a woman's most direct
weapon against industrial abuses, her all-powerful weapon as a
consumer. At the time of the Lawrence strike, Miss Vida Scudder, of
Wellesley College, is reported to have said in a talk to a group of
women citizens in Lawrence:--

"I speak for thousands besides myself when I say that I would rather
never again wear a thread of woolen than know my garments had been
woven at the cost of such misery as I have seen and known, past the
shadow of a doubt, to have existed in this town."

Miss Scudder might have been more emphatic and still have been
entirely within the limit of plain obligation; she might have said, "I
will never again wear a thread of woolen woven at the cost of such
misery as exists in this town." Women will not be doing their duty,
as citizens in this country, until they recognize fully the
obligations laid upon them by their control of consumption.

The very heart of the question of the dress is, then, economic and
social. It is one of those great everyday matters on which the moral
and physical well-being of society rests. One of those matters, which,
rightly understood, fill the everyday life with big meanings, show it
related to every great movement for the betterment of man.

Like all of the great interests in the Business of Being a Woman, it
is primarily an individual problem, and every woman who solves it for
herself, that is, arrives at what may be called a sound mode of dress,
makes a real contribution to society. There is a tendency to overlook
the value of the individual solution of the problems of life, and yet,
the successful individual solution is perhaps the most genuine and
fundamental contribution a man or woman can make. The end of living is
a life--fair, sound, sweet, complete. The vast machinery of life to
which we give so much attention, our governments and societies, our
politics and wrangling, is nothing in itself. It is only a series of
contrivances to insure the chance to grow a life. He who proves that
he can conquer his conditions, can adjust himself to the machinery in
which he finds himself, he is the most genuine of social servants. He
realizes the thing for which we talk and scheme, and so proves that
our dreams are not vain!

CHAPTER VI

THE WOMAN AND DEMOCRACY

The one notion that democracy has succeeded in planting firmly in the
mind of the average American citizen is his right and duty to rise in
the world. Tested by this conception