346 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



business. Slie may teach, write, i:)reac}i, lecture, practice law or 

 medicine. Journalism and belles-lettres are her happy hunting 

 grounds. She may marry or remain unmarried with equal honor, 

 and no one dictates in her choice of a husband. She may wear 

 bloomers and ride a wheel. She may carry on public agitations 

 to an unlimited extent. The most serious drawbacks to her com- 

 plete freedom result from flaws in her own standards and tradi- 

 tions, and are in no wise imposed upon her from without. 



American men are neither tyrannical nor condescending to- 

 ward women. From childhood up they have been in the habit 

 of seeing their sisters walk beside them with independence and 

 privilege equal to their own. Their attitude is one of frank 

 comradery based upon a respect which on both sides is uncon- 

 sciously taken for granted. They have, besides, a genial tendency 

 to be proud of their women and to applaud rather than discour- 

 age their ambitions. If women wish to vote, these men will not 

 deny them. In fact, many an American household presents the 

 edifying spectacle of a husband more ready to vote the suffrage 

 to his wife than she to accept it. 



Notwithstanding this freedom perhaps because of it one 

 need only obtain an unaffected expression of their feeling to find 

 that, maid and matron alike, the women of the country are, as a 

 rule, content in marriage as a career. They wish for children, 

 and gladly make the prolonged sacrifices necessary to their care 

 and education. One day a young woman exactly such a one as 

 may be met with any day anywhere in the country went " in 

 fun " to consult a fortune-teller. But she returned in tears, and 

 confided to her girl friend that she wept because the seer had told 

 her she would never have children. 



It can not of course be said that among women there is no dis- 

 content, no restlessness. The age is full of discontent of a certain 

 kind, and restlessness is in the blood. Women do not escape 

 these general influences of the time. Moreover, there is, at least 

 among college women, a special dissatisfaction with the drudgery 

 attendant upon home-making. With the increase of individual- 

 ity which the higher education can not fail to bring, comes the 

 need of a new sort of home ; and the conflict and adjustment of 

 old with new ideals, old with new duties, old with new purposes, 

 brings confusion and sadness into the problem of many a modern 

 woman's life. Notwithstanding this, the college woman is found 

 in general to be no more ready than her uneducated sister to go 

 back upon the womanhood which means self-denial, and the 

 career which means self-sacrifice. 



When these American women, full of the complicated in- 

 terests and duties of the American home and its dependent 

 sociological activities, are confronted with the prospect of exer- 



