If this new evaluation of woman's work in civilization seems to err on the side of women, we shall be satisfied if it helps to bring about a re-evaluation which shall include women not in an incidental way but as people of flesh and blood and brain - feeling, seeing, judging and directing, equally with men, all the great social forces which mold character and determine general comfort, well-being and happiness.

Women have been engaged in a continuous contest to defend their arts and crafts, to win the right to use their minds and to train them, to obtain openings for their talents and to earn a livelihood, to break through legal restraints on their unfolding powers. In their quest for rights women have naturally placed emphasis on their wrongs, rather than their achievements and possessions, and have retold history as a story of their long Martyrdom.

Feminists have been prone to prize and assume the traditions of those with whom they had waged such a long, and in places bitter conflict. In doing so, they have participated in a distortion of history and a disturbance of the balanced conceptual thought which gives harmony and power to life.

Those who sit at the feast will continue to enjoy themselves even though the veil that separates them from the world of toiling reality below has been lifted by mass revolts and critics.

Your project it has my fullest sympathy. I think it imperative to put this material together. No doubt we have many of the same reasons for seeing it that way but it does me great good to learn that one so competent as you stands ready to assume the task. I shall be only too happy to tell you how I visualize the thing, parts of which I have longed to tackle myself but have not done and see no way to do myself. I look forward with the keenest enjoyment to meeting you - a privilege far too long denied me.

Your familiarity with Susan B. Anthony's passion for preserving her own and Mrs. Stanton's archives - meaning more than the personal interest of course - will make you receptive of course to this broad plan for a great international feminist archive which Rosika Schwimmer has drawn up. I don't know where you stand on the issue of war and peace but I entertain, as one of my feminist props, the belief that time and again in history women have had to take over men's bankrupt societies and that the Schwimmer-Addams' and other feminists' attempts to take charge of the western world in 1915 was a great outburst of the same sort of responsibility.

All the correspondence and the interviewing connected with the drive for peace are in Mme. Schwimmer's keeping. But she is getting on in years and is by no means well. Nor can she afford to house this archive any longer. It is good feminist material and should not be lost by burning or by boxing for no one to read.

What is even more on my mind in championing the enclosed plan is some way to recapture the imaginative zest of women for public life. It is perilous for society if they retreat to private interests to the exclusion of interests in the common life represented by the State.

Women have been active, assertive, competent contributors to their societies, but when women believe they are passive, and without influence, their collective strength is undermined. The very idea of women's oppression takes hold of women's minds and oppresses them. But women could be freed from the ideological bondage by discovering their own powerful creative history and using the knowledge to create new social relations.

As for my being free now, I have had as much freedom all along as I really cared for. I loved sitting at home with my darling every night and being at his side all the days. Outsiders and even you and Miriam (William's sister) because of your comparative youth could not fully comprehend our mutual happiness in working, jabbering, and getting such exercise as we took in our simple ways. This is an absolute truth.

Early in my undergraduate studies I had first read Mary Beard's Woman as Force in History. Somehow, I was able to connect with her central idea, that women have always been active and at the centre of history. I was struck as by a sudden illumination, by the simplicity and truth of her insight. Mary Beard had arrived at that conviction the same way I had, by herself having been an engaged participant in women's work in society.

Mary Beard's basic thesis and what became the focus of her life's work is the assertion that women have always been a very real, although neglected, force in society. Without denying that women had legitimate grievances, Beard maintained that feminist protest from the eighteenth century to the twentieth had devalued women's history by expounding women's subordination. The myth that women were or are only a subject and oppressed sex is not only wrong, she argued, but it is counterproductive because as women accept that designation of themselves and their pasts, their collective strength is undermined. The very notion of oppression imprisons women's minds and oppresses them. She believed women could only be freed from that ideological bondage by discovering their own powerful, creative history and using that knowledge to create new social relations. Beard saw her job, her intellectual work, as political, designed to reach all women and persuade them of the power of their pasts and, moreover, of their futures.

Women are made to seem invisible, she said, not simply because history has been written by evil men or because women have, in fact, been invisible but because these men, as well as most of the professional women and radical feminists of her day, focused their concern on those areas of the community in which men predominate. Beard placed herself in opposition to the militant feminists of her time who called for absolute equality. Such simple-minded slogans, she insisted, deny the power and force of the total community of women, deny the existence and value of a distinct female culture.