Page:Women of the West.djvu/156

Rh To give a list of the fine women who have done all this, would take too much space. Of them, nothing finer can be said than that in almost no case has the dollar mark made any difference in social status or public leadership. Some of the highest honorary positions in the power of the women of the state to confer upon other women, are held by those whose family budget is comparatively small.

In a state measuring 146,977 square miles there is room for many women, and the total population of Montana being only 550,000, one might say there is room for many more women.

The distinction of Montana women is that in the mass they are cosmopolitan. Up and down and across the continent east of the divide, femininity has ventured or been invited into Montana. Women have come to teach and remained to keep house. Women have come to keep house and their daughters remain to practice law or medicine, to enter the Forest Service, or the State Legislature, to raise families, to write poetry, fiction, philosophy, to edit newspapers, to do all that femininity has ever tried, from driving aeroplanes to raising peonies on a dry-land farm. The first woman representative to the National Congress was a Montana woman.

Montana women are foundation builders. Their pioneer mothers blazed trails and made clearings, and their daughters are to carry on the construction of a culture worthy of a foundation built from stones of sincerity, self-knowledge, courage and love of humanity.

Montana is a land of promise. Montana women are working to make it a land of fulfillment. They are studying the problems of older, congested districts, determining to provide against undesirable experiences recorded there. They are going to be wise and capable to handle the larger issues upon which national welfare depends.

The women of Montana, today, are the splendid products of the more adventurous and the more courageous, who fought