en into independence and good
service. Almost never, however, have they led one to the top. In free
fields such as merchandising, editing, and manufacturing we have yet
to produce a woman of the first caliber; that is, daring,
experimenting, free from prejudice, with a vision of the future great
enough to lead her to embody something of the future in her task.

In every profession we have scores of successful women--almost never a
_great_ woman, and yet the world is full of great women! That is, of
women who understand, are familiar with the big sacrifices,
appreciative of the fine things, far-seeing, prophetic. Why does this
greatness so rarely find expression in their professional
undertakings?

The answer is no doubt complex, but one factor is the general notion
of the woman that if she succeeds she must suppress her natural
emotions and meet the world with a surface as non-resilient as she
conceives that of man to be in his dealings with the world. She is
strengthened in this notion by hard necessity. No woman could live and
respond as freely as her nature prompts to the calls on her sympathy
which come in the contact with all conditions of life involved in
practicing a trade or a profession. She must save herself. To do it
she incases herself in an unnatural armor. For the normal, healthy
woman this means the suppression of what is strongest in her nature,
that power which differentiates her chiefly from man, her power of
emotion, her "affectability" as the scientists call it. She must
overcome her own nature, put it in bonds, cripple it, if she is to do
her work. Here is a fundamental reason for the failure of woman to
reach the first rank. She has sacrificed the most wonderful part of
her endowment, that which when trained gives her vision, sharpens her
intuitions, reveals the need and the true course. This superior
affectability crushed, leaves her atrophied.

The common characterization of this atrophied woman is that she is
"cold." It is the exact word. She _is_ cold, also she is self-centered
and intensely personal. Let a woman make success in a trade or
profession her exclusive and sufficient ambition, and the result,
though it may be brilliant, is repellent.

She gives to her task an altogether disproportionate place in her
scheme of things. Life is not made by work, important as is work in
life. Human nature has varied needs. It calls imperatively for a task,
something to do with brain and hands--a pr