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*The Metropolitan Magazine, October, November, December, 1912.

I

THE EDUCATED WOMAN

What I shall try to say in the following pages is in the nature of a composite reply to letters I receive from young women who ask my advice about the education they should strive for, and the use of the education they have. The prevailing spirit of these correspondents is an eager desire to be of service. Their letters are at once delightful and appalling; they fill me with mingled pride and timidity. They reveal an immeasurable will-to-serve, an incalculable soul-power waiting, like a mountain reservoir, to be released in irresistible floods of righteousness, capable, too, of devastating misdirection. All this power says to me in so many words: "Tell us what to do."

My sense of responsibility is lightened by the consideration that people do not take one's advice, even when it is good, and when they seek it. Human actions are shaped by a thousand forces stronger than the written wisdom of the wisest guide that ever lived. The best that the seers of the race discovered centuries ago has not, it seems, become a controlling motive even in the lives of their followers. If the counsel of the ages is not regarded, an ordinary modern cannot hope that his words will have much influence for good. But a sincere request demands a sincere compliance. Since my correspondents think that my advice may be of use to them, I will suggest some problems for them to study, that they may be better fitted for humanitarian work.

Because I am known to be interested in bettering the condition of the blind, many of my correspondents, whose hearts are stirred by the thought of blindness, offer to help their brothers in the dark, and they ask me how to begin. Of late I have found that my letters, in reply to those who wish to help the blind, contain a paragraph about the sightless, and then pass to other things. I have sometimes wondered if my friends were not puzzled rather than helped by what I wrote. A class of college girls in an institution near great manufacturing cities and coal-mines asked me to initiate them into philanthropic endeavour for the sightless. I told them to study the life that swarms at their very doors -- the mill-hands and the miners. I wonder if they understood. I tried to tell them what has been said many times, that the best educated human being is the one who understands most about the life in which he is placed, that the blind man, however poignantly his individual suffering appeals to our hearts, is not a single, separate person whose problem can be solved by itself, but a symptom of social maladjustment.

That sounds discouragingly vague and cosmic. It may have perplexed the girls to whom I wrote it. They asked me how to help the blind, how to educate themselves so that they might be of use to their unfortunate fellowmen, and I offered them the universe -- I gravely recommended that they study Industrial Economics. My advice to them to study the life that surrounds them was perhaps the only part of my prescription that was not paradoxical. For the whole situation is paradoxical and confused. Society is a unit; the parts depend on one another; one part of the world suffers because the rest is not right. And yet we can each know only a very little about the whole of society. Moreover, these college girls, living in a life that I do not know, send their questions to me across a thousand miles -- to me who must grope about a library of a few hundred books, whereas they have all the books of the world open to them. They can visit and talk with ten human beings while I am spelling out my intercourse with one.

Education? How can any one who has eyes to see and ears to hear and leisure to read and study remain uneducated? Are the "educators" at fault? Is there something lacking in those who administer the schools and colleges? I wonder about these things and puzzle out the details of my message with increasing perplexity.

The unfortunate are not only those whose infirmity appeals to our sympathies by its visible, palpable terror -- the blind, the deaf, the dumb, the halt, the crooked, the feebleminded, the morally diseased. The unfortunate include the vast number of those who are destitute of the means and comforts that promote right living and self-development. The way to help the blind or any other defective class is to understand, correct, remove the incapacities and inequalities of our entire civilization. We are striving to prevent blindness. Technically we know how to prevent it, as technically we know how to have clean houses, pure food, and safe railways. Socially we do not know how, socially we are still ignorant. Social ignorance is at the bottom of our miseries, and if the function of education is to correct ignorance, social education is at this hour the most important kind of education.

The educated woman, then, is she who knows the social basis of her life, and of the lives of those whom she would help, her children, her employers, her employees, the beggar at her door, and her congressman at Washington. When Shakespeare wrote "Hamlet," or whether he wrote it or not, seems relatively unimportant compared with the question whether the workingwomen in your town receive a living wage and bear their children amid proper surroundings. The history of our Civil War is incomplete, as taught in the schools, if fifty years afterward the daughters and granddaughters of veterans do not understand such a simple proposition as this: "The woman who bears a child risks her life for her country."

It is just such fundamental propositions related to the problems of life which school education seems to ignore. In school and college we spend a great deal of time over trivial matters. I cannot recall much that I learned at Radcliffe College, which now stands forth in my mind as of primary importance. The little economic theory that I learned was admirably put; but I have never succeeded in bringing it into harmony with the economic facts that I have learned since. The courses I took were so elementary that I should not presume to judge the opportunities which Radcliffe offers for the study of economics. It simply happens, as it happens in the experience of many students, that such academic wisdom as I was privileged to share in did not touch the problems I met later.

If we women are to learn the fundamental things in life, we must educate ourselves and one another. And we few who are unfairly called educated because we have been to college must learn much, and forget much, if we are not to appear as useless idlers to the millions of workingwomen in America. Any girl who goes to school can study and find out some of the things that an educated American woman ought to know. For instance, why in this land of great wealth is there great poverty? Any intelligent young woman like those who write to me, eager to help the sightless or any other unfortunate class, can learn why such important work as supplying food, clothing, and shelter is ill-rewarded, why children toil in the mills while thousands of men cannot get work, why women who do nothing have thousands of dollars a year to spend.

There is an economic cause for these things. It is for the American woman to know why millions are shut out from the full benefits of such education, art, and science as the race has thus far achieved. We women have to face questions that men alone have evidently not been quite able to solve. We must know why a woman who owns property has no voice in selecting the men who make laws that affect her property. We must know why a woman who earns wages has nothing to say about the choice of the men who make laws that govern her wages. We must know why a hundred and fifty of our sisters were killed in New York in a shirt-waist factory fire the other day, and nobody to blame. We must know why our fathers, brothers, and husbands are killed in mines and on railroads. We women, who are natural conservationists, must find out why the sons we bring forth are drawn up in line and shot. We must organize with our more enlightened brothers and declare a general strike against war. My father was a Confederate soldier, and I respect soldiers. But I grow more and more suspicious of the political powers that take men away from their work and set them shooting one another. Not all the military poems that I have read have roused in me an heroic desire to welcome my brother home with a bullet in his heart. We women have the privilege of going hungry while our men are in battle, and it is our right to be widowed and orphaned by political stupidity and economic chaos. To be sure, we are not allowed to vote for or against the congressman who declares war; but we can instruct ourselves unofficially in these matters.

Does what I mean by an educated woman become clearer? It ought to be clear; for all that I have said was said before I was born, and said by men; so there can be no flaw in the logic. We women must educate ourselves, and that without delay. We cannot wait longer for political economists to solve such vital problems as clean streets, decent houses, warm clothes, wholesome food, living wages, safeguarded mines and factories, honest public schools. These are our questions. Already women are speaking, and speaking nobly, and men are speaking with us. To be sure, some men and some women are speaking against us; but their contest is with the spirit of life. Lot's wife turned back; but she is an exception. It is proverbial that women get what they are bent on getting, and circumstances are driving them toward education.

The other day the newspapers contained an item which is pertinent here, since we are dealing with women and education. The Harvard Corporation has voted that it will not allow any halls of the university to be open to lectures and addresses by women, except when they are especially invited by the Corporation. There was no such rule until an undergraduate club asked Mrs. Pankhurst to speak. Then the rule was made. The Corporation has a right to make such a rule. But why has it discriminated against women? An educated man is one who receives, fosters, and contributes to the best thought of his time. By this definition, are the Harvard Corporation educated men? (1)

Fortunately, education does not depend on educational institutions any more than religion depends on churches. Says Bacon in "Novum Organum": "In the customs and institutions of schools, academies, and colleges, and similar bodies destined for the abode of learned men, and the cultivation of learning, everything is found adverse to the progress of science, for the lectures and exercises are there so ordered that to think or speculate on anything out of the common way can hardly occur to any man, and if one or two have the boldness to use any liberty of judgment, they must undertake the task all by themselves; they can have no advantage from the company of others. And if they can endure this also, they will find their industry and largeness of mind no slight hindrance to their fortune. For the studies of men in these places are confined and, as it were, imprisoned in the writings of certain authors, from whom, if any man dissent, he is straightway arraigned as a turbulent person, and an innovator."

Perhaps the first lesson to be learned by us women who are bent on educating ourselves is, that we are too docile under formal instruction. We accept with too little question what the learned tell us. Reason, or whatever substitute heaven has given to us, does not stand at the door of receptivity and challenge what seeks admission. I am surprised to find that many champions of woman, upholders of "advanced ideas," exalt the intelligence of the so-called cultivated woman. They portray her as an intellectual prodigy to whom the wisest man would resign his library and his laboratory with a feeling of dismayed incompetence. It is not woman's intelligence that should be insisted upon, but her needs, her responsibilities, her functions. The woman who works for a dollar a day has as much right as any other human being to say what the conditions of her work should be. It is just this, I am sorry to find, which educated women do not always understand. They argue that because George Eliot wrote great novels, and Jeanne d'Arc led armies to victory, therefore, women have as much genius as men; so they go on and on in a course of thought which is beside the point. Those who argue against the rights to which we are plainly entitled do not elude the issue with more wavering uncertainty than we show in defending ourselves.

I am not disposed to praise the educated woman, as we commonly use the term. I find her narrow and lacking in vision. Few women whom I meet take a deep interest in the important questions of the day. They are bored by any problem not immediately related to their desires and ambitions. Their conversation is trivial and erratic. They do not consider a subject long enough to find out that they know nothing about it. How seldom does the college girl who has tasted philosophy and studied history relate philosophy and the chronicles of the past to the terrific processes of life which are making history every day! Her reputed practical judgment and swift sympathy seem to become inoperative in the presence of any question that reaches to a wide horizon. Her mind works quickly so long as it follows a traditional groove. Lift her out of it, and she becomes inert and without resource. She is wanting in reflection, originality, independence. In the face of opposition to a private interest or a primitive instinct she can be courageous and vividly intelligent. But she retreats from general ideas as if they did not concern her, when in point of fact civilized life is comprehended in general ideas.

Such a woman comes to the gravest responsibilities like the foolish virgins who hastened to the marriage with no oil in their lamps. She is not prepared for the battle of life. Before she knows it she may be in the midst of the fight, undisciplined and disorganized, struggling for all that is precious to her against an enemy whose position she has not reconnoitred. She sends her sons and daughters into the streets of life without the knowledge that protects. Ignorance gives her confidence, and she is fearless from want of understanding.

It is not possible to refer a complex difficulty to a single cause. But it sometimes seems that the heaviest shackle on the wrists of delicate, well-nurtured women is a false notion of "purity and womanliness." We are taught, generation after generation, that purity and womanliness are the only weapons we need in the contest of life. With this shield and buckler we are assured of all possible safety in an essentially hard world. But the enemy does not play fair. He disregards womanliness and purity. Women have learned this in lifelong suffering. Yet some of those who have suffered most cling to the ideal and pass it on to their daughters, as slaves teach their children to kiss their chains. About matters that affect our very lives we are cautioned to speak "with bated breath," lest we offend the proprieties and provoke a blushing disapprobation. The ideal of the trustful, pure, and ignorant woman is flattering and sweet to her timid soul. But it is not, I believe, the product of her own imagination. It has grown up in the worshipful fancy of romantic man -- her poet and her master. The time has come when woman is subjecting this ideal to shrewd criticism.

II

MY LADY

All things uncomely and broken, all
things worn out and old,
The cry of a child by the roadway,
the creak of a lumbering cart,

The heavy steps of the ploughman
splashing the wintry mould,
Are wronging your image that blossoms
a rose in the deeps of my heart.

The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong
too great to be told;
I hunger to build them anew, and sit
on a green knoll apart.
With the earth and the sky and the water
re-made, like a casket of gold,
For my dreams of your image that blossoms
a rose in the deeps of my heart.

These beautiful verses by Mr. Yeats are the song of the new spirit hymning the mistress of the world. The old chivalry couched a lance against dragons that would devour us, and sang our beauty in unmeasured ecstasy. In some legends it proved its gallantry by kissing an ugly hag, and forthwith she turned into a lovely princess. When we were locked in grim dungeons, chivalry assailed the stronghold and delivered us, especially if we were handsome and of royal blood.

The new chivalry is dressed in working-clothes, and the dragons it must face are poverty, squalor, industrial slavery. The distressed damsel in the moonlit tower has become the girl in the street, the woman prisoned in a dirty kitchen, the wage-earner in the factory. Our champion need not fare forth into far countries to do wonders and attest his prowess. The enemy is here, everywhere -- "all things uncomely and broken."

Woman-worship, the central motive of song and legend these many centuries, has been too much inspired by the will to possess and too little by the will to serve. The modern knight sans peur et sans reproche must learn that virtues ascribed to his lady to make her a more precious object of desire have not proved good working substitutes for some plainer virtues which he denies her after he has won his suit. It is but niggardly largess to bestow upon her so much education as will make her a witty, pleasant companion and then refuse her access to the wider knowledge of which man is the jealous custodian. We confess our incapacities. We are inconsistent and timid. We hand down from mother to daughter ideals of ourselves which are not in keeping with our experience. We amuse our brothers by irreconcilable and conflicting assertions. Every day of our lives we justify that superior masculine smile which says, "Just like a woman!" We especially justify it by accepting the legendary ideal of us which he has made for his gratification. This ideal has tender and beautiful aspects. But it is full of contradictions and absurdities. It is, on the whole, an obstacle to justice, intervening darkly between the facts of life and a clear, honest vision.

Men assure us that woman is an angel, but has not sense enough to share in the management of common earthly affairs. The standard of good sense which man has in mind is not an absolute standard beyond the reach of human attainment, but the ordinary standard of masculine achievement. Man ascribes to woman a mysterious short-cut method of mind known as "intuition," a cerebral power which guides all her activities from sewing on a button to discharging statesman's duties as Queen of England. Perception, tact, sympathy, nervous rapidity of thought are her age-long attributes. But -- she would abuse the ballot. Her judgment is childish, she lacks discrimination and balance. She is frugal, a sharp bargainer in the retail market, a capable partner in a little shop; but she is unable to figure the economy of spending a hundred and fifty millions for battleships. She excels in organizing and conducting philanthropic work; but it would be disastrous to allow her an equal voice in determining how much public money should be spent in charitable undertakings.

I was once a member of the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind. We had forty thousand dollars of public money to spend. The work was so new and experimental that the Legislature and other officers of government could not know whether we were using the money wisely or not. There were three men on the commission and one other woman. She and I were in a safe minority, but our voice counted in every expenditure. The money was appropriated by a legislature of men as the result of an investigation and appeal made largely by women. Now note the contradiction. Women were allowed to have authority in spending State money. But no woman had had direct voice in deciding whether or not the money should be appropriated at all. The money was collected from tax-payers, many of whom were women, and it was created in part by the labour of women wage-earners. Once in the hands of the State, it was beyond the control of woman's fine, feminine intuition, of her perception, her tact, her other adorable qualities. If a woman, unaided and triumphantly irrational, should devise a situation as contradictory as that, the magnificent male would smile in condescension and say: "There you are! You see, women are utterly inconsistent."

For her to answer as she might, I fear, would be "unladylike." True ladies do not argue. They cannot argue because they are women as well as ladies, and lack the reasoning faculties. Moreover, argument is unseemly in them. It only demonstrates their proverbial loquacity. It is, in a word, "unladylike." So round and round runs the circle of thought, coming back always to that ideal of the lady; receptive, unquestioning, illogical, charming. While her lord sings to "Highland Mary," to "the angel in the house," to the "phantom of delight," it is not gentle for her to lay her hand across the sweet strings and ask a plain question. Hers is the charm "to haunt, to startle, to waylay," but she must haunt with a smile, she must startle only pleasant sensations, she must waylay her lord's thought only when it is happy, never when it is errant fallacy.

The books of the world have sung woman's praises and placed her a little higher than the angels. But the book of woman is not unmixed adoration. When desire liberates his generosity and wakes his lyre to rapture, man sets her upon peaks limitlessly high, and if she had true modesty, she would blush with discomfort at his impetuous hyperbole. However, he has his hours of disillusion and takes back everything nice he has said. As long ago as when the Hebrews were making the Bible, when man did all the writing, if not most of the talking, he discovered many faults in woman and set them down in vigorous words. He noted especially her tendency to infringe upon his hours of wordless meditation. Saith Ecclesiasticus: "As the climbing up of a sandy way is to the feet of the aged, so is a wife full of words to a quiet man." St. Paul says: "Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection, but I suffer not a woman to teach, or to usurp authority over the man, but be in silence."

It was St. Paul who insisted on the ideal of celibacy which was taken up by the early fathers of the Roman Church. The ancient Jews had felt the need of sons to make their tribes strong against enemies; so fruitfulness with them was a religious virtue. But the Roman world was densely populated, and the need for individual salvation was more urgent than the need for more people; so single blessedness became a religious virtue among the early Christians. The natural obstacle to celibacy was woman, and the result was that she was held responsible for man's lapses into matrimony. To the more austere fathers of the church she seemed to be man's greatest enemy, his tempter and affliction, the devil's gateway, destroyer of God's image. This idea of her fitted well with the story of her misdeed in the garden of Eden and man's banishment from paradise, for which he bore her a grudge. As a wife she was not worshipped; but her unmarried state became exalted in the figure of the Virgin Mary. Men knelt to her and besought her intercession. While the spirit of the time, embodied in church authority, beautified the mother of Christ, it continued to degrade her sisters. They were shut up in convents and ordered to stay at home, to conceal their beauty as dangerous to the beholder.

The ascetic ideal did not prevail in practice because human nature is against it. The church, which found in the words of St. Paul only a reluctant approval of marriage, finally took marriage under its protection and sanctified it. The romantic spirit grew up through the Middle Ages, and woman again became an object of delight and praise. But priestcraft and statecraft, expressions of man's attitude, kept her subjugated. Man was her sole instructor in religion, and religion comprehended all that she officially learned. He taught her her duties, her needs, and her capacities. He marked out for her the wavering line which delimited her "sphere." The chief content of this "sphere" was her duty to make him happy, to be a proper mate for him. He drilled her in morals, that she might not deceive him; he taught her obedience, that she might be his slave. He celebrated her in song and story because that celebration gave him pleasure. It was an utterance of his artistic sense. He made her laws, constituted himself judge, jury, jailer, and executioner. He had entire charge of her prisons and convents, of her house, her church, and her person. He burnt her, tortured her, gave her to wild beasts and cast her forth to be a pariah when she violated his property title in her. He laid down the measure of her knowledge, the quantity of it that would meet his approval. Through all times he granted her the privilege -- of bearing his children. But once born, they were his children, not hers.

One day, when he felt especially good-humoured, he gave her permission to learn to read. "I wish," said Erasmus when he was translating the Greek Testament, "that the weakest women might read the Gospels and the Epistles of St. Paul." The alphabet was her new tree of knowledge. She had made a ruinous blunder at the first tree, but the fruits of the new tree carried no penalty, except the sorrow which knowledge brings to the innocent. It is likely, however, that experience had already taught her the full measure of sorrow. The beginning of literacy among women was the beginning of their emancipation, just as the spread of common school education was the beginning of democracy. The emancipation is not complete, and we have not arrived at democracy. The masters seem instinctively to have felt that some bars should be left up, some gates should be closed against women and against certain classes of men. The professions were placarded, "Dangerous. Women not admitted." Over the pulpit was placed the legend inherited from the Jewish and Roman priesthood, "Woman, be silent."

As late as the nineteenth century John Ruskin, who was thought very radical in his time, confessed how quaintly old-fashioned he was in these words: "There is one dangerous science for women -- one which let them beware how they profanely touch -- that of theology." As if the relation between God and man were a masculine monopoly! Ruskin's essay on "Queens' Gardens" is an expression of the romantic liberal who dares and retreats, sings brave pæans of deliverance and then shrinks back into a sort of timid severity. He attributes to us almost every admirable quality that a human being could dream of possessing. Indeed, he praises us unfairly at the expense of our brothers; for he says: "Men are feeble in sympathy and contracted in hope; it is you only who can feel the depths of pain and conceive the way of its healing." That is to say, our natures are richer than men's, we suffer more, yet we must not explore the relations between God and man by which our sufferings are explained and assuaged. It is amusing to remember that critics have spoken of Ruskin's genius as "feminine."

The nineteenth century with its tardy mediævalism and its return to lights that never were on land or sea, together with its scientific clarity and its economic revolts, has summed up all the confusions of woman's position. Ruskin and Spencer are contemporaries. Mill's "On the Subjection of Women" and Tennyson's "Princess" are fruits of the same nation and the same era.

There is a deeper comedy in the "Princess" than Tennyson intended to put there. The opening scene is on an English lawn, and there is light talk about culture and the nobility of legendary women. One of the guests mocks at the notion of women's colleges:

Pretty were the sight
If our old halls could change their sex, and flaunt
With prudes for proctors, dowagers for deans,
And sweet girl graduates in their golden hair.
I think they should not wear our rusty gowns,
But move as rich as emperor-moths.

Then the poet tells a sweet, fantastic story laid in Fairyland. The mood of the story is expressed in the sad, exquisite interludes, lyrics of tears, of dead warriors, and of soft yieldings to the touch of man. Poetry is timeless; but time brings its revenges even upon poets. Just before Tennyson, who had been a brave democrat in his youth, was made a baron, Newnham College was opened, and "sweet girl graduates" became so familiar that the "Princess" lost its mild point before the author was dead. Tennyson fluttered a little way into the thought of his time, and then fluttered back again. In the second "Locksley Hall," he poetized his Toryism finally and fatally. Meanwhile the world had moved on.

In the nineteenth century Shakespeare was rediscovered and worshipped the other side idolatry. Everything was found in Shakespeare, including much that is not there; for example: his profound psychological knowledge of women. Books were written about his heroines which prove that the ideal of the perfect lady is drawn forever in the Shakespearian drama. In the introductions to the plays that I read at college, Rosalind and Portia are analyzed as if the whole philosophy of womanhood were contained in their poetical fancies, or at least as if we could never thoroughly understand women without knowing what Shakespeare wrote about them. I doubt if the women in Shakespeare's comedies are to be taken seriously. They are pretty creatures intended to be played by boys. They are the vehicle of any more or less fitting strain of poetry which happens to please the poet. Alice in Wonderland is a very real little girl; but one would not make a grave, scholarly analysis of the traits of character which she displays in her encounter with the Mock Turtle. Neither should we press too heavily upon Shakespeare's poetry to extract his beliefs about women. The unrivalled sonnets voice the praise and also the petulant dissatisfaction of a man in love, or pretending to be in love for the purpose of poetry. The woman-worship in the sonnets and in the glowing passages of the plays, spoken by gallants in pursuit of their ladies, is only the conventional romanticism common in mediæval and renaissance literature.

Shakespeare's phrasing outflies that of all other poets. But his ideas of women are neither original nor enlightened. In studying the social ideas of a writer and his time we often learn more from his unconscious testimony than from his direct eloquence. Portia, is wise, witty, learned, especially when disguised as a man; but she is disposed of without protest, through her father's will and its irrational accidents, to a commonplace, bankrupt courtier, and the tacit implication is that she is happily bestowed. Where Shakespeare brings Portia's career to an end, a modern comedy would begin. In the other plays the delightful heroine is hurried off at the close of the fifth act into the possession of a man whom she would not look at if she were as wise and strong and witty as the situations have represented her. Wedlock, no matter what the conditions, or how deep its essential indignity, is good enough for the loveliest Shakespearian maiden, and there is no suggestion that all is not as it should be. Helena, devoted, brave, loyal, is rewarded by being given to a careless worthless youth. In "Twelfth Night," Viola and the sentimental Duke, Olivia and Sebastian, pair off as nimbly as if personality were only a matter of wigs and disguises, of identities easily mistaken and as easily reestablished. Hermione, queenly and gracious, is bound to a person who behaves like a furious spoilt child, and is represented as respecting him and wishing to keep him.

Shakespeare does teach us much about the ideals of women that prevailed in his time. For he regards as a comic situation, to be turned with his magic phrases and concluded with joy-bells, what we should regard as a tragic situation.

The tragedy that lurks behind the false ideal of womanhood is being disclosed in our time. Woman is beginning to say to her master: "Romantic man, cease a while your singing of lays antique and ballads new. We would talk with you in prose. You have dreamed long enough of the lady, who, alas, is in a negligible minority. It is time for you to give your superior intelligence to the well-being of millions and millions of women."

III

THE WOMAN AND HER HOUSE

We women have often been told that the home contains all the interests and duties in which we are concerned. Our province is limited by the walls of a house, and to emerge from this honourable circumscription, to share in any broad enterprise, would be not only unladylike, but unwomanly. I could not help thinking of this the other day when I was asked to go to a far state and take part in some work that is being done for the blind. If I accepted this invitation, should I not be leaving my proper sphere, which is my home? I have thought of it many times since I learned that there are in America over six million women wage-earners. Every morning they leave their homes to tend machines, to scrub office-buildings, to sell goods in department stores. Society not only permits them to leave their proper sphere; it forces them to this unwomanly desertion of the hearth, in order that they may not starve. Oh, my sisters in the mills and shops, are you too tired, too indifferent to read the ridiculous arguments by which your rights are denied and your capacities depreciated in the sacred name of the home and its defence?

Woman's sphere is the home, and the home, too, is the sphere of man. The home embraces everything we strive for in this world. To get and maintain a decent home is the object of all our best endeavours. But where is the home? What are its boundaries? What does it contain? What must we do to secure and protect it?

In olden times the home was a private factory. The man worked in the field or at his handicraft, while the woman made food and clothes. She shared in out-of-door labour; but indoor work naturally became her special province. The household was the centre of production, and in it and about it man supplied himself with all that he needed -- or all that he had -- by rudimentary hand-processes. The mill to grind corn was not far away. The leather used by the shoemaker was from a beef killed by a neighbour. Over every cottage door the words might have been written: "Mr. and Mrs. Man, Manufacturers and Dealers in General Merchandise." Home life and industrial life were one. To-day they are widely separated. Industries that used to be in the house are spread all over the world. The woman's spinning-wheel and part of her kitchen and dairy have been taken away from her. When she seeks to understand economic affairs, and to exert her authority in their management, she is in reality only following her utensils.

The spinning-wheel, ancient emblem of domestic industry, has been removed to great factories. She has followed it there both as worker and owner. So she still does her part in the great task of clothing the human race. Where the spinning-wheel is, the woman has an ancestral right to be. For no matter how complex wheel and loom have become, she depends on them still to make the blanket that covers her child in its sleep. It is her duty as a house-mother to watch her spinning-wheel, to see that no member of the world-family goes ill-clad in an age when wool is abundant, when cunning machines can make good coats, when a ragged frock on a self-respecting woman is a shame to us all. It is for woman to follow her wheel, to make sure that it is spinning wool and not grinding misery, that no little child is chained to it in a torture of day-long labour. The spinning-wheel has grown a monstrous thing. In order to identify it, one must study wages, tariffs, dividends, the organization of labour and factory sanitation. The woman who studies these problems and insists on having a voice in their solution is in her home as truly as was her grandmother whose tireless foot drove the treadle of the old spinning-wheel. The home is where those things are made without which no home can be comfortable.

Once the housewife made her own butter and baked her own bread; she even sowed, reaped, threshed, and ground the wheat. Now her churn has been removed to great cheese and butter factories. The village mill, where she used to take her corn, is to-day in Minneapolis; her sickle is in Dakota. Every morning the express company delivers her loaves to the local grocer from a bakery that employs a thousand hands. The men who inspect her winter preserves are chemists in Washington. Her ice-box is in Chicago. The men in control of her pantry are bankers in New York. The leavening of bread is somehow dependent upon the culinary science of congressmen, and the washing of milk-cans is a complicated art which legislative bodies, composed of lawyers, are trying to teach the voting population on the farms.

It would take a modern woman a lifetime to walk across her kitchen floor; and to keep it clean is an Augean labour. No wonder that she sometimes shrinks from the task and joins the company of timid, lazy women who do not want to vote. But she must manage her home; for, no matter how grievously incompetent she may be, there is no one else authorized or able to manage it for her. She must secure for her children clean food at honest prices. Through all the changes of industry and government she remains the baker of bread, the minister of the universal sacrament of life.

When she demands to be mistress of the national granary, the national kitchen, the national dairy, the national sewing-room, whoever tells her to confine herself to her house is asking her to move forward and backward at the same time. This is a feat which even her inconsistency cannot achieve. The inconsistencies reside not in woman and her relation to her plain duties, but in her circumstances and in some of her critics. She can put a basket on her arm and bargain intelligently with a corner grocer; but she cannot understand the problem of nationalizing the railroads which have brought the food to the grocer's shop. She is clever at selecting a cut of meat; but the central meat-market must not be opened to her investigation; a congressional committee, which she did not choose, is doing its whole duty as father of the house when it tries to find out who owns the packing-houses in Chicago, how much money the owners make out of her dinner, and why thousands of tons of meat are shipped out of the country while her family is hungry.

She opens a can of food which is adulterated with worthless or dangerous stuff. In a distant city a man is building himself a palace with the profits of many such cans. If a petty thief should break into her pantry, and she should fight him tooth and nail, she would be applauded for her spirit and bravery; but when a millionaire manufacturer a thousand miles away robs her by the peaceful methods of commerce, she has nothing to say, because she does not understand business, and politics is not for her to meddle in.

Woman's old "domestic sphere" has become not only an empty shell with much of the contents removed, but a fragile shell in which she is not safe. Beside her own hearth she may be poisoned, starved, and robbed. When shall we have done with the tyranny which applies worn-out formulas to modern conditions? When shall we learn that domestic economy is political economy? The noblest task of woman is to get bread for her children. Whatever touches her children's bread is her business.

Woman from times long gone has been the nurse, the consoler, the healer of pain. To-day the sick-bed is often in a great public hospital. There she has followed it as professional nurse, and her services have been welcomed and acknowledged. In the hospital wards where she moves, deft, cheerful, capable, there are men unnecessarily laid low by the accidents of trade, and children maimed and dying who might be well and playing merrily in the bright morning of life. From the battlefields of industry come the wounded, from the shambles of poverty come the deformed. What enemy has stricken them? How much of all this disease and misery is preventable? Shall the wise nurse stand by the bed of pain and ask no questions about the social causes of ill-health? If her own child in her own home is needlessly hurt, she blames herself for her carelessness. In the world-home if a child is needlessly hurt, she is equally responsible. By her vigilance in the world-home woman can help to bring about a civilization in which every preventable disease shall be rooted out, and every condition that causes broken bodies shall be examined and abolished. This is her problem. She is mistress of the sick-room, and the sick-room is world-wide.

The education of children is acknowledged as lying within the scope of maternal care. The mother is the first teacher before the child goes to school, and in the schoolroom her unmarried sister devotes herself as a professional foster-mother to the children of others. The American nursery is a public building with a flag flying over it. If anywhere, woman is mistress in the schoolroom. So evident is this that in relation to schools she has a certain political privilege. She can vote for the school committee and serve on it herself. But even here she is bound by a very short tether. She has nothing official to say about how much money shall be spent for schools. Her freedom in this respect, as in some others, is the form without the substance. For the fundamental question in the public school problem is the question of money. Money must be appropriated by men. Moreover, the laws relating to children, for example, the laws of compulsory education, are made by men. It is not for her to say whether a child shall be taken from school to grind in mill and factory. Yet every child plunged in ignorance, bent by man's work before his time, is a thwarting of her sacred mission to fill the world with children well-born, well-bred, beautiful, wise, strong for the burdens of life! The schoolroom and all that it means belongs to the central intimacy of home, and all that violates the schoolroom violates the sanctity of the woman's hearth.

It is idle to say that woman could not improve the schools, that the schools are already free, and that every child has opportunity for instruction. The efficiency of the school depends upon things outside the schoolroom. It has been found that you must feed your child before you can teach it, and that the poor home defeats the best schoolroom. Behind the free school we must have a free people. What profits it to provide costly school buildings for anemic, under-fed children, to pass compulsory education laws and not secure a livelihood for the families whose children must obey them? What is the common sense of free text-books without wholesome food and proper clothing? Where is the logic -- masculine or feminine -- of free schools and free child-labour in the same commonwealth? These questions concern the most ignorant woman and the best educated woman, and the solution of them is necessary to the health and comfort of every home.

Woman's place is still the household. But the household is more spacious than in times gone by. Not all the changes of modern life have changed woman's duties essentially. Her work as spinner, bread-giver, helper of the helpless, mother and teacher of children is nowise different to-day but is immensely increased and intensified. Too often confused by the dazzle and uproar of modern life, she is the primal woman still, the saviour and shaper of the race.

In what a grim, strange abode must she often discharge her old-time functions! Sometimes it is no home at all, but an overcrowded, sunless lodging; it is not a shelter, but an industrial prison; it is not a nursery, but a lazaretto. Countless mothers of men have no place fit to be born in, to bear others in, to die in. Packed in tenements forgot of light, unheeded and slighted, starved of eye and ear and heart, they wear out their dull existence in monotonous toil -- all for a crust of bread! They strive and labour, sweat and produce; they subject their bodies and soul to every risk, lest their children die for want of food. Their clever hands which have so long been set to the spindle and the distaff, their patience, their industry, their cheapness, have but served to herd them in masses under the control of a growing industrial despotism.

Why is all this? Partly because woman does not own and direct her own share of the national household. True government is nothing but the management of this household for the good of the family. Under what kind of government do we live? To this question, her question, woman must find an answer by following her sisters to their places of sojourn. It is for her to know if their home is home indeed, if their shelter is strong and healthful, if every room -- in lodging, shop, and factory -- is open to light and air. It is for her to see that every dweller therein has freedom to drink in the winds of heaven and refresh his mind with music, art, and books; it is for her to see that every mother is enabled to bring up her children under favourable circumstances.

The greatest change is coming that has ever come in the history of the world. Order is evolving out of the chaos that followed the breaking up of the old system in which each household lived after its own manner. By using the physical forces of the universe men have replaced the slow hand-processes with the swift power of machines. If women demand it, a fair share of the machine-products will go to them and their families, as when the loom stood at hand in their dwellings. They will no more give all their best years to keep bright and fair the homes of others while their own are neglected. They will no more consume all their time, strength, and mental capacity in bringing up the rosy, laughing children of others while their own sweet children grow up pitiful and stunted. There is motherhood enough in the world to go round if it is not abused and wasted.

Yes, the greatest change is coming that has ever come in the history of the world. The idea that a higher power decrees definite stations for different human beings -- that some are born to be kings and others to be slaves -- is passing away. We know that there is plenty of room in the world and plenty of raw material in it for us all to be born right, to be brought up right, to work right, and to die right. We know that by the application of ordinary intelligence and common good-will, we can secure to every one of our children the means of culture, progress, and knowledge, of reasonable comfort, health, and happiness, or, if not happiness, at least freedom from the unnecessary misery which we all suffer to-day. This is the new faith that is taking the place of the faith in blind, selfish, capricious powers. Religion, the life of which is to do good, is supplanting the old servile superstitions. The spirit of the time we are in has been eloquently described by Henry Demarest Lloyd:

"It is an ethical renaissance, and insists that the divine ideals preached for thousands of years by the priests of humanity be put into form, now, here, and practically, in farm and mine, stock-market, factory, and bank. It denies point-blank that business is business. It declares business to be business and politics and religion. Business is the stewardship of the commissary of mankind, the administration of the resources upon which depend the possibilities of the human life, which is the divine life."

What is there, then, so cold, sordid, inhuman in economics that we women should shrink from the subject, disclaim all part in it, when we touch it daily in our domestic lives?

Many young women full of devotion and goodwill have been engaged in superficial charities. They have tried to feed the hungry without knowing the causes of poverty. They have tried to minister to the sick without understanding the cause of disease. They have tried to raise up fallen sisters without knowing the brutal arm of necessity that struck them down. We give relief to a mother here and there, and still women are worn out at their daily tasks. We attempt social reforms where we need social transformations. We mend small things and leave the great things untouched. We strive after order and comfort in a few households, regardless of the world where distress prevails and loveliness is trodden in the dust.

Our abiding-place will be home indeed when the world outside is a peaceful, bright home for mankind. Woman's happiness depends upon her knowledge of the facts of life as much as upon her lovely thoughts and sweet speech and her faithfulness to small duties. In woman is wrapped the hope of the future. The new child, the new civilization, all the possibilities that sleep in mankind are enfolded in her. In her travail is the resurrection of the human race. All this glorious promise can be brought to naught by ignorance of the world in which it is to be fulfilled. To plead with woman to urge her to open her eyes to the great affairs of life, is merely to bid her make ready her house for the child that is to be born.