Excepting a negligible minority, the feminine career of today (as of
the last ten thousand years of the race's history) consists in the
acquisition of a husband. After that she is so identified with him
that her own life, as something distinct, individual and unique,
becomes blurred and then completely erased. The feminine careerist,
the careeristina, if you will, is a definite type. Consider the
unimportance of a collective purpose to the woman whose career is the
mate, and then the mate's career. All the kinks and twists of the
feminine mind, resulting from the necessities of that fundamental
primary problem, would form a multitudinous and interesting list. The
most successful careeristinas are the absolutely unconscious ones
because they are not passively besieged nor actively bombarded by any
doubts as to what they want. They play their game exceedingly well as
do not the quasi-rebels and faint-hearted revoltees that form no small
percentage of the Newest Women. For a number of women the feminist
movement has been an attempt to break away from the traditions of
the wife-careerist, and to strike a line of auto-careerism. Can
the careeristina instinct, the fruit of the practice of so many
generations, be uprooted by the good intentions of a mere statesman?

But the masculine careerist is a marvelous creature. He is a biologic
sport, an abnormal variation. New York is the place to watch and
study him in his thousands and tens of thousands. You can observe
him climbing, climbing, climbing, precisely as an ant climbs a tree.
Nothing can really discourage or sway him from his chosen path. If he
is not getting on financially, he is getting on socially, or he is
using the one method of advance to help him with the other. How the
line of least resistance and greatest advantage is determined for and
taken by him is a fascinating process.

The careerist instinct, the inherited flair for a career, must not be
confounded with the instincts of self-preservation, self-expansion
or self-expression, because they are utterly different. Indeed, the
careerist instinct is often their direct antagonist, clashing with and
dominating them. The making of the career involves the distortion, the
mutilation, degradation, degeneration or even the complete suppression
of the true personality. But it is all instinctive. To consider the
life of the careerist as an expression of instinct will explain too
the success of so many who have no inne