eader will forgive the abruptness of the shift of attention from
the subject of one chapter to the subject of the next. Each chapter,
because of having been a separate magazine article, is still an
isolated unit. Its isolation, however, is only that of form. In
thought there is a sequence both logical and temporal.

Devoting themselves to five critical phases in the mental development
of the modern woman, the five chapters of this book accompany her
through five successive stages in her personal life. The postponement
of marriage, the preliminary period of self-support, the new training
for motherhood, the problem of leisure, the opportunity for civic
service,--these subjects, treated in turn, follow one another in the
order of their appearance in a normal life-history. They are further
unified by the proof (I hope it is proof) throughout adduced that even
the most diverse of the phenomena observed, the female parasite
equally with the female suffragist, the domestic-science-and-art
enthusiast equally with the economic-independence enthusiast, are all
of them products of the one same big industrial unfoldment which is
exposing all women, willing or unwilling, to the winds of the social
process, which is giving to all women, whether home-keepers or
wanderers, in place of the old home-world, the new world-home.

WILLIAM HARD.

_Chicago, Dec., 1911._

INTRODUCTION

The woman of to-morrow will not differ from the woman of yesterday in
femininity or physique or capacity, in her charm for men, or her love
of children, but in the response of her eternally feminine nature to a
changed environment. The environment is bound to alter the superficial
characteristics of woman as every change has done. Man, in his turn,
will be a beneficiary of this new womanliness as he has been the ready
victim of the old-womanishness.

The reader will find in this book a dramatic picture of the gap
between girlhood and motherhood which causes both girls and men to go
wrong, and which can only be filled adequately by work--work even more
suitably performed after marriage than before. Postponed childbearing,
if not postponed marriage, is justified by the superiority of the
younger children or the children of older parents. A declining birth
rate may be redeemed by a declining death rate and the superior
progeny of mature marriage.

The life of great-grandmamma fills us with wonder and pity. Her
labors were legion, and, while no long