The Business of Being a Woman

IMITATI

m, and believing man's way of life will assuage it, lays siege to his kingdom. Some of the unexpected loot she has carried away still embar

nd what will you see? One or probably more women in mannish suits and boots calmly smoking cigarettes while they talk,

masculine ways to their liking and adopted them. The probability is that if anybody should object to their habits, many of them wou

ducts of the woman's invasion of the man's world. She did not

brain was being trained, her time employed, her influence directed. "Give us the man's way," was her demand

that though the ideas were many, the resulting measures were few. It is the woman's eternal complaint against discussion-nothing comes of it. In a country like our own, where reflection usually follows action, the woman's natural mental attitude is exaggerated. It is one reason why we have so few houses where there is anything like conversation, why with us the salon as an institution is out

would follow the "just-as-good" curriculum of the college founded for her. In the last sixty or seventy years tens of thousands of women have been students in American universities, colleges, and technical schools, taking there the same training as men. In the last twenty years the annual crescendo of numbers has been

tely whether their attack on problems is the same, whether they come out the same. Nevertheless, he would be a rash observer who would pretend to lay down hard-and-fast generalizations. Assert whatever you will a

zations, on the whole correct, may be m

eers. They had set themselves a lofty task: to prove themselves the equal of man-to win privileges which they believed were maliciously denied their sex. The spirit with which they attacked their studies was illumined by the loftiness of their aim. The girl who

l treat this sort of impedimenta with more respect. She will know less of abstract ideas, of philosophies and speculations. They will interest her less. The chances are that she will be less skillful with microscope and scalpel, though this is not certain. She will show less enthusiasm for technical problems, for machinery and engineering; more for social problems, particularly when it is a question of meeting them with preventives or remedies. In the first two or three years after entering college, she will almost invariably app

an do anything with her but convince her, for she jumps the process, lands on her conclusion, and there she sits. Things are so because they are so. And the chances are she is right, in spite of the irregular way she got there. Something superior to reason enters into

nity out and masculinity into a woman's brain. The woman's mind is still the woman's mind, although she is usual

can decide what it is worth. Set the man-trained woman's mind at what is called man's business, let it be what you will-keeping a shop, practicing medicine or law, editing, running a factory-let her do it in what she cons

r, for exactness, is endless. Dignity, respect for their undertaking, devotion to professional etiquette they may be counted on to show in the highest degree. These are admirable qualities. They have led hundreds of women into independence and good service. Almost never, however, have they

great women! That is, of women who understand, are familiar with the big sacrifices, appreciative of the fine th

sympathy which come in the contact with all conditions of life involved in practicing a trade or a profession. She must save herself. To do it she incases herself in an unnatural armor. For the normal, healthy woman this means the suppression of what is strongest in her nature, that power which differentiates her chiefly from man, her power of emotion, her "affectability" as the scientists cal

s cold, also she is self-centered and intensely personal. Let a woman make success in a trade or profe

fits the common good, without which the world would not be as orderly and as happy. Say what we will, it matters very little what the task is-if it contributes in some fashion to this superior orderliness and happiness. But it means more. It means leisure, pleasure, exci

ely jealous of interference in it as she would be if it were a child. She resents suggestions and change. It is hers, a personal thing to which she clings as if it were a living being. That attitude is the chief reason why working with women in the development of gr

missed the fullness of life. She finds that society regards her as one who shirked the task of life, and who, therefore, should not be honored as the woman who has stood up to the common burden. When she senses this-which is not always-she treats it as prejudice. As a matter of fact, the antagonism of Nature and Society to the militant woman is less pre

hat the unrest which drove her to the attempt is not necessarily satisfied by her triumph, that it is merely stifled and may break out at any time in vagaries and follies. They must be made to realiz

be treated as an apostate if, instead of following the "life work" she had picked out, she slipped back into matrimony. I can remember the dismay among certain militant friends when Alice Fr

od of their lives. But I am not saying that this theory is no longer influential. It is probable that in a modified form it was never more influential than it is to-day. For, while the Uneasy Woman has practically demonstrated that

cy. "Celibacy is the aristocracy of the future," is the preaching of one European feminist. It is a modification of the scheme by which the medieval woman sought to escape unrest. Four hund

this amounts to is that she does not see in the woman's life a satisfying and permanent end. There are various points at which she claims it fails. It is antagonistic to personal ambition. It makes a dependent of her. It leaves her in middle life without an occupation. It keeps her out of the great movements of her day-gives her no part in t

n would not be with us as she is to-day, more vociferous, more ins

woman's business, if it is not a part of it, something is weak in the scheme. Something is weak if the woman

middle life, her forces spent, without interests and obligations which will occupy brain and heart to the full, without impo

? Is there no place in it for economic independence? Has it no essential relation to the world's movements? Is it an episode which drains the forces