ry is that they are women still, and this seems to
be a surprise to many worthy souls ... 'the new woman' will be no
less female than the 'old' woman ... she will be, with it all, more
feminine.

"The more freely the human mother mingles in the natural industries
of a human creature, as in the case of the savage woman, the
peasant woman, the working-woman everywhere who is not overworked,
the more rightly she fulfils these functions."[20]

We may not be so sure that there is not some evidence for "growing
beards," "developing bass voices," and "manifesting the destructive
energy, the brutal combative instinct, or the intense sex-vanity of the
male"; and in our brief attempt to make a first study of womanhood in
the light of Mendelism, we have seen good reason to understand why
masculine characters may come to the surface in the female whose
femininity has worn thin. Several of the lower animals definitely show
us the possibilities.

But we need not accept the issue on the grounds of such superficial
manifestations as these, for there are others, more subtle and vastly
more important, on which must be fought the question whether women in
industry are women still, and whether the "new woman" is more feminine
than the old. Let us dismiss the extremes in both directions. We need
not adduce the members of the Pioneer Club, who show their increasing
femininity by donning male attire; nor need we question that large
numbers of women in industry continue to remain feminine still. The
practical question which we must determine, if possible, is the average
effect of industrial conditions and the assumption of the functions
commonly supposed to be more suitably masculine, upon women in general.
Here we definitely join issue with Mrs. Gilman.

It is impossible to discuss, as we might well do, the available evidence
as to the effect of external activities upon that wonderful function of
womanhood which, in its correspondence with the rhythm of the tides,
hints, like many other of our attributes, at our distant origin in the
Sea--the mother of all living. Reference was made in an earlier chapter
to this function, and its use as, in most cases at any rate, a criterion
of womanhood and a gauge of the effect of physical exercise or mental
exercise thereupon. The writer of "Women and Economics" has nothing to
say on this subject--less, if possible, than on the subject of
lactation. The menstrual fun