eme is adapted. The
demand comes from that portion of womankind which is excluded by the
canons of good repute from all effectual work, and which is closely
reserved for a life of leisure and conspicuous consumption.

More than one critic of this new-woman movement has misapprehended its
motive. The case of the American "new woman" has lately been summed
up with some warmth by a popular observer of social phenomena: "She is
petted by her husband, the most devoted and hard-working of husbands in
the world.... She is the superior of her husband in education, and
in almost every respect. She is surrounded by the most numerous and
delicate attentions. Yet she is not satisfied.... The Anglo-Saxon 'new
woman' is the most ridiculous production of modern times, and destined
to be the most ghastly failure of the century." Apart from the
deprecation--perhaps well placed--which is contained in this
presentment, it adds nothing but obscurity to the woman question. The
grievance of the new woman is made up of those things which this typical
characterization of the movement urges as reasons why she should be
content. She is petted, and is permitted, or even required, to consume
largely and conspicuously--vicariously for her husband or other
natural guardian. She is exempted, or debarred, from vulgarly useful
employment--in order to perform leisure vicariously for the good repute
of her natural (pecuniary) guardian. These offices are the conventional
marks of the un-free, at the same time that they are incompatible with
the human impulse to purposeful activity. But the woman is endowed
with her share-which there is reason to believe is more than an even
share--of the instinct of workmanship, to which futility of life or of
expenditure is obnoxious. She must unfold her life activity in response
to the direct, unmediated stimuli of the economic environment with which
she is in contact. The impulse is perhaps stronger upon the woman
than upon the man to live her own life in her own way and to enter the
industrial process of the community at something nearer than the second
remove.

So long as the woman's place is consistently that of a drudge, she is,
in the average of cases, fairly contented with her lot. She not only
has something tangible and purposeful to do, but she has also no time or
thought to spare for a rebellious assertion of such human propensity to
self-direction as she has inherited. And after the stage of universal
femal