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richest of periods, the one which begins with The Father and ends with The Dance of Death.

What lies behind Strindberg's fight against all the outgrowths of the feministic movement is exactly this: he continually clung to the ideal of woman as wife and mother which he had formed in his youth. And what he attacked during the period in which he wrote and defended his work Married was just such conditions as are likely to destroy the altogether too unpopular ideal.

What he attacked was partly Ibsen's false exposition in A Doll's House of man and woman in wedlock and which started a silly discussion about unhappy marriages in general and especially of woman as the one contrahent in wedlock who has been oppressed for centuries; partly he directed his weapons against matrimony under present conditions, as he himself writes in an interview-preface to the first part of Married:

“I have shown that perfect bliss is impossible, I have shown that woman under present conditions has often—not always—become a toad on account of her education, I have thus—write it down. Sir—attacked the education of the female, church marriage and the liberty on the part of the men to play the paramour; consequently I have not attacked woman, but rather—write it down, Sir, in large letters—Present Conditions.

“Woman does not need my defense. She is the fashion and therefore she is the mistress of the world. And the freedom she now demands is the same freedom demanded by all men. This we must acquire as friends, not as enemies, for as such we will get nothing.”