which leads only to earning the merest
subsistence is not so enticing, not so ideal, that one could expect
woman to sacrifice everything for it. Our highly praised
independence is, after all, but a slow process of dulling and
stifling woman's nature, her love instinct, and her mother instinct.

Nevertheless, the position of the working girl is far more natural
and human than that of her seemingly more fortunate sister in the
more cultured professional walks of life--teachers, physicians,
lawyers, engineers, etc., who have to make a dignified, proper
appearance, while the inner life is growing empty and dead.

The narrowness of the existing conception of woman's independence and
emancipation; the dread of love for a man who is not her social
equal; the fear that love will rob her of her freedom and
independence; the horror that love or the joy of motherhood will only
hinder her in the full exercise of her profession--all these together
make of the emancipated modern woman a compulsory vestal, before whom
life, with its great clarifying sorrows and its deep, entrancing
joys, rolls on without touching or gripping her soul.

Emancipation, as understood by the majority of its adherents and
exponents, is of too narrow a scope to permit the boundless love and
ecstasy contained in the deep emotion of the true woman, sweetheart,
mother, in freedom.

The tragedy of the self-supporting or economically free woman does
not lie in too many but in too few experiences. True, she surpasses
her sister of past generations in knowledge of the world and human
nature; it is just because of this that she feels deeply the lack of
life's essence, which alone can enrich the human soul, and without
which the majority of women have become mere professional automatons.

That such a state of affairs was bound to come was foreseen by those
who realized that, in the domain of ethics, there still remained many
decaying ruins of the time of the undisputed superiority of man;
ruins that are still considered useful. And, what is more important,
a goodly number of the emancipated are unable to get along without
them. Every movement that aims at the destruction of existing
institutions and the replacement thereof with something more
advanced, more perfect, has followers who in theory stand for the
most radical ideas, but who, nevertheless, in their every-day
practice, are like the average Philistine, feigning respectability
and clamoring for the g