boys than girls are abnormal or deficient in mind or special sense, and that more boys than girls suffer premature death from many of the ills that flesh is heir to. Facts show, above all, that more women than men live to a ripe old age, and not only thus survive, but have a good chance for health and strength. It is declared by experts that mental derangements are more common in old men than in old women, Dr. Wille setting the ratio at ten per cent. males to six per cent. females. The specific gravity of the blood, as Lloyd Jones has shown, is found higher in old women than in old men; and there is far greater constitutional youthfulness among old women than among old men, which is in itself a sign of greater vitality and later conservation of work-power. The liability to death is about the same in the two sexes between the third and thirtieth years, and there is a special dangerperiod for girls between the fourteenth and twentieth years; but when we get above thirty-five the chances are better for both life and health for women than for men. This is not alone a peculiarity of civilization, for we are told by those who have especially studied the matter that among some savage tribes fully two-thirds of those surviving the sixtieth year are women. It is true, however, that the conditions of civilized life, especially those easier domestic conditions we now have as the result of inventions of all sorts, are especially favorable to longevity in women. Dr. Langstaff says: "It is quite plain that the recent fall in the death rate favors the accumulation of surplus women." The result of all the recent studies of

sex-differences and sex-conditions leads to the conclusion that under most of the conditions of social life, in a wide range of varied forms of human society, we have proof of the "greater physical frailty of men and the greater tenacity of life in women." As Dr. Campbell says: "Women possess a greater innate recuperative power than men," and, although more often slightly ill, make easier recovery. The facts make the phrase "the weaker sex" as applied to women a little misleading.

Men, it is true, are able to summon for emergency, or crisis-effort, far more muscular power than women. They have a steadier nerve, and a greater capacity for putting all the strength and vigor they possess into a short term of effort for a distinct end. This gives them efficiency of the highest sort in the regulated industries of the world. This makes men far better able than women to keep pace with the modern machines, to hold their even share of the burden of business demands, and to fill the larger and more exacting offices of the world in public affairs. Moreover, men have, through all their earlier years, "a straight line" of progressive power up to the period of the slowing down of age; while women have for years "a curved and variable line" that requires consideration each month at its weakest point. Men can go from strength to strength steadily until they have reached their meridian of power without a break. Women have periodicities that often hinder regular advance. Men also are relieved from the physical cost of parenthood. A man who is married and has children has, indeed,

"given hostages to fortune" and must work the harder and serve the more unselfishly. But women, in addition to the economic burdens which parenthood imposes, must also contribute a measure of physical force, a determination of bodily strength both in child-bearing and child-rearing, which means often a heavy price paid for social serviceableness. A childless woman once said to a mother whose splendid family of five children were all that any parent could desire, "How I envy you! I would give twenty years of my life to have such a family as that." "Well," answered the mother, "they cost about that." All that is implied in the curves and periodicities of women's lives makes them more dependent upon men during the early period of life than men are upon women, and gives a sound biological reason for the social demand for "chivalry," and for the saving in all possible ways of women's strength and health while they are about the social business of motherhood. This it is which makes the father in duty bound to carry the heavier economic load all through the child-bearing and child-rearing period. This it is which made our Saxon forefathers in an ancient statute give "a married woman, with child, free range of the forest for wood-gathering," and a generous "share of the harvest." This it is which has made all progressive and successful civilizations guard both the young mother and the potential mother from excessive labor; guard such both by the personal devotion of their men relatives and by the social consideration of laws and customs.

When, however, the climacteric of middle life is

reached, nature gives a new deal and starts a fresh balance of power between men and women. When the child-bearing age is passed woman's line of life becomes as "straight" as man's, and the "curves" that have required consideration at their weakest point are no longer a part of her experience. Moreover, at the point when the change comes in women's physical condition, there may be, and now increasingly is, a fresh start given to the mental and emotional life. It cannot be too soon realized that in the lives of women there is capacity for a second youth. A second youth, that holds in reserve full compensation for any expenditure that a reasonable motherhood may have deinanded. A second youth, when new thoughts blossom, when wishes and tendencies of personal development may flower into realization, when all that has gone into the sacrificial service to family life may add a peculiar flavor and a special wisdom to personal achievement or to enlarged social service. This is the meaning of the "Women's Club Movement" and of the many forms of associated action by which mature womanhood, now that it is at last educated and free, takes up its own self-culture and its own chosen activities for the common good. Asked once to describe the Women's Club Movement one answered, "Women's Clubs are the great non-academic university-extension movement of the nineteenth century for women in their second youth." A wit hearing the answer asked if a "second childhood for women preceded their second youth?" Not a bad hit, and not simply a jest; for, if an undisciplined woman, bound to make a fool

of herself, does not accomplish that unhappy distinction before she is twenty-five, she will surely do it between forty-five and sixty to astonish her friends by her extravagancies of behavior. The trained and disciplined woman, however, is eager for work and for large enterprises at this period of life as never before. She seeks activity of whatever sort as native to her own desire, and if she is not sufficiently well educated or sufficiently in touch with the things best worth doing, in the lines most congenial to her natural capacity, she is likely to rush about from one to another busyness of interest, without plan or effectiveness and to a distraction of energy. To many women, also, whom life has used hardly in circumstance or relationship, there may come a childish restlessness before they can "settle down" to the true rejuvenescence of thought, of feeling and of power which is theirs by right. The old theories of women took no account of this rich and large possibility of later life. If the fact that more women than men lived to old age, and that more women than men seemed to relish life and want to engage in activities of moment after they were old, was at all perceived, it was laid to the natural perversity of women that they thus hung on to life when no longer desired and put themselves in the way when they could no longer do that for which they were made! As Professor Sheavyn well says: "The disadvantages of being a woman have been better understood than the advantages." 4 "4 Now, for the first time, we are learn

Phoebe Sheavyn, Ph.D., Professional Women in The Position of Woman.