Not but what that greatest room in the world—the room for improvement—is still open to us; but the fun of it is that so many more are all the time crowding up to its doors. Women as a class are growing more intelligent every year; realizing their own responsibilities, inside and outside the four walls of home; learning to balance themselves and to walk steadily along untried paths; rejoicing in this discovery of their own mental powers and yet clinging tightly to the old family loves and home ties.
So let us not worry ourselves over the dismal prophecies of great men as to the position of woman. We will continue to meander along the pleasant paths of improvement, but spell ourselves with a small w.
God made us all; may He help us to realize our limitations as well as to develop our utmost. Selah.
XIV
ON PUBLIC DUTIES
One of Mary E. Wilkins’ delightful heroines remarks, in speaking of certain would-be leaders of social reform in her village: “I don’t know that I think they are so much above us as too far to one side. Sometimes it is longitude and sometimes it is latitude that separates people.” “This is true,” says President Roosevelt, “and the philosophy it teaches applies quite as much to those who would reform the politics of a large city, or, for that matter, of the whole country, as to those who would reform the society of a hamlet.” But the active woman of to-day—and much more the woman of to-morrow—is not in danger of separating herself by either latitude or longitude. She is eager to help, and meets her problems half-way with outstretched hands. She is taking hold of all sorts of municipal matters and working against unsanitary conditions, defective sewerage, poor drainage, impure drinking water and the practice of making backyards, alleys and even streets the dumping-ground of those who are too negligent, or too indolent to consider the appearance of their immediate locality.
“The poor ye have always with you,” and as Dr. Babcock has said: “To take care of the lower orders is essential to social safety, though the words, ‘Inasmuch as ye did it to the least of these,’ had never been spoken, and the thought of helping humanity should be some little comfort, though the recognition of a ‘cup of cold water’ had never been dreamed of. To help poor children to learn to sew cannot compromise you in any way. To prick your finger in the sewing-school and draw one little red drop, is in the line of the world’s redemption, at least from ignorance and incapacity.”
But to this mission of woman from simply altruistic motives we can add that divine commission entrusted to Mary at the door of the sepulchre on that Sabbath morning nineteen hundred years ago, so that she is working everywhere to lift little children out of degradation, to teach them, to make of them good citizens, to abolish child-labor. And is it not true that every woman working in a quiet way for the improvement of those in her immediate neighborhood is manifesting the spirit of the scriptural injunction, “Bear ye one another’s burdens”?
“The women’s clubs of the period, with their classes for intelligent study of the great questions of the day, are creating a new political economy,” says the Hon. Carroll D. Wright, late chief of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, and no man in this country is better fitted to judge of the economic conditions that attend any great movement. One of the significant features of the club movement is that our deepest thinkers, our most far-sighted men recognize in it one of the great forces of the age. It is all well enough for one or two brilliant women writers who pride themselves on belonging to no women’s clubs whatever, to direct their powers of sarcasm against the movement and to flippantly observe that women’s clubs are a fad, or to inveigh against our taking ourselves seriously. We can even bear that Mr. Bok or Mr. Cleveland should warn his readers against being led unwillingly into public life, to the utter neglect of buttonless husbands and starving children; these things are outside the pale of serious consideration.
What does the earnest, thinking woman who reads Drummond’s “Ascent of Man” and Ruskin’s “Unto This Last” care? What does the woman who is studying the great humanitarian problem of to-day—whether singly or in classes—mind if a magazine writer who cares more for brilliancy than for accuracy takes her to task because she takes the fact of organized effort for bettering present conditions, and ministering to great human needs, seriously? For men who think and read and observe what is going on in the world to-day, men who come nearest to seeing what are the present economic forces and whither they are tending—such men are the quickest to recognize women as an important factor in the world’s progress, and are the most cordial in extending a hand-clasp of sympathy and “God-speed” to any specialized movement among us.