The Wasted Years

WOMAN has become a problem, and she is as gravely bent upon solving herself as if she lived behind the looking-glass. She is determined that man shall understand her better, even if he come to love her less.

It may be questioned whether the effort is as profoundly wise as it is earnest. If one’s real object is living, there are advantages in not spending too much time in criticizing life; and many of the points under hot discussion seem to be largely academic, kept away from the point of practical test in order to prolong the fun of the discussion.

Is there anything in much of this current talk about the sexes? What would happen if it were not a question of women but just of folks? There was something like it back in King Charles’s day. All the wiseacres, who called themselves men of science, held endless wordy disputes about the question of a live fish having any weight in water. So long as t he actual fish was kept out of sight, the argument gave the greatest satisfaction to all concerned. But one day came a stupid fellow who thoughtlessly weighed a liv e fish in a vessel of water and then weighed the same vessel of water without the fish. After this the fun was gone; there was nothing left to dispute over. Is it a heresy to hint that there would be fewer questions of feminism if a little experimental common sense were applied at certain points?

There is, however, one question which is asked by discriminating observers, which deserves an answer and can hardly add to the existing tumult if discussed. Why is it, they inquire, looking about them and seeing much which they believe ought not to be, why is it that among the women not obliged to work, and following no profession, so many of those in their third decade are so profoundly unhappy? Why these wasted years between school and marriage?

There is no room for the denial of the unhappiness; that is self-confessed and plainly evident. The question of feminism is involved because marriage is admitted by the querists as a factor, but it is desired to deal with the topic as plainly and directly as possible, without considering woman as a problem, or sex as the solution of every difficulty pertaining to women. Indeed, without wishing to be a spoil-sport, we must, before we finish, send one of the stock woman-theories, that about early marriages in former days, as high as Gilderoy’s kite.

We have a problem not complicated by poverty, for only those ‘not obliged to work’ are dealt with. Equally set aside are those who prefer to work, whether needy or not. And by implication we exclude the unfit, the unruly, the ignorant, the incapable; for though these may be equally unhappy they are easily accounted for. There are left the daughters of good homes, those with light responsibilities and no worries about the future, girls with leisure, talent, education, friends, free to enjoy life, yet by their own admission most unhappy. And unless marriage intervenes, this state of unhappiness is supposed to continue until all likelihood of marriage is past.

It is the way in which marriage is introduced into this conclusion which makes this a question of feminism. If the unhappiness is due to belated marriage or to a diminished chance of marriage, then this is most properly a sexquestion; but if it is merely terminated by marriage and not casually dependent thereupon, then this is not a sexproblem except in so far as conditions, accidental rather than necessitated, make it more prevalent among women. For as no one supposes for a moment that working women and professional women and married women are the only ones who have no troubles, so it may be very pertinently inquired whether young men, if compelled to change places with these young women, would not show very similar, and perhaps aggravated, symptoms of mental distress. In that case we are not dealing with a sex-question, and that, it may be said, is my own conviction.

But since feminism is the sport of the day, and in the popular belief marriage explains all a woman’s ills, — because either she is married or she is n’t, she can’t be or she won’t be, she is too feminine or not enough so,— let us, now that the view-halloo is raised, follow the field and hunt down the part which marriage plays in the problem under discussion.

I shall make no attempt to disprove the belief that women to-day are marrying too late in life; very likely the figures show it, and if so then the fact is pertinent and must be admitted. But the age at which the women of to-day are marrying has nothing to do with the popular prejudice that formerly nearly all women married and at a very early age. This is but a vulgar error, wholly baseless even though somebody’s grandmother, whom we all know about, did marry at fourteen, rear sixteen children, have a saintly character, and at ninety-three could read fine print without glasses. Of all the popular superstitions afloat there is none more mischievous than that which affirms that the matrimonial chances of a girl, not hampered by poverty, are greatly deferred or diminished at the present day. It breeds distrust and despair of a fundamental craving; it destroys hope just where nature most needs hope to bridge the period of waiting for a pure and happy fulfillment of her designs. And no old wives’ tale ever hung on such a cobweb as this superstition of the very early marriages of our grandmothers.

The notion is one which has been adopted without investigation. Like the fish of King Charles’s day, it has been everywhere accepted and argued upon with no attempt to ascertain the facts. Not only is there nothing in print which is readily accessible, but there is nothing to which experts in statistical work have been able to turn, and every professional genealogist to whom I have taken my conclusions for revision has expressed himself surprised because his independent investigations have borne me out. One writes, ‘Every genealogist of experience, I mean those who have been “at it" for years, published books of family history as well as compiled unpublished genealogies, has given me uniformly the same answer I should have given, 18 to 19 as the average age. The curious thing to my mind is that so many of us who have been dabbling in this special study for years should have gone astray so unanimously. I cannot account for it on any logical hypothesis, as we, of all persons presumably experienced in weighing all such testimonies, ought to have seen or felt the untenableness of our conclusions. It is really a practical fact to genealogists, for in scores of cases where dates are unavailable we have to resort to estimating age at marriage in order to reconstruct the relative order of the children of a family.

I have always used nineteen years for that purpose.’

But the figures indicate that in New England, for the first two centuries of our occupation, the average age of maiden marriages was very close to twenty-three years and six months. In some great tribes it rises above twentyfour years. In other words, even the genealogical experts have placed the average age of women’s marriages in colonial days five full years too low.

The bearing of such a fact upon the problem in hand is tremendous. It means that in the earliest days in New England, for every girl who married at eighteen, another married at twentyeight or more; for every one who married at sixteen, another had to be fully thirty before she could marry. It means that up to the age of thirty no girl to-day has any less reason to look forward to marriage as probable than her great-grandmothers of one and two centuries back. It means that if she insists upon being miserable during her third decade, as many declare she does, she must hereafter trump up some better excuse than that her chances of marriage are less than those of the women of former generations.

The question is of sufficient importance to deserve some slight elaboration. In the first place, the facts are fairly taken, and they are representative. Not only are the names of those to whom I am chiefly indebted ¹ of themselves a guarantee of the fairness and soundness of the work, but each contributor chose his own material, special pains was taken to cover a wide range of condition, occupation, and territory, and in every line but one all the available perfect data were used. The time-limits were 1620 and 1820, but by far the greater number of the records fall between 1650 and 1800. Only maiden marriages were taken,and in the case of the Martha’s Vineyard families only the marriages of maidens to bachelors, — marriages of maidens to widowers, which would have raised the average materially, being excluded. Even so, five hundred and seventy-five Vineyard marriages yield an average of twenty-two years and fifteen days, much the lowest obtained. Two hundred and forty-four Abbotts and Blanchards combined give an average of twenty-four years and fifty days, and single generations sometimes go much higher, one early in the nineteenth century, of a family not included in the averages, reaching full twentyeight years for the women and over twenty-nine for the men.

But the average age of marriage for a large group and the age at which the most marriages were consummated, may stand far apart. A few very late marriages will raise the average to a point unfair to reckon from. Yet tested in this way the popular belief finds no support. Of the whole 2425 records examined and averaged, only two per cent are of marriages under seventeen, and this is almost exactly the percentage of those who married at forty or later. From less than four per cent in the eighteenth year the number increases annually, until in the twenty-second year twelve and seven-tenths per cent of the total marry. This is the most popular year. But it takes ten years for the numbers to fall again to the same number who married at sixteen, and a good twenty before they swing below the figure of those who married between fifteen and sixteen. Of the whole twenty-four hundred but seven married under fifteen. When tabulated, the figures for all the families run remarkably uniform. Location, occupation, quality, affect the results but little. If anything, the armigerous and professional families marry earlier than the laboring and, strange as it may seem, the seafaring families.

The very early marriages of our grandmothers, at least in the colonial days, are a myth. And we might have guessed it by heeding one almost obtrusive fact. In those days a man was bound to work without wages until his majority. Unless he was a seafarer, who had very early assumed responsibility for his own support, he had nothing to marry upon until he was twenty-four or twenty-five years old, provided he had no inheritance and received no deed of gift from his father. He must either work and buy land, or start out. into the wilderness and create a farm, which took even longer. There are numerous exceptions, but as a rule the colonial man did not marry till he was between twenty-four and twenty-six years of age. As he naturally chose a wife somewhat, but not too much, younger than himself, we have at hand a convenient check to our figures.

But if the average woman in the first two cent uries in New England did not marry until she was over twentythree years old, what particular advantage had she, save in her chance of raising a larger family, over the woman of to-day who does not marry until she is thirty ? (The age of thirty is quite arbitrarily chosen; we have definitely discarded any comparison in the figures.) W hy do we speak rather enviously of the woman of long ago, as if to her the future were more assured, the day’s work less harassing? Most of our women college graduates now must be actually nearer their wedding-day when they graduate than those women of long ago were when their scanty schooling stopped. Their mental horizon must have been pitifully limited. It is not that they lacked modern inventions, but modern ideas. With few amusements, few diversions, no books, without variety in their daily lives, with even their marriage long deferred after their first youth, why do we assume for them an exemption from the unhappiness which women complain of to-day ?

It was their task to heckle tow and to card wool, to work at the loom and the spinning-wheel, to make soap and dip candles, to labor in the fields while the men were fishing, to toil their good twelve or fourteen hours a day, — from candlelight to curfew their day’s service, —and never for themselves unless they spun and wove their bridal gear, but for their ‘keep’ alone and the good of the family. That marriage was not the certain consummation of their maiden hopes is shown by the number who straggled into it when they were over thirty. And these figures give us no hint of the many to whom it was denied either by mental or physical disqualification, by duty to aged or infirm parents, by the burden of bringing up orphaned brothers and sisters, by the loss of lovers at sea or in the wars; for they paid full toll in those days to sea and forest, to the pirate and the Indian.

In some families the number of women who never married is surprising. In a family-tribe of hardy, unintellectual, prolific pioneers, where all their interests demanded the coöperation of marriage, I have found, in 398 families of five generations from the emigrant, numbering 2520 individuals, fifteen per cent of the women who lived to be eighteen years old dying unmarried, and it would probably be hard to find another tribe of the same period, as large as this, with so small a proportion of unmarried women.

If by any mischance the woman of former days was obliged to support herself, it is surprising to find how little, even within recent years, she could earn and how hard she must work for that little. I can remember when a dressmaker came at seven in the morning and worked twelve hours for a dollar a day. A few years earlier, tailoresses, on their annual visitation, began work at six in the morning and received less wages.

A teacher’s lot was no better. Before me are the annual town reports of my native town for seventy years. The earliest ones give no details of the schools. Usually from twelve to fourteen female teachers were employed in the summer schools, a few in the winter. In 1851, female teachers of summer schools got their board and an average of $1.97 a week for thirty-three hours of work. In 1858, they got $2.67 a week and board, and never more until the third year of the war. The school year was from 104 to 132 days, and a teacher capable enough to teach both summer and winter could sometimes earn as much as $66.00 a year; most could not much exceed fifty dollars in cash and their board, for from 21 to 24 weeks’ work. Yet for five years in succession one family of three adult Irish paupers was receiving from the town, in cashequivalent, from three to four times as much as the best female teachers could earn. It was literally true that one could get more from the town in the almshouse than in the schoolhouse. But wages then were better than they had been. An aged kinswoman has told me that in the eighteen-twenties she taught for her board and seventy-five cents a week. In addition to the usual branches she could teach Latin, French, logic, astronomy, and probably also navigation and surveying. For teaching winter schools from which men had been evicted, she got as much as $1.25 a week and board.

We may as well demolish the timeworn superstition that the good old times again are all we need to make us happy. There never were any good old times. ‘Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these,’ chides the Preacher, showing that the complaint is as old as human nature. Hear Homer: ‘Few sons are like their fathers; most are worse, only a few are better. ² If in Homer’s opinion — and he puts the words into the mouth of Athena, speaking in the guise of Mentor, double-distilled wisdom — most men are worse than their fathers, then upon what degenerate days must we have fallen! Given a length of time like that between ourselves and Homer and the complaint falls to pieces of its own absurdity.

If, therefore, our young women are unhappy, let them not defend themselves by saying that it is because life is harder for them, and marriage is more belated and more uncertain than it was for their grandmothers. It may be true that few of the grandmothers were distinctly unhappy in the way in which our young women suffer, and certainly few of them can be charged with wasted years, but it is clear that the cause of the difference should be sought outside the points we have touched upon.

Nor need it be urged that the difference lies in the peculiar unrest of today. All times have been restless; it is through change and upheaval that time marks duration, and when we get at the heart of any bygone period we always find it curiously modern and understandable. There is an ignorance of the past which constantly assumes that everything in our own times is new and peculiar. This woman-question seems to be currently regarded as something spontaneously generated but yesterday. Few look back to that period before t he war when the yeast of life was in a ferment greater than today. All fads and fancies, all theories and experiments, of eating and drinking, of religion and free love, of dressreform, and even of women’s rights, were then exploited. We had Millerism, Mormonism, Fourierism, Bloomerism, Grahamism, spiritualism, abolitionism, prohibition, communities to t ry out certain theories, and lone prophets crying in the wilderness that their farthing candle was the only true light.

The raw-boned, bespectacled spinster of the caricatures, armed with a baggy gamp and talking of ‘woman’s proper sphere’— (‘woman’s proper spear not an amberill,’ the opinion of Artemus Ward) — was the precursor of the militant suffragette. If she wore bloomers, so much the merrier for the humorists. An eye-witness has told me of seeing Lucy Stone, on an occasion when she had scandalized her audience, carried off the stage by two men, as stiff as a poker, obnoxiously non-resistant, shouting as she was borne away, ‘This liber-rty of spee-ech is glo-o-o-ri-ous.’ There were fewer of them, those ladies of old, but they could have taught the modern woman some new tricks.

Nor is that specific charge of the decrease in the number of marriages as recent as we may think. Here is the modern note: ‘I believe there are more bachelors now in England, by many thousands, than there were a few years ago, and probably the number of them (and of the single women, of course) will every year increase. The luxury of the age will account for a good deal of this, and the turn our sex take in undomesticating themselves for a good deal more. But let not those worthy young women who may think themselves destined to a single life repine over-much at their lot, since, possibly, if they have had no lovers, or, having had one, two, or three, have not found a husband, they have had rat her a miss than a loss as men go.’ Thoroughly disillusioned, is it not? — But modern? — Vintage of 1754! It is the vivacious Harriet Byron writing the second letter of the second book of Sir Charles Grandison.

It is, then, no recent thing for young ladies to regard life as offering them a very uncertain chance of marital happiness. How it worked out practically, we can get some idea by studying the figures already given in connection with the story of Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice. At twenty-seven the sensible Charlotte announces her engagement to the most asinine curate who lives in books. ‘The boys were relieved from their apprehension of Charlotte’s dying an old maid,’ we read. (Charlotte doubtless realized how unpleasant the boys might yet make themselves.) ‘Charlotte herself was tolerably composed. . . . Mr. Collins, to be sure, was neither sensible nor agreeable; his society was irksome, and his attachment to her must be imaginary. But still he would be her husband. Without thinking highly of either men or matrimony, marriage had always been her object; it was the only honorable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giv ing happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want.’

Miss Austen has etched her portrait with an acid almost chemically pure. Like a true artist she leaves Charlotte in her story when ‘her home and her housekeeping, her parish and her poultry, and all their dependent concerns, had not yet lost their charms.’ Admirable Miss Austen, who trusts us to see the rest! Among those women of thirty and over who married in the two centuries we have studied, how many must have been Charlottes! If fewer women are marrying now than formerly, — whether they are fewer or not fewer does not concern our inquiry,

— is it because they lack chances, or because, with their enlarged opportunities for self-support, they can so much better maintain their ideals that they no longer regard the first Mr. Collins who offers, as‘a pleasant preservative from want ’?

Thus far we have only been trying to eliminate marriage as the necessary major cause of the apparently needless unrest and wretchedness prevalent among our best-educated and best-protected young women. My own belief is that this is not a sex-question. It becomes that merely because under present prevailing conditions the women affected outnumber the men. Only numerically is it a woman-question, and that is accidentally. If the lack of work does not fully explain condit ions,

— and the form in which the question is put indicates that lack of occupation must be one of the larger factors, — then we may perhaps account for the sexual ratio of unhappiness in those of like age and condition as due to the prevalence of certain ideas, not peculiar to either sex, proceeding in alternate waves, as an epidemic of fixed character might one year attack principally males and the next year preponderately females, the latter not having been exposed to it the first year and the males being immune the next year. Heretofore it has been the men who have suffered most from mental distress. We remember the period of Wertherism, a masculine epidemic. While Werther was

his Charlotte, with wholesome materialism,

Went on cutting bread and butter.

Just at present it is the men who are ‘cutting bread and butter.’ They have gone through their period of storm and stress, they have indulged in Byronic romanticism, they have tried theism and atheism and have driven themselves to the depths of despair over the conflict of science and religion, while their women at home were placidly receiving as gospel the opinions delivered to them by authority. Now that in turn the women ask, ‘Whose authority?’ and begin to think for themselves, it is complained that they are turning the world upside-down. Well, what of it? is n’t the world turned upside-down every twenty-four hours? And nothing ever spills off.

The intellectual result of this breaking away from authority ought to be about the same among women that it was among men, for in time it will be discovered that intellectually they are much alike. If the result is the same, we cannot think the change wholly bad.

But let us not deny that losses accompany it, which are in themselves grave enough to produce disturbance and deep unhappiness. Perhaps the greatest loss at present is that sense of duty which so dominated our parents and grandparents, which is such a serviceable helm in guiding action. Yet duty is the legal child of authority, and wherever outward authority lapses or is denied, we may expect this ideal to fade, until a new authority is established within. The authority of parents diminished, there is less of prompt obedience, although perhaps not less of love; the authority of the church broken down, there is less of worship, although perhaps not less of service, the other side of religion; the authority of the state relaxed, there may be more of ferment, although less of rebellion. Instead of obedience enjoined there is service freely rendered; the quality becomes finer even though for a time the quantity be less.

Among women at present, the breaking down of religious authority seems to be a well-marked symptom of the pathology of this unrest and unhappiness. In the intellectualizing of woman’s life the faculty of belief has temporarily become somewhat atrophied. I have observed it among my own acquaintance, who have lamented to me their inability to believe as their husbands do, — in the future life, for instance. They are trying to find out by reason what can only be known by experiment, by living it. If we do not deplore this change or mention it with alarm, it is because it has been coming on for a long time, and because it chiefly affects a picked class of women who can and must think for themselves, and who may be trusted to keep on until they arrive at sound conclusions.

But the loss of that stern old ideal of duty which did the thing commanded because it was commanded, and thought the thought ordained because it was divinely ordered, even though unreasonable, is a loss of happiness. Yet it is a loss which must be endured. Freedom is no doubt good for us, but not too much of it at once; we need to be trained to it, and one of the tributaries to the misery which we are discussing is the responsibility conferred by the greater liberty of both thought and action in our own day. The ‘ freedom of the self-limited,’ as the late Charles Henry Ames called it, is the only freedom which can insure happiness.

Together with this new burden of responsibility for her own thinking, there has come to the modem girl, through the changes in domestic life, too great or too sudden release from enforced occupation. David Harum remarked that even a dog needs to be ‘ kept from broodin’ on bein’ a dog,’ and probably the chief difference between the girl who works and the girl who does not work is just—work. The safest, surest, cheapest remedy for mental ills is work; not merely occupation to fill idle hours, but work so skillfully chosen, so individually adjusted, so alluringly presented, that it reaches the imagination and enlists the will in the effort to effect somet hing desirable and good. But this is no matter for empirical treatment. Let us leave it to the trained vocationalists and to those who have wise hearts.

The girl in her twenties also needs the companionship of men. There is nothing in a girl’s education more profitable to her than contact with able and honorable men much older than herself. While it is commonly recognized that sons grow apart from their fathers as manhood is forming, it is less understood that at a somewhat later period daughters undergo a similar, though less noticeable, change with reference to their mothers. The father who takes pains to be his daughter’s best friend during her twenties is saving her present unhappiness and educating her for marriage. Girls so fathered and befriended are recognizable at once by the expert; they have a certain poise, initiative, penetration, detachment, a certain superiority to petty feminine wiles, which need not lessen their ability to please men, but which do increase their disability to be fooled by them.

But it is not our mission to seek remedies for the malady we are diagnosing. And concerning the question of the alleged waste of time there may be differences of opinion. The young women of the leisure class considered fall into two general types: one, the selfish, grasping, undisciplined girls, who demand everything and give nothing, who can never be happy and whose years are indeed wasted because they will not learn; the other, those who desire to learn, but who can discover no way to escape from their limitations and the problems they wrestle with. The distress of the latter is the greater, but their years are not wasted; time is the material which they use up in learning how to live; it may be used extravagantly, but it is not thrown away.

The fact is that for all thoughtful youths, unless of peculiarly fortunate temperament and condition, there must be a large amount of unrest, pain, uncertainty, foreboding, merely because t hey are young and have no guarantee of the future. They are untried troops, waiting in panic for the battle to sweep their way, certain of nothing, not even of how they will conduct themselves, yet fearful most of all that they may have no opportunity of fighting. The ease of their condition is the worst obstacle in the way of many who have the ability or the privilege of selecting their own course. From these more favored young women their good homes remove the spur to labor and their parents discourage the taste for it. Yet the social conscience of the age warns them that work is necessary to life and drives them against — a wall of feathers. Their energy is dissipated; nothing results from their striving; the world is going ahead wit hout t heir help, and before they have begun it they are out of the race. What is hard necessity beside such discouragement?

For one, I like to believe that the young people of the coming generation are not less able or less earnest, not less willing or less devoted, than those of our own young days. Those men in buckram whom we boast of having fought, were they indeed so much more formidable than the giants in the path of the youth of to-day? Were we never ‘cowards on instinct,’ pluming ourselves on our ‘discretion’? I feel that we, the talking generation, might suffer in comparison with the youth of today, did not our memories so often play us false. Certainly not all of us have achieved even honesty and courtesy and common human kindness. Did we all once have learning and wit and zeal? Where are our zeal and wit and learning now? Are our sons and daughters so much our inferiors? No, by my halidome! And we know it!

It is worth our while to believe in Youth. If Youth fail then we fail with it; for between ourselves and the extinction of the human race stands only the thin line of the youth now coming up. Were any one generation to refuse utterly to do its duty to that next after it, the human race would be doomed to extinction within fifty years. And what has any generation to show but what it has done for the generation next after it, the generation which is the work of its hands, the heir of its ideals, the executor of its testament? From us those young people take the torch to bear it onward in the race, and we cannot afford to criticize too harshly either their speed or their endurance.

Therefore it is not in unkindness that I avow that, even if it were possible, I would not remove all difficulties from the path of youth. It is our business in life to achieve happiness, if we live long enough to finish the game; and the rules of the game are very strict. Happiness is not the work of a day, nor of a year; it consists in a slow mastery of untoward conditions. What our girls to-day are suffering is partly the result of temporary and local disturbances, but it is largely natural and inevitable; it has always been, even in the days when women did the least possible thinking. With our grandmothers it took a purely religious cast, and was called ‘concern for the soul.’ It was settled when a certain mystical, but none the less practical, relation with the divine was established, quite different from the revolt at dogma and the effort to think things out upon a reasonable basis. It was purely individual then, it is largely social now; but the conflict is the same; it is the effort to develop a personality, to master the environment in which the individual is placed, to become truly at home in the world. It is the struggle for existence in the spiritual world, and it must go on.

Perhaps Shakespeare never hit the shield more fairly on the centre than when he represented Henry the Fifth on the night before Agincourt, disguised, surveying his ill-conditioned army. ‘The king,’ he affirms, when questioned if the king were not disheartened, — and who should know so well as he how the king felt, — ‘the king would not wish himself anywhere but where he is.’ The individual who can stand thus and confront the world out of the midst of his own danger, sorrow, perplexity, despair, has conquered the world. His necessity he has made his opportunity, — ‘Here stand I; I can do no otherwise,’ — and in not wishing for anything different he has doubled the resources at his hand. Not to wish one’s self anywhere but where one is, is about the best that human nature is capable of, when the will to fight goes with it. I cannot perceive than an unblemished past is requisite to this attitude of mind; with all his faults and failings and sins, a man may stand to it and win out; he may do it without submission to any theological dogma, without being technically ‘good’ — some who have done it we find quite without the pale; but no man can do it without a vital faith in a living God, by whatever name he calls Him, however ignorantly he worships. If a man will refuse escape from hard conditions and will fight in his own place, he shall know the true from the false and shall have his reward.

These are hard sayings. The achievement of personality is tedious and difficult; it is birth with long travail; when it is complicated with intellectual problems and questionings there is added danger and delay, — rebellion against conventions and restrictions, distaste for our lot, doubt of the end, and an inclination to smash things. The revolutionary attitude of women at present may be partly nerves, hysteria, a mania for imitation, — it is all these in certain instances, — and it is not always necessarily an advance either in ideas or in performance; but in general it is the index of an effort to reach a higher plane of consciousness by dealing with environment as something subject to will and skill, and by beginning with immediate surroundings to make them over. The hopefulness of it as a movement lies largely in the inclination to try out theories upon local problems, to turn energy into effective work. But mere revolt is not power: it must be followed by voluntary obedience to higher law before it develops anything of power.

If, therefore, the young women of to-day who suffer, they know not why, will revive their hope, and light again the lamp of duty, waiting with patience for necessary changes and adjustments within and working quietly for the conscious effecting of changes in the world without, — no matter how small, so they be conscious improvements, — they may pass these Wanderjahre with comparatively little disturbance that is outwardly and disapprovingly noted by the casual observer. To promise more would be charlatanism. The best we mortals can do with these problems of pain and suffering, necessary and unavoidable as they are for growth, is to keep them to ourselves. And there is always duty to something, some one.