secure, form bureaus where all sorts of women, apprehensive of the
future, may be examined, advised, steered on their way? In this they
would merely be taking a leaf from the present volume of French
history its women are writing. It is the women of independent means
over there who have devised so many methods by which widows and girls
and older spinsters tossed about in the breakers of war may support
themselves and those dependent upon them. There is Mlle. Thompson's
Ecole Feminine, for instance, and Madame Goujon's hundred and one
practical schemes which I will not reiterate here.

Women of the industrial class in the United States need new laws, but
little advice how to support themselves. They fall into their natural
place almost automatically, for they are the creatures of
circumstances, which are set in motion early enough to determine their
fate. If they do hesitate their minds are quickly made up for them by
either their parents or their social unit. The great problem to-day is
for the women of education, fastidiousness, a certain degree of ease,
threatened with a loss of that male support upon which ancient custom
bred them to rely. Their children will be specialized; they will see
to that. But their own problem is acute and it behooves trained and
successful women to take it up, unless the war lasts so long that
every woman will find her place as inevitably as the working girl.

II

For a long time to come women will be forced to leave the
administering of the nation as well as of states and cities to men,
for men are still too strong for them. The only sort of women that men
will spontaneously boost into public life are pretty, bright, womanly,
spineless creatures who may be trusted to set the cause of woman back
a few years at least, and gratify their own sense of humorous
superiority.

Women would save themselves much waste of energy and many humiliations
if they would devote themselves exclusively to helping and training
their own sex. Thousands are at work on the problems of higher wage
and shorter hours for women of the industrial class, but this problem
of the carefully nurtured, wholly untrained, and insecurely protected
woman they have so far ignored. To my mind this demands the first
consideration and the application of composite woman's highest
intelligence. The industrial woman has been trained to work, she
learns as she grows to maturity to protect herself and fight her own
battles, and