food, the need of exercise, the joy of living, these come first and absorb the bulk of its life whether the individual be male or female. . . . Two riders pass . . . my window; one rides a horse, the other a mare. The animals were, perhaps, foaled in the same stable, of the same progenitors. They have been reared alike, fed alike, trained alike, ridden alike,; they need the same exercise, the same grooming; nine tenths of their existence are the same, and only the other tenth is different. Their whole organization is marked by the distinction of sex; but, though the marking is ineffaceable, the distinction is not the first or most important fact. . . . This is not denying the distinctions of sex, but only asserting that they are not so inclusive and all-absorbing as is supposed. It is easy to name other grounds of difference which entirely ignore those of sex, striking directly across them, and rendering a different classification necessary. It is thus with distinctions of race or color, for instance. An Indian man and woman are at many points more like one another than is either to a white person of the same sex. A black-haired man or woman, or a fair-haired man or woman, are to be classed together in these physiological aspects. So of differences of genius: a man and woman of musical temperament and training have more in common than has either with a person who is of the same sex, but who cannot tell one note from the other. . . . Nature is too rich, too full, too varied, to be content with a single basis of classification; she has a hundred systems of grouping, ac cording to age, sex, temperament, training, and so on; and we get but a narrow view of life when we limit our theories to one set of distinctions."

The over-emphasis of sex functions, and the domestic and family traditions which grew out

of it, found expression chiefly in the Nineteenth Century in America. The lives of hundreds of women of the great, typical, middle, comfortable classes, both living and dead, have been studied, and are here interpreted as showing how coercive the belated conventions of feminine duty and behavior have been. They serve to explain the inconsistencies, the futility, the narrowness of the great mass of such women at the present time. To women who are struggling in the meshes of their own mixed temperaments, and the fastchanging conventions of the feminine world, here is encouragement as well as revelation. When

men are able to free themselves from their traditional opinions about women, and to give as dispassionate thought to the efficiency of women as to other social problems; and when women as a class acquire the same belief in their own abilities as men now possess, 46 the woman question will solve itself; for it will have become merely a phase of general progress, in which both sexes. necessarily rise together.

CHAPTER XV

FAMILY PERPLEXITIES

"Modern conditions and modern ideas, and in particular the intenser and subtler perceptions of modern life, press more and more heavily upon a marriage tie whose fashion comes from an earlier and less discriminating time. When the wife was her husband's subordinate, meeting him simply and uncritically for simple ends, when marriage was a purely domestic relationship, leaving thought and the vivid things of life almost entirely to the unencumbered man, mental and temperamental incompatibilities mattered comparatively little. But now the wife, and particularly the loving, childless wife, unpremeditatedly makes a relentless demand for a complete association, and the husband exacts unthought-of delicacies of understanding and co-operation. These are stupendous demands. . . .

"No contemporary woman of education put to the test is willing to recognize any claim a man can make upon her but the claim of her freely-given devotion to him. She wants the reality of choice, and she means 'family,' while a man too often means only possession. This alters the spirit of the family relations fundamentally. Their form remains just what it was when woman was esteemed a pretty, desirable, and, incidentally, child-producing, chattel. . . ."-From A New Machiavelli-H. G. WELLS, 1910.

THE Twentieth-Century woman is in process of transition from hyper-femininity to balanced womanhood. This movement, represented in the middle of the last century by sporadic, exceptional types; and since then by larger groups,

such as the college alumnæ on the one hand, and women in industry on the other, is steadily gathering momentum. Of all the vocations listed in the current census, there is not one which women have not attempted. At the same time, household management is rapidly becoming an applied science;. and motherhood and the rearing of children are taken with infinitely greater seriousness and are measured by a rising standard of devotion and intelligence.

While social conservatives point out—what cannot be denied-that women grow less and less domesticated and feminine in habit; and, while the prophets of the feminists reply that they are, nevertheless, more womanly and humane; plain, thoughtful men and women are puzzled and apprehensive in the face of the problems raised by the change. The proud father who, at some sacrifice, sends his clever daughter to college, is surprised to find that when she returns home she is not satisfied to be merely the ornament of the house and the comfort of her parents until she marries. He is troubled by her critical attitude. toward her suitors, her disdain of protection, and her reserve toward marriage. The sweet, domestic mother, whose whole life has been absorbed in domestic detail and in childbearing, grieves that her daughter, just out of school, insists on going to a business college, or to a train

ing-school for nurses, to learn to earn her living "when it is quite unnecessary.

At the other extreme are the "emancipated' parents who, because of their own limitations and mistakes, have an intense desire to plant their girls in a larger life than the old conventional domesticity. They are often astonished and disappointed to find their daughters relapsing into traditional femininity under the fundamental impulses of maternity. All the advantages of education seem to have been thrown away; for the higher culture seems to bear no essential relation to the inevitable duties of the domestic woman.

After all, the confusion and doubts of parents are of less account than the perplexities of the marriageable young woman of this transitional day. She sees that older women accepted as right-if not satisfactory-the peculiar status which was half-domestic, half-dependent; but she has somehow acquired an instinctive sense, from the social atmosphere, from the newspapers, from the example of women who have "done things," that she ought not to accept unquestioningly such a plane for herself. She wants to marry, but does not dare to say so, and must, therefore, practise the ancient arts of concealment and coquetry; or, scorning to do so, is likely to remain unmarried.

If she marries under the impetus of natural