Section IV: From Femininity to Womanhood
Chapter XVI: The Larger Life and Citizenship
"We're hungry ... and since
We needs must hunger—better for man's love,
Than God's truth! better, for companions sweet,
Than great convictions! Let us bear our weights,
Preferring dreary hearths to desert souls."
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
"We are discovering women ... our modern world is burdened with its sense of the immense, now half-inarticulate, significance of women. . .
"Woman insists upon her presence. She is no longer a mere physical need, an aesthetic by-play, a sentimental background; she is a moral and intellectual necessity in man's life. She comes to the politician and demands, Is she a child or a citizen? Is she a thing or a soul? She comes to the individual man ... and asks, Is she a cherished weakling or an equal mate, an unavoidable helper? Is she to be tried and trusted or guarded and controlled, bond or free?
"For if she is a mate, one must at once trust more and exact more; exacting toil, courage, and the hardest, most necessary thing of all, the clearest, most shameless, explicitness of understanding.
"The social consciousness of women seems to me an unworked and almost untouched mine of wealth for the constructive purpose of the world."
—From A New Machiavelli
—H. G. Wells.
The survey of the life of the ordinary domestic woman of the past century has brought us to the conclusion that excessively feminine habits were the most serious disadvantage under which women struggled. By implication, also, men were as much too "masculine" as women were too "feminine" for the uses of modern life, and the gulf between them made the adjustments of marriage unduly difficult, besides reacting injuriously upon the children. With the definite decline of militarism and paternalism at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, new types of domestic relations began to appear; but the traditional habits characteristic of the earlier regime still persisted.
The restrictive theory of a female sphere ordained by God and controlled by men, culminated in America about the time of the Civil War, and was afterward rapidly broken down by vast changes in industry and in religious thought, and by the applications of science to common life which have taken place since then. Yet even now the conventional behavior associated with hyper-femininity and hyper-masculinity is still affected or unconsciously imitated in childhood, and is deemed essential-at least in women-to respectability. Evidently, so long as the standards of religion and conduct devised by men continue to be revised largely by them, progress toward a common human-as distinguished from a bi-sexual-basis of morals will be slow.
No thoughtful person will deny that the average man needs refining and moralizing, nor that the ordinary woman is lacking in strength and largeness of mind; yet the vestigia of old social ideas remain to make girls more foolishly girlish and boys more brutally boyish from their childhood up. Though we know that half the misery of modern life comes from living in daily intensity, from sex-suggestion and indulgence, there is yet very little intelligent attempt to abate it, except by the negative process of suppression. There is certainly nothing which the world needs less at the present moment than emphasis on sex and sex differences, nor more than preparation for family duties.
Although co-education has now been established in schools and colleges for more than a generation, it is still regarded by most people as a matter of convenience and economy, rather than as an effective and rational opportunity for preparing the young for family life. The entrance of young women into industry is deprecated as diverting them from marriage and motherhood, rather than accepted—as it should be—as one of the suitable means for marriageable young people to become acquainted with each other on a self-respecting basis of business association. Although low wages, excessive hours of labor, and unsanitary conditions threaten every young person in industry, let us not forget that the girls of two or three generations ago were physically even less fit to be mothers than many modern workers, in spite of the protection of a home. If the health of girls is menaced by the inhuman exactions of many occupations, it obviously points to the alleviation of working conditions rather than to a denial of the right of economic independence.
The problems precipitated by the escape of women from the purely domestic sphere are, indeed, not capable of immediate solution; but they are relatively easy as compared to keeping them within it. It would be too bold, perhaps, to say that one of the best remedies for domestic infelicity is the feminization of men and the masculinization of women; but if men could be domesticated just a little more, and if women could be persuaded to be a little less feminine in their habits and more masculine in their minds, marriage would be more practicable and the family life somewhat nearer the ideal.
There is some alarm nowadays about the "feminization" of the schools by women teachers, but very little, apparently, about the "feminization" of the family through the inattention of men to their family duties. Yet, in practice, the ordinary father—an artisan, a clerk, or a business man—does very little fathering beyond providing support and playing with the children a little, nights and Sundays. The constructive work of bringing up the family is left largely to mothers, whose education and experience are very limited. As the hours of the working-day decrease, and as transportation facilities make it possible for men to be more at home, it should be possible to revive in a better form the cooperative family, somewhat after the old-fashioned rural type. Parents and children may come to share not only the proceeds of their joint labors, but educational opportunities and pleasures as well.
It is one of the most hopeful signs of our times that a certain class of men—though only a small and selected class—take it for granted that their paternal duties are as important as their business. In every community, and particularly in college towns, there are a good many young husbands who spend at least a part of their leisure in babytending, in dishwashing, and the heavier kinds of household labor. They do these things in order that their wives may escape the confinement and monotony of domesticity for a part of each day; they even help that their wives may have time for culture clubs and social reforms. There are families where the husband and wife divide the household labors between them, and both go out to work every day to earn and to share the common income. In one family, the educated wife, after having borne several children, left them when they were out of babyhood to a relative of highly domestic traits, and herself accepted a salaried position. So far from disrupting the family, this unconventional procedure has made fine men of these boys, men who have a strong attachment to their home and their parents, and who are peculiarly considerate toward their young wives. This wife was maternal, but not domestic; but so reasonable an arrangement would not have been possible, had not the husband possessed highly paternal qualities, and been willing to take his full share in bringing up the family.
There are, in truth, a thousand different adjustments of maternal and paternal relations, and as many subdivisions of domestic labor and family finance. Perhaps the happiest as well as the most uniformly competent family of my acquaintance consists of ten persons. The parents, both graduates of a good small college in the Middle West, came to California for the husband's health, and the wife for a time, and in addition to child-bearing, chiefly supported the family. They have always lived simply and on the principle of all members of the family, regardless of age and sex, sharing all there was—whether of labor, drudgery, domestic care, pleasure, or money. When the family grew too large for the mother and the elder children to do all the work, they brought in a young girl from the Indian reservation near by, who is now, at middle-age, almost as intelligent and as much a member of the family as the adopted daughter. For, in addition to raising six children of their own, these warm-hearted people adopted another who needed a home.
The children, one by one, have gone to college, partly earning their own way; and the older ones, as they got into the world, helping the younger. Now the parents, at their prime of life, occupy jointly a conspicuous public position. The eldest daughter, who is of a maternal disposition, runs the house and looks after her younger brothers and sisters, and is compensated therefor by her parents. It is, indeed, a very plain establishment, but altogether sanitary and comfortable. Every person in it is well fed, well clothed, industrious; and nobody is drudging to give other members of the family something they have not earned and do not need. Every member of the household is useful, happy, and loyal to the rest; and, unitedly, they make sacrifices in order to contribute service to the public welfare. Their hospitality is proverbial, and seldom do their guests hear elsewhere more interesting conversation than in this jolly, cooperative family.
This might be called the ideal American family, yet the parents were not exceptional, perhaps, except in their sincere and simple insistence upon the principle of family unity, regardless of the sex, age, and condition of servitude of its members. Consider the difference in the results if the women had all stayed at home keeping a conventionally elaborate house; pinching their pin-money to be well-dressed, and hanging like dead-weight on the males of the family. Suppose the daughters, instead of working their way through college with some help at home, had attained a merely superficial education, and contributed nothing to society but "good looks" until they were married! As it is, there are ten persons, eight of whom are already self-supporting and well-educated, while the two younger ones give promise of meeting the family standard. All of them have had a larger life, all of them are better citizens than under the old system of sex-spheres and sex-duty; and even the head of the family has had an easier time—not to count in the spiritual compensations of profound family affection and the close comradeship of the husband and wife.
Still another significant tendency of our time is the emergence of a considerable class of men whose personal ideals are neither patriarchal nor military. In America, at any rate, the fighting man—the bully, the pugilist, the war hero, the fire-eater, the tyrannical husband and father, the man who expects to be waited upon by all women—holds a much less honorable place than in Europe. The predatory and the parasitic—whether men or women—are slowly being discredited. There is a reclassification going on which tends somewhat towards that among the Chinese, who rate people in the order of their contribution to society: scholars, producers, merchants, soldiers, et cetera. The humanitarians, once so exceptional, are a growing class of men of personal cleanliness, abstemious habits, fond of family life, and interested in political and social reforms, and by no means physically effeminate. They are, rather, men of a refined but powerfully muscled athletic type, whose fighting instincts find expression in the protection of the weak by the exercise of their higher mental shrewdness. These are the attorneys who fight for poor clients and for just but unpopular causes; politicians who wade into the muck of partizanship, not for personal gain, but for the joy of cleaning things up and making a better world to live in; employers who try industrial experiments for the solution of labor disputes, and the lessening of unnecessary drudgery; doctors who give as much time to unpaid preventive work as to building up a lucrative practice; men whose religion takes the form of settlement club work for boys, or probation and prison reform; and many others to whom some form of social service is as necessary as the fulfilment of their worldly ambition.
The relation of these new kinds of men to this discussion lies in the fact that these are the men who want wives as companions rather than domestic subordinates; who call in women to help them solve social problems; who join hands with them in their efforts to obtain the guardianship of their children, the control of their persons, property, and earnings; to protect young girls and boys; and even, and last, to help them secure equal political rights. Unquestionably there is an increasing number of thoughtful men to whom the acceleration of progress seems to depend largely on the emancipation of women from pettiness, ignorance, idleness, and social pauperization. At one end of our social scale there is a great body of idle, dissolute men; at the other, a group of selfish, luxuriously clothed, and economically dependent women. The men flock into the cities and hang about the "slum" districts; the women parade the fashionable quarters, exhibiting themselves and their finery. The imagination can hardly compass what would happen if such men stopped drinking, and such women stopped talking about clothes, and all of them went to work at some really useful occupation.
Too often the arguments for the social liberation and political enfranchisement of women are based merely on what might happen if they were achieved. There is scarcely anything which was said in favor of the enfranchisement of the common man a century ago; or of the negro and the foreigner in more recent times, which does not now apply equally to women. But, aside from the justice of it—an unanswerable argument in our day—and without regard to the specious cry of expediency, and omitting all prophecy, women need and must have a larger life. Even when motherhood shall have become, for all except the most ignorant, a high and chosen vocation; and even with every scientific assistance in the household, the life of the exclusively domestic woman will still be too narrow. Although during the earlier years of child-bearing the life of a mother is necessarily confining, there remains to the average woman from a third to a quarter of her whole adult life in which these primary duties occupy relatively very little time, and when, therefore, she might be a producer, or of public service.
It is customary for many conservative persons who are willing to grant so much as this, to point out the unpaid honorary services in philanthropy and charity in which women may now properly engage, and to which they think it wise to limit them. Let it be remembered that all philanthropy was once the province of the great lady, the priest, and the religious orders who received no pay, but it was not the more efficiently done on that account. Consecration may reduce the selfishness of the charitable, but it does not eliminate the human instinct to do that which brings compensation better than that which does not. The most faithful wifehood and motherhood on the part of members of a woman's board do not necessarily prepare them to solve the business of charitable institutions and societies, nor to comprehend and prevent the causes of poverty and family desertion, of sickness and unemployment. The merely palliative, hand-to-mouth methods of the charities of past generations were, in a measure, due to the fact that they were carried on chiefly by clergymen and domestic women. The gulf between the old-time, classically trained minister, and the modern clergyman, whose preaching and praying are only a part of many social and civic duties, is no greater than that between the old-time charitable lady and the trained charity worker of our day.
Nor are the men chosen for honorary service boards those living at leisure, devoting their time to clubs, personal culture, amusement, travel, society; but almost invariably those who have made a conspicuous success in some other field, and who, at the same time, are willing to give their scant leisure for the public welfare. The accepted measure of economic usefulness is money; and the public justly values honorary public service at what the giver would be valued at in his industrial capacity. Many women of small earning capacity are performing the honorary services for their husband, and are measured rather by the status of the man who supports them than by anything they have done themselves. But more and more the services of women, whether to the individual household or to industry, or to the public welfare, must be reckoned in terms of money before they will be thoroughly respected either by men or by other women.
Women are demanding in their own leaders intelligence and competence rather than wealth and social position, and are beginning to be willing to pay for them. The charity organizations are officered largely by trained and salaried women secretaries, and supported by wealthy men and women, who recognize their superiority over volunteer workers. The woman suffrage movement illustrates the appreciation which domestic women and women of leisure have of the abilities of others who have held a place in the wage-earning world. The campaign of political education, financed by women of wealth, is carried on almost wholly by speakers, writers, and organizers who have established their social value in competition with men.
The financial measure of human ability may not be the ideal one, but it is a necessary stage before a higher one can be applied. The woman who has earned a salary of a hundred a month before her marriage, can accept support with self-respect only if she does a hundred dollars' worth of necessary labor afterward; or contributes a child to society of a quality which justifies her temporary release from labor. She can no longer shilly-shally with her conscience by assuming that, in managing servants, paying calls, dressing herself becomingly, and making herself a charming wife and hostess, she is fulfilling all that society has a right to expect of her—even if her husband be satisfied. The efficiency test alone is rapidly discrediting a class of personally lovely women who spend their lives in consuming rather than in producing; and, on the other hand, it is setting a higher valuation on competent mothers and on women workers.
From another aspect, the entrance of young women into the economic world has an important relation to marital happiness. Until girls have as good an education and are as capable of self-support as young men, it will continue to be assumed that a suitor does his fiancée a favor in marrying her and relieving her of the necessity of proving herself in serious competition. The man who marries a woman who has already proved herself in work as exacting as his own, does not regard her as "a weaker vessel," but instinctively respects her competence and her opinions as he would those of another man. Both she and her children rise in value in his eyes, by so much as he is compelled to recognize the pain, the peril, the limitation of life, and the incessant labor which good mothering involves.
Jane Addams, in her Newer Ideals of Peace, points out how women's lives have been restricted by the arbitrary assumption that their contribution to society must be made solely through children and the home:
"From the beginning of tribal life women have been held responsible for the health of the community, a function which is now represented by the health department; from the days of the cave dwellers, so far as the home was clean and wholesome it was due to their efforts, which are now represented by the bureau of tenement house inspection; from the period of the primitive village, the only public sweeping performed was what they undertook in their own dooryards, that which is now represented by the bureau of street cleaning. Most of the departments in a modern city can be traced to woman's traditional activity, but, in spite of this, so soon as these old affairs were turned over to the care of the city, they slipped from women's hands, apparently because they became matters for collective action, and implied the use of the franchise."
Miss Addams shows, further, that these outside occupations develop in the immigrant workers "an unusual mental alertness and power of perception" which results in their breaking through custom and habit, and in their acquiring the power of association.
These are qualities which women as well as immigrants need, and the domestic woman must somehow be brought in touch with a larger life—for her own sake to liberate her from conventional pettiness; for the children's sake that she may be their intelligent guide; and for her husband's sake, to relieve the marital tension which inevitably rises between a man and woman so far apart as the conventional married pair. Because of the intensely personal view which the wifely and maternal life engenders, women are emotionally exacting and expect of matrimony satisfactions which only a connection with outside realities can give. Their problem is, then, how to widen their view, how to keep abreast with the great currents in which men are caught by their very occupations, and yet how to remain the center and the mistress of the home and family.
One solution is already suggested in the fact that girls now generally remain at school longer than boys. There can be no question that the woman who is to marry and, by her motherhood cares, to be sequestered for a period of her life, needs a better education—a sort of anticipatory fund of resources, as it were—than the man whose daily contact with the business world is a continuous education in itself. The earlier years of motherhood develop the emotions to the neglect of the mind; and, because they must be filled with a monotonous succession of petty and imperative duties, tend to rob the woman of the power of systematic thought. The early mental training of girls should anticipate this heavy draft, so that the mother may keep alive her mind and soul in after years. It is necessary not alone for herself, but for the children whose friend and counselor she is destined to be through the years when they will question her competence and her authority.
It is curious that those who are quite willing to grant the necessity of a broader education and better physical development for girls who are to marry; who acquiesce in their employment in charities and the politer social reforms, balk just at the barrier of suffrage. It is, no doubt, because they are still unconsciously in thrall to the rub-off-the-bloom theory of the past century. The tradition that the essential qualities of womanhood, like the veneer which has been called "femininity," would somehow be destroyed by the larger life, and particularly by the exercise of political rights, is still lingering in the minds of a majority of men. While they are clinging to this time-worn apprehension, the field of politics itself has come to include nearly everything requiring collective action, and which touches the life of every member of the family.
The chief function of every citizen who votes, as distinguished from the politician and the officeholder, is now to watch, to approve and disapprove by the ballot, their use of power and the measures they promote. The regeneration of democracy now going on in this country, which takes, on the one hand, the form of breaking down the machine, and, on the other, the direct appeal to the people, throws into higher relief the absurdity of refusing to women a share in deciding upon officers and issues which concern them quite as much as any other portion of the people.
Without reiterating the stock arguments in favor of admitting women to suffrage, it is important to note that voting with the occasional interest in political campaigns and large public questions affords just that connection with the larger world which the domestic woman needs; and requires no more of her energy than it does of the ordinary male citizen. Many "strictly feminine" women now spend more time away from home in social teas and card parties, in charities and bazars and aid societies, in clubs and musicales, than would serve to make them intelligent voters and active citizens. They spend their energy, moreover, with less compensation, since they do not need encouragement in pettiness, futility, idleness, luxury, nor even in polite begging to promote benevolences of which they have no personal knowledge. They sorely need the breadth of mind which the discussion of impersonal issues—trusts, tariff, and municipal graft, police, school, and health measures—would tend to produce.
In modern society the common interests of the family group are all too few. The man engrossed in the economic struggle—the children in school and play—the mother in housekeeping, social amenities, and benevolence—though together constituting the social unit, have slight mutual concern in anything except the spending of the income. If politics are discussed at all, it is by the father and son, while the women give a bored and superficial attention. But if the women were conscious of a power in these matters, all would have a common interest in being informed on them, as they already have a common stake in their proper conduct.
What, then, do women need? It must be clear enough to the open-minded reader of the preceding pages that, since the decline of home manufactures, the domestic woman has had less and less means of justifying her existence except through motherhood.
Under the spell of the idea that every woman is a potential mother, whether married or not, many people overlook the fact that at any particular time there are many hundred thousands of women who are not mothers, and who must make their claim to support by men on the ground of being housekeepers. The wife who is doing the work of the household is, at any rate, earning her board and lodging, often something more. And, as the number of children in the family is likely to be in proportion to poverty rather than riches, these working women probably contribute throughout the whole of their lives—as housekeepers, mothers, and grandmothers—more than the equivalent for all they receive; and are, therefore, in a self-respecting position.
But it would be easy to show that there are several hundred thousand women in America whose inactivity or quasi-domestic occupation makes them dissatisfied, while at the same time society is feeding and clothing them. As to the unmarried ones, there can be no question that they ought either to be preparing themselves for usefulness, or to be giving something definite and necessary to society. And as to the married ones, only those who are fully occupied with children and with really necessary—not fictitious—household tasks, should be regarded as fulfilling their whole duty. Even mothers of children, when the children are grown up and gone, should be able to give a portion of their time in mature and useful service outside the home. In proportion as women of all classes are transferred from the consuming to the recognized producing classes, they will gain in self-respect and contentment; while the world at large will be the richer thereby.
The first thing women need is to see clearly that it is disreputable to trade wifehood and merely potential motherhood for the luxury of a home and the protection of a husband. Indeed, a very considerable number of women do realize it, and are driven more and more into volunteer social service by their discontent with a parasitic existence. Such discontent with the semi-idle or relatively useless life is highly creditable to them, and the effort to escape from the tradition which surrounds them should be encouraged by men. When women have learned not to exchange their beauty and their sex-function for luxury, and when they begin to try to do some thing worthy of their human energies, then they will begin to rate their labor in a truer perspective. Men, as a rule, work harder than women, but they are not half so busy. A woman will tell you she has no time to read—but is meantime doing beautiful and often quite superfluous needlework in all her spare moments. She has no time to keep up her music, which she really loves, and upon which she spent so many years of practice in girlhood, but she will retrim her hats, remake her dresses, taking infinite trouble to propitiate that Juggernaut of womenkind—Fashion.
In proportion as women go to work at exacting, routine occupations outside the home, they are dropping the habit of futile busyness; they buy fewer,plainer,more substantial clothes,and wear them longer. The standard street dress, represented by the separate waist and tailor suit, which became the fashion for the first time about 1890, is a historic landmark in the life of American women. In spite of manufacturers and designers, that type of dress, corresponding to the man's business suit, has remained the standardized dress of the modest woman.
This readjustment of values is in itself making a wide differentiation in the varieties of domestic women. Once all domestic women had the same ideas, and their lives were spent in a continuous effort to attain an ever greater elab oration of clothes and housekeeping. While now there is a larger and larger group of women who are putting their housekeeping under their feet, so to speak-reducing it by appliances, short-cut methods, elimination, systematization, simplification, to a point where it is pleasurable and good exercise, and where it leaves them the greater part of their time and energy for the higher interests of the home and for intellectual comradeship with husband and children.
As soon as girls began to go into industry, they began to learn anew the habits and the joys of thoroughness, which had been the characteristics of their manufacturing grandmothers. They began to test themselves by the achievements of men and to take pride in meeting their business requirements. But, as a rule, as Professor Thomas so justly remarks, women are still to men as amateurs to professionals, for they came late into the economic game. But already the effect upon their habits and modes of thought is strikingly apparent. To do hard things, under trying conditions, and under the supervision of men upon whom the conventional tears, temper, and coquetry have no effect, either by way of excuse or increased wages; is a tremendous corrective to the emotionalized feminine temperament. For a pretty girl to discover that her male employer has no use for her unless she can spell and take dictation correctly, is an education in itself. Instead of depending merely on her traditional sex weapons, she will more and more depend upon competence, and, in doing so, will gain self-control and an independent poise.
The entrance of young women into industry is readjusting all the sex relations and making mutual concealment between man and woman more difficult. Two generations ago the whole education of a girl was aimed to conceal her nature from herself as well as to keep her ignorant of the nature of men. The old-fashioned private school reared girls to a kind of sexlessness, with the result that they were morbidly fearful and yet curious about sex matters. They were inevitably oversensitive, feeling themselves stained, as Marholm says, "by everything imaginable—by the glances of indifferent men, by their own thoughts, by physiological knowledge." Such a state of mind is not possible to young women who meet men daily in business relations. Nor can men much longer conceal from the women whom they meet in business the unsavory facts of their own social habits. Girls who, in the seclusion of the home, might never learn what their suitor's previous life had been, cannot fail to see men somewhat as they are, and to exercise their judgment as never before. The power of selection, so long almost wholly in the hands of men, is gradually being transferred to the potential mothers of the race.
But of all the modifications which economic and political liberation will work in the characters of women, the most important is the development of a social conscience. The women of the past century, having no responsibility for matters outside the home, and no direct knowledge of how money was made, accepted all they could get from their men-folk with a clear conscience. But the woman who earns her own living in our day -however pleasantly-sees young girls by the thousands paid less than a living wage, to supply the luxuries of society at a price below the proper cost of production; or to furnish inordinate profits for men to waste upon other and idle women. The thoughtful woman who does volunteer social work begins to measure her own comforts in terms of others' need. Women are thus acquiring a socialized conscience-they no longer willingly buy sweatshop lingerie; or accept unquestioningly jewels bought with money made in predatory businesses. There is, perhaps, no more touching and hopeful aspect of the growing social conscience of women, than the efforts of rich women to square their awakened consciences by spending themselves and their money in the service of mankind.
Of the unmarried woman, almost nothing has been said in these pages, although there might profitably have been inserted a chapter on "The Superfluous Woman," in order to round out the discussion of the tyranny of tradition. It is enough for our purpose to note that she was once regarded as superfluous: a poor, unfortunate, useless human creature, who had missed the only worthy vocation of woman, and for whom there was no suitable niche in the home or the world. In this better time we need not trouble ourselves very much about her. She is neither superfluous nor idle, as a rule, and, in spite of hampering conditions, is working out her own ambitions. Though often underpaid, as compared with men of the same degree of efficiency, though handicapped by her over-feminized conscience and her conventional habits, her future is solving itself with encouraging rapidity and ease. When she shall have caught up with the game, and when she has acquired the same confidence in herself that the ordinary man has, and an equal opportunity to exercise her abilities, she will be—herself! Not a masculine female, nor a defeminized anomaly, but just a competent, sensible woman, for whose service the world already has unlimited use.
What, then, do women need? Above all, fair play and freedom from interference. Havelock Ellis has expressed the idea finely:
"We are not at liberty to introduce any artificial barriers into sexual concerns. The respective fitness of men and women for any kind of work or any kind of privilege can only be attained by actual experiment; and as the conditions for such experiment are never twice the same, it can never be positively affirmed that anything has been settled once for all—. . . . An exaggerated anxiety lest natural law be overthrown is misplaced. The world is not so insecurely poised."
It is one of the most astonishing vagaries of human thinking that, in spite of faith in God, in the face of the demonstrated power of good, and the progress of humanity, mankind continues to balk at every change. The instinct of motherhood is as old as that of procreation, and more fundamental to life; yet the world is in a state of fright for fear women will forsake their calling. If the last word has not yet been said of the Divine Spirit or of Nature, why should it be supposed that the family relations are finally determined, and the significance of woman to life wholly fixed! Every liberation of women in any direction has, so far in the world's history, tended toward a higher civilization; yet women are still heavily weighted with traditions which obscure their true nature and which hinder them and their children. Let every man who has read these pages ask himself whether he is really a god, that he should presume to set for women the limits of capacity and duty; and let every woman take courage to develop all that is hidden within her—"for we know not what we shall be."