hem up--and which cannot always hold their
own in England, even with the aid of these!

Every woman, like every man, has a natural desire for influence; and if
this instinct yearns, as it often should yearn, to take in more than her
own family, she must seek it somewhere outside. I know women who bring to
bear on the building-up of a frivolous social circle--frivolous, because it
is not really brilliant, but only showy; not really gay, but only bored--
talent and energy enough to influence the mind and thought of the nation,
if only employed in some effective way. Who are the women of real influence
in America? They are the schoolteachers, through whose hands each
successive American generation has to pass; they are those wives of public
men who share their husbands' labor, and help mould their work; they are
those women who, through their personal eloquence or through the press, are
distinctly influencing the American people in its growth. The influence of
such women is felt for good or for evil in every page they print, every
newspaper column they fill: the individual women may be unworthy their
posts, but it is they who have got hold of the lever, and gone the right
way to work. As American society is constituted, the largest "social
success" that can be attained here is trivial and local; and you have to
"make believe very hard," like that other imaginary Marchioness, to find in
it any career worth mentioning. That is the foam, but these other women are
dealing with the main currents.

IN SOCIETY

One sometimes hears from some lady the remark that very few people "in
society" believe in any movement to enlarge the rights or duties of women.
In a community of more marked social gradations than our own, this
assertion, if true, might be very important; and even here it is worth
considering, because it leads the way to a little social philosophy. Let
us, for the sake of argument, begin by accepting the assumption that there
is an inner circle, at least in our large cities, which claims to be
"society," _par excellence_. What relation has this favored circle, if
favored it be, to any movement relating to women?

It has, to begin with, the same relation that "society" has to every
movement of reform. The proportion of smiles and frowns bestowed from this
quarter upon the woman-suffrage movement, for instance, is about that
formerly bestowed upon the anti-slavery agitation: I see no great
difference. In Boston,