ish enthusiasm, that she is in search of a
career, that she is restless and does not know what she wants. They will
give any reason, almost, rather than the recognition of a genuine and
dignified claim. Possibly all this is due to the fact that for so many
hundreds of years women have had no larger interests, no participation
in the affairs lying quite outside personal and family claims. Any
attempt that the individual woman formerly made to subordinate or
renounce the family claim was inevitably construed to mean that she was
setting up her own will against that of her family's for selfish ends.
It was concluded that she could have no motive larger than a desire to
serve her family, and her attempt to break away must therefore be wilful
and self-indulgent.

The family logically consented to give her up at her marriage, when she
was enlarging the family tie by founding another family. It was easy to
understand that they permitted and even promoted her going to college,
travelling in Europe, or any other means of self-improvement, because
these merely meant the development and cultivation of one of its own
members. When, however, she responded to her impulse to fulfil the
social or democratic claim, she violated every tradition.

The mind of each one of us reaches back to our first struggles as we
emerged from self-willed childhood into a recognition of family
obligations. We have all gradually learned to respond to them, and yet
most of us have had at least fleeting glimpses of what it might be to
disregard them and the elemental claim they make upon us. We have
yielded at times to the temptation of ignoring them for selfish aims, of
considering the individual and not the family convenience, and we
remember with shame the self-pity which inevitably followed. But just as
we have learned to adjust the personal and family claims, and to find an
orderly development impossible without recognition of both, so perhaps
we are called upon now to make a second adjustment between the family
and the social claim, in which neither shall lose and both be ennobled.

The attempt to bring about a healing compromise in which the two shall
be adjusted in proper relation is not an easy one. It is difficult to
distinguish between the outward act of him who in following one
legitimate claim has been led into the temporary violation of another,
and the outward act of him who deliberately renounces a just claim and
throws aside all obligatio