NOTE These chapters have appeared in THE FORUM as monthly articles in a series. They are here reproduced for the most part in original form, any repetition occurring by reason of this previous use being justified, it is thought, as giving special emphasis to each sub-topic. The analytical Table of Contents is introduced not only to show succinctly the main argument advanced, but also in the hope that it may prove of service in class-work should the book be honored by use in sociological study. INTRODUCTION EVERY problem of environmental change becomes more acute as it works inward toward the family. Every element of social unrest intensifies both in stress and in difficulty, as it relates itself to the home and to the position of women who constitute the centre of the home. Every awkwardness of adjustment of our still adolescent democracy is shown in higher light as it touches the life and labor of women. Every demand upon personal character for new types of excellence to match the new forms of social organization acquires a more imperious force as it appeals to the changing feminine ideal. Every obstacle to human progress toward justice and the common weal as against the privilege of caste, of custom and of wealth, shows a more tragic quality where the selfishness or shallowness or coquetry or low-mindedness of women blocks the upward way. Every question of the sociologist cuts, like the etcher's tool, more deeply as it approaches that most subtle and most fundamental of all problems: What is the nature and function of Woman? Every moral devotion that strives to attain and to preserve a human personality equally strong and fine in Being and in Doing fibres upon its deepest root as it engages in its newest spiritual adven ture, namely, a Womanhood justly balanced in individual achievement and in social service. What wonder, then, that the "woman movement" has become more complex and confusing as it has advanced from point to point? That women should own their own souls and be morally responsible for their own acts seemed clear long ago. That women should own their own persons to the extent of being secured by law against cruelty and outrage has seemed evident for a considerable period. That women should own their own property by inheritance, and the fruit of their own labor as earnings, began to seem clear to our civilization early in the last century. That women should own their own "influence," should "make up their own minds," should be accountable for their own share in social control and in social uplift, is newly perceived. That women for their own sake, and for the extension of a truer democracy, should be steadied and sobered by equal political responsibility with men in the State, is fast coming to wide acceptance. That women have a right to the utmost reach of educational, professional, artistic, commercial and industrial op!portunity as a basis for capacity for that self-support which is an essential to feminine as to masculine dignity of character, is approaching perception. That society needs the full liberation of all potential possibilities of feminine contribution to the thought and the labor of the world, is on its way to belief. That the distinct and specialized genius of womanhood, as the outgrowth of unique functional discipline in the experience of life, has in it a gift to human growth which shall yet add peculiar value to every sphere of mental and moral endeavor, is dimly appearing as a truth of the future. That these principles, and their relation to the evolution of the race, may be seen a little clearer, is the purpose of this book. The fruit of many years of thought, of study and of observation, these inadequate but serious essays of interpretative and appreciative criticism aim to give some clarifying help in this vital crisis in the individuation of woman. The keynote of this study is that while "new occasions teach new duties" and the call to-day is for women to assume with courage and with gladness the new life of the new time, new duties do not abrogate old responsibilities, but rather enlarge, spiritualize and transform them. In a time when so many believe that all that mankind needs for its perfection is new and more clever mechanisms of economics, statecraft and statute law, it is peculiarly difficult for women, as newcomers into the world of public affairs, to keep their old deepbedded faith in the worth and power of the individual choice. In a time when all the inherited ethical standards and religious sanctions are radically changing in the crucibles of scientific laboratories, it is especially hard for women, as newly claiming the moral and intellectual initiative, to bear testimony to the inner trusts and aspirations upon which their souls have fed. Newly arrived, as a partially accepted and slightly modifying factor in the organized church, school, shop, market-place, State and social order, which man has arranged for his own development and his own self expression, women hesitate to voice their mental questionings or moral hesitations concerning these established institutions, lest they be thought still childish and untrained and their chance "to do what men do" be taken away or made too difficult for success. Eager women students in college and university take the manmade ideals and civilization they find there outlined as a fixed intellectual and ethical mould, to which they must fit themselves or fail in their new ambition to become complete and effective human beings, each on her own account. Women, as well as men, have for the most part a far clearer realization of the onesidedness of woman's functional development, than of the equal one-sidedness of man's discipline of life. Men and women alike take what they find as already developed out of the segregation of the sexes in all the deeper and higher areas of human experience and achievement, and assume that what men have thought and written and lived and done is the measure of human power. Slowly, however, the truth is dawning upon women, and still more slowly upon men, that woman is no stepchild of nature, no Cinderella of fate to be dowered only by fairies and the Prince; but that for her and in her, as truly as for and in man, life has wrought its great experiences, its master attainments, its supreme human revelations of the stuff of which worlds are made. That woman has been but a "silent partner" in the building of the outer temples of thought and action during the ages when she has been denied the tools of self-expression in art and science, in literature and politics, is no proof that her |