults let us learn. All Europe, as we show in Chapter III, is constantly menaced by similar tendencies....

It is hard to write without danger of misrepresentation, and it is especially important to make it clear that nothing is here implied as regards individuals. As far as our argument goes the majority of men who compose the armies of Europe at the present moment might be ardent supporters of women's rights! The indictment is against militarism. Since the war broke out every woman's paper has been full of complaints as to the way in which women have been treated - quite apart from atrocities and sufferings, and the break down of the theory that women are 'protected,' so admirably exposed in The Englishwoman, January 1915.