If a woman does no labor in her home which could
properly make her self-supporting outside that home
she is in duty bound to do something outside her home
to justify her claim to support. The special social
danger now apprehended by those who sum up the
above indictments of the lady, is the possibility in
modern times of having so many of her. In old times
only a few at the top of favoring circumstance could
be supported by the labor of men.
Now the great
middle class may successfully ape the fashions of nobil-
ity, and even the poor may imitate the customs that
keep the married woman at least from entering “gain-
ful occupations." Thus parasitism may spread to the
very paupers! Thus proceeds the argument of Olive
Schreiner.

Mrs. Perkins Gilman 5 outlines the way out of this
social danger to be a wholesale movement of women
into man's specialized industrial order, each woman to
do for pay, whether single or married, with or without
children, some work she has learned to do well; with
women teachers, nurses, caretakers, and all whose spe-
cialties cover the home needs of children, housekeeping
and the rest—to enable all women to make marriage
and maternity an incident of experience rather than
a vocation giving material support. Ellen Key, on the
opposite side, calls earnestly to women that they are
on the wrong track even in the present movement to-
ward specialization of this sort. She would have
women not only face the lessening supply of domestic!

"Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Woman and Economics.
Ellen Key, The Century of the Child.

servants with composure but dismiss such as they have, and all mothers and intimate women relatives of mothers, live for and with their children and kindred. She would make far more rather than less of maternity and family obligation and by the simple life within a home as complete as possible in itself, make the development of personality, fine, strong, effective, progressive, the only vocation of the average woman. She would, however, make permanent place and opportunity for the exceptional woman, born a specialist, i to "burgeon out her powers"; and she would make teachers and nurses "mothers-at-large."

Somewhere between these extremes may lie the golden mean of wise decisions. But, meanwhile, is it true that the lady of to-day, who is cared for by her husband without hard labor either within or without the home, or who has inherited wealth that gives her problems of expenditure rather than of acquisition, is but a parasite? If she is married and bears and cares well for children, and makes a true home, she cannot be idle and must often work hard. If she has not married and has taken on some life-interest, intellectual, artistic, social, she is still employed; but perhaps in neither case in a manner that would make her easily or surely self-supporting. Does that fact alone make her a parasite? Nay, her social usefulness or harmfulness depends upon the kind of person she is rather than upon the definiteness of her economic status. "Clear your minds of cant," says Dr. Johnson; and the admonition is useful, whether the cant in question be the religious, the political or the economic. To-day

we are deafened by the economic cant, the translation in strident tones of all values into terms of dollars and cents. When a sociologist talks about a "thousanddollar man" or a "three-thousand-dollar man," he is talking as one who would measure a sunset by a railroad track. Using adequate human standards, a very great man may never be able to earn a thousand dollars a year, and a very small one or very dangerous one may capture his millions. The lady, therefore, should not be overcome with shame by epithets which deal only with commercial budgets. It may even fall to her lot to make the last stand against the overemphasis of our adolescent social science upon the "pay envelope"! If so, success to her!

7

The vital element in the modern criticism of the lady, and one which should be heeded with tragic earnestness, is that which calls attention to the wrong side of womanhood; the sinister aspects of a really idle class of women debauched and coarsened by vulgar luxury. When Professor Ferrero shows us historically the "abuses of liberty" of which privileged woman has been guilty, abuses "greater than those of man because she exercises more power over him than he over her," and also "because in the wealthier classes she is freer from the political and economic responsibilities that bind the man," so that she can "easier forget her duty toward the race"-we see the danger that now besets the lady of our civilization, and through her, the race.

There are three dominant tendencies of expression 'G. Ferrero, The Women of the Cæsars.

which the lady has shown. One, that of the specially gifted, toward individual and creative work. This cannot now be discussed. It belongs to a separate study. Of the other two, the tendency which Professor Ferrero has so searchingly revealed, is that toward the selfish exploitation of man and of all social agencies, even of the friends who love her best, for her own selfish, voluptuous, irresponsible pleasure. The qualities which base or ignorant or pleasure-seeking men have bred in her for their own gratification, grown monstrous in independent social power, at last endanger the very institutions man most highly values. At must never be forgotten that the lady has flowered out of the soil of unselfish service of her kind; that mother-nature which common womanhood expresses. If she rashly and wickedly strives to draw her lifeforce through the air of wanton coquetry from the sap of healthier growths (like the orchid, beautiful, fantastic, but uncanny), she withers at the centre of her being, and becomes a parasite indeed. That the suddenly acquired luxury of undisciplined classes, that the brazen domination of wealth in our American life, tend to produce among us women of the lady rank, and their pitiful imitators among the ignorant poor, who ignore every duty and outrage every womanly ideal, is terribly true. They are, so far as they exist, the most tragic force for social friction and national. disintegration in American society. It is to prevent the increase of the social dangers inhering in a womanhood thus debauched by selfishness, greed and the pursuit of pleasure as the business of life, that the

leaders of thought among women should chiefly address themselves. This is more vital than the immediate settlement of the intricate problems of the economic position of the married woman with children.

And to this end such leaders should refuse to accept financial values, especially such as are reckoned only on the basis of the market-price of labor, as the only classification of the useful or the useless in womanhood. The revolution in woman's work caused by the vast industrial changes of the last century do indeed make necessary radical readjustments in her economic life. Only the childish fear to attempt the full solution of difficult problems. Hence all thanks are due to those women who are bravely thinking their own preferred solutions through to logical ends; whether they are ranged with Mrs. Gilman's piquant audacity of wholesale settlements on a new basis, or with Ellen Key's ponderous and solemn moral appeal for a rebirth of the oldest in the newest womanhood. Nothing is out of place in discussion of the unavoidable puzzles of life and labor that to-day press upon enlightened women, except bigotry and cowardice. In this field of vast social changes and their reaction upon womanhood, however, as in all environmental pressure upon the individual, we all live before we can learn a rule of living; and we are taught what that rule must be by necessary experimentation. Some

"Motion, toiling in the gloom,

Yearning to mix itself with life,"

ordains our course. In the sphere of character, how