Page:The Business of being a Woman by Ida Tarbell.djvu/249

 Public Library. It produced Dorothea Dix, who for twenty years before the Civil War carried on perhaps the most remarkable investigation of conditions that has ever been made in this country by man or woman,—the one which required the most courage, endurance, and persistency,—her investigation of the then barbaric system for caring—or not caring—for the insane. State after state enacted new laws and instituted new methods solely on the showing of this one woman. If there were no other case to offer to the frequent cry that women have never had an influence on legislation, this would be enough. Moreover, this is but the most brilliant example of the kind of work women had been doing from the beginning of the Republic.

To my mind there is no phase of their activities which reveals better the genuineness of their training than the initia-