re is also perceptible an incipient development
of sentiment to the effect that this whole arrangement of tutelage and
vicarious life and imputation of merit and demerit is somehow a mistake.
Or, at least, that even if it may be a natural growth and a good
arrangement in its time and place, and in spite of its patent aesthetic
value, still it does not adequately serve the more everyday ends of life
in a modern industrial community. Even that large and substantial body
of well-bred, upper and middle-class women to whose dispassionate,
matronly sense of the traditional proprieties this relation of status
commends itself as fundamentally and eternally right-even these, whose
attitude is conservative, commonly find some slight discrepancy in
detail between things as they are and things as they should be in this
respect. But that less manageable body of modern women who, by force of
youth, education, or temperament, are in some degree out of touch with
the traditions of status received from the barbarian culture, and
in whom there is, perhaps, an undue reversion to the impulse of
self-expression and workmanship--these are touched with a sense of
grievance too vivid to leave them at rest.

In this "New-Woman" movement--as these blind and incoherent efforts to
rehabilitate the woman's pre-glacial standing have been named--there
are at least two elements discernible, both of which are of an economic
character. These two elements or motives are expressed by the double
watchword, "Emancipation" and "Work." Each of these words is recognized
to stand for something in the way of a wide-spread sense of grievance.
The prevalence of the sentiment is recognized even by people who do not
see that there is any real ground for a grievance in the situation as
it stands today. It is among the women of the well-to-do classes, in the
communities which are farthest advanced in industrial development, that
this sense of a grievance to be redressed is most alive and finds most
frequent expression. That is to say, in other words, there is a demand,
more or less serious, for emancipation from all relation of status,
tutelage, or vicarious life; and the revulsion asserts itself especially
among the class of women upon whom the scheme of life handed down from
the regime of status imposes with least litigation a vicarious life, and
in those communities whose economic development has departed farthest
from the circumstances to which this traditional sch