We, women, are now entering upon ou r second work. By the mid-1930s Laura Riding could have been seen as a prototype of the emancipated woman. As a woman who had achieved an extraord inary degree of success in a man's world, Riding was uniquely qualified to look at feminist ideas from a vantage point still denied most women, and with a breadth and sweep all her own. Much of what she discovered, in the decade of the thirties, is now be ing recognized on a large scale by the women of the nineties. A woman is always a woman, but only in certain specific, practical contexts is she wom an as against man.
Woman becomes more and more a foil to male positiveness.
Among primitive and early peoples, for example, the hair and its arrangement does not mark, specifically, sexual difference. Among many tribes hair is held to be endowed with magical properties. Samson, who wore his hair long according to Nazarite religio us custom, lost his magical strength when it was shorn. Among the Hos, a negro tribe of West Africa, priests may not shave their heads. Similarly, in a certain Masai clan, the head chief and rainmakers and sorcerers do not pluck out their beards, believing that some supernatural power resides in them.