Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/358

346 business. She may teach, write, preach, 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 complete freedom result from flaws in her own standards and traditions, and are in no wise imposed upon her from without.

American men are neither tyrannical nor condescending toward 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 unconsciously taken for granted. They have, besides, a genial tendency to be proud of their women and to applaud rather than discourage 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 discontent, 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 individuality 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 interests and duties of the American home and its dependent sociological activities, are confronted with the prospect of