hough
the woman worker had been accepted and even honored in the East, it was
not until the West had made her a matter of course that she was
universally regarded as entirely within the proper sphere of femininity.
Up to that time she had been looked upon as the creature of
circumstances, to disappear when the conditions of her existence were
altered, rather than as an established fact; but the last decade of the
century swept away such remaining cobwebs of tradition and for all time
made the woman worker a recognized fact as well as factor in the
totality of our social system.

As the century drew to its close, increasingly prominent and determined
became the position of the woman worker. Her sphere of action became
rapidly enlarged; she grew to be a power as well as an influence. She
was no longer of necessity the subordinate worker; often she claimed and
obtained a place at the head of affairs, even if as yet these were
rarely "of great pith and moment." The woman worker rapidly developed
into the woman of business. She began to rival the men in enterprise,
even although she rarely contended with them in their traditional
fields. Yet even this latter rule was not universal in application; the
nineteenth century had not yielded its latest breath before it had seen
the appearance of women as commercial travellers, as agents of various
descriptions, and in many departments contending with the men for
supremacy in fields that had hitherto been considered necessarily
confined to cultivation by the sterner sex.

The close of that century also saw women entering into rivalry with the
men in learned professions. Female practitioners of medicine, such as
Dr. Mary Walker, had been known for some time, and the last few years
have seen, even in the most conservative States, women admitted to the
bar, following in the footsteps of Mrs. Belva Lockwood, to contend with
their male rivals in forensic eloquence and subtleties. The professorial
chairs of such institutions of learning as Vassar College, the
forerunner of the many splendid educational centres for female training
that have sprung up throughout our land, were filled for the most part
by women, themselves the product of those educational institutions; and
even some of the universities hitherto confined to the education of the
male youth of our land opened their doors to women, while coeducation
already had its notable strongholds. Everywhere there was granted, and
gladly