s, in all group activities connected with learning and the fine
arts.

But on the other side, if emancipated women had not applied themselves,
since 1870, to the direction of education, literature, religion and
amusements, all these interests must have suffered serious neglect and
probable deterioration through the concentrating of the interests of the
ablest men in engineering, manufacturing, commerce and other fields of
pure and applied science. By popularizing these interests, women have
really humanized them, as all similar revolutions have done in the past.
In breaking up old forms and intellectual conventions they have set free
new and vital impulses. Whether the historian of the future will
consider this period of democratization and feminization a time of
advance may be uncertain; but it is certainly a time of liberated energy
and of broadening participation in all that is best in life.

V

The Economic Independence of Women

Nowhere does a human being escape compulsion. Even were he alone in the
world he would be forced to obey the physical laws governing gravity,
heat, cold, hunger and disease. No matter what his desires might be, he
would find himself limited and constrained by fixed laws, the inexorable
penalties of which he could escape only by obedience. If the man were
not alone, then each one of his companions would limit his freedom, and
he would limit each one in the group, if they were to live together in
peace and efficiency; and yet each of the man's companions would help to
free him from the tyranny of physical forces, from the social pressure
of others, and even from the bondage of his own nature.

Independence is thus an ideal to be achieved only through obedience. It
begins in self-subordination and reaches its finest realization in
social subordination. Since the beginning of time men who thought have
always dreamed of freedom; and for two hundred years now independence
has been a word to conjure with. But in so far as independence means
freedom to follow one's own unregulated desires, it is a fantastic and
dangerous dream; and yet this dream of impossible independence has been
among the greatest influences in furthering human development in the
past.

The old-time dependence of one individual on the immediate caprices of
another largely disappeared with the passing of slavery. But in place of
this personal subjection has come a more complex and in some ways more
compelling and c