W.E.B. Du Bois: “With the best will and knowledge, no man can know women's wants as well as women themselves.”

Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation,—we fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to…

But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins.

So wofully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of “swift” and “slow” in human doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science.

Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world wilderness.