r school and park and playground and street and factory are
essentially controlled by you. You are increasingly housekeeper, and
even mother. You not only control Working. You also control Living.
But who are you, you that now control Living? You are----"

She tapped my shoulder and laughed.

"You are the Tired Business Man. Yes, whether manufacturer, financier,
scholar, or poet, you are the Tired Business Man. You always were. You
still are. You are a fighter still, by nature. You conquer steel and
steam--and make a boat that will carry a mountain of ore. You conquer
mounds of stock certificates and masses of men--and organize armies
for the production of wealth. You conquer knowledge--and write your
treatise. You conquer the sources of emotion--and write your poem.
Then you're through. You lie down on your mat and go to sleep. To be
housekeeper, to be homemaker, to take from each part of life its
offerings of value and patiently to weld them into a coherent, livable
whole--that is not your faculty. You are a specialist. Produce,
produce, produce--a certain thing, a one certain thing, any one
certain thing, from corkscrews to madonnas--you can do it. But to make
a city a home, to elicit from discordant elements a harmonious total
of warm, charming, noble, livable life--you'll never do it, by
yourself."

She paused.

"Well," she said, "why don't you ask me to help you a bit? Even aside
from any special qualities of my sex, don't you know that the greatest
reserve fund of energy in any American city to-day is the leisure and
semi-leisure of certain classes of its women?"

"But they can give their leisure to 'good works' now if they want to,"
I answered.

"Yes," she said, "but if they do that, they'll want to go farther.
Look!"

And this is what she showed me--what she told me:

* * * * *

Over there on Michigan Avenue, occupying the whole front part of the
ninth floor of the Fine Arts Building, are the quarters of the Chicago
Woman's Club. Twenty-seven years ago, in the Brighton public school,
northwest of the Yards, that club started a kindergarten, providing
the money, the materials, the teacher, the energy--everything but the
room.

[Illustration: INTERESTS OF CHICAGO WOMEN'S CLUB: DOMESTIC SCIENCE
CLASSES; INSTRUCTION FOR THE BLIND; ORCHESTRAL CONCERTS; SUFFRAGE
CAMPAIGNS.]

It was a "good work," one might think, quite within "woman's sphere."
But it wasn't entered into