granted, to womanhood all that it asked in concerted demand;
"Woman's Rights," as far as claimed by the consensus of womanly thought,
had won all that its advocates could desire in the matter of
recognition.

The change came with wonderful suddenness; yet it was so natural in its
workings, and the national mind had so long been prepared for it, that
it bore with it no sense of strangeness. Such a personality as that of
Mrs. Hetty Green, for example, the richest woman in America, financier
and woman of affairs, holding directing interests in many large
corporations, fostering and guiding some of the greatest enterprises in
the world of finance, and doing all of her own responsibility and
unaided by advice--such a personality as this would have seemed
incredible fifty years ago, but to-day is hardly worthy of more than
passing note. The entrance of women into the sphere of business,
competing with men upon their own ground, matching their wits against
those of their masculine competitors and remaining unworsted in the
struggle, excites no remark but is accepted as a thing entirely natural
to the conditions of modern life. Yet in its youth the century whose age
beheld these things would have maintained, even with acrimony, that they
were undesirable impossibilities.

Even some of the extreme demands of the radicals in such matters were
granted, at least experimentally, with results which showed the wisdom
of the more moderate advocates of "Woman's Rights." A town in Kansas,
that stronghold of extreme experiments, placed the whole internal
government mayoralty, town council, and all like offices in the hands of
its women. This was about 1897; and the century had not yet drawn its
last gasps when the aforesaid town was found to be bankrupt, while its
affairs generally were in such hopeless confusion that the men were, at
the next election, hastily called in to repair, as far as possible, the
devastation which had been wrought. But if women could not find success
in the administration of civic government, they none the less proved
themselves, in more than one notable instance, admirable organizers and
administrators in other spheres. It suffices to recall the name of
Frances Elizabeth Willard to show what can be accomplished by an able
woman working upon lines which her education and sexual traditions fit
her to pursue. Miss Willard left behind her noble monuments in the
Woman's Christian Temperance Union, of which she was p