e newer sections, has in its power, by wise and
careful action, to improve the conditions, elevate the tone, and
crystallize the moral force of its community in such a way as to make
it more desirable to live in, more beneficial to its own citizens,
more of an example to others.

All these questions of club life and work would naturally come up
before a federated body, and these would as naturally lead to
governmental questions; to contrasts and records of activities in
different parts of the world, and to the investigation of the causes
which bring about certain results.

Women are naturally both receptive and constructive. The affirmative
states of mind are those which, particularly belong to women; as
iconoclasts they are mere echoes. This affirmative condition is most
favorable to true development. Nothing good has ever come of mere
negation. But we must look for our truths and our basis of true
growth, in the light of the rising dawn--not, as heretofore, in the
waning glory of the setting sun. The union of clubs is the natural
outgrowth, of the planting of the true club idea. It was a little
seed, but it contained the germ of a mighty growth in the kinship of
all women--the women who differ as well as the women who agree; and
the federation of clubs is the forerunner of that unity of the race of
which philosophers have spoken, of which poets have dreamed, but which
only the constructive motherhood and womanhood of the race can
accomplish.

The Clubwoman[1]

The nineteenth century has been remarkable in many ways. It has
developed a new material and social order; but the fact is not as yet
fully recognized that it has developed a new woman--the woman who
works with, other women; the woman in clubs, in societies; the woman
who helps to form a body of women; who finds fellowship with her own
sex, outside of the church, outside of any ism, or hobby, but simply
on the ground of kinship and humanity.

[Footnote 1: _The Cycle_.]

It is not yet twenty-one years since a great daily in New York said
that if a society composed wholly of women could hold together one
year, a great many men would have to revise their opinion of women.
The remark was made apropos of the formation of the first women's
clubs in this country, and was echoed on all sides publicly and
privately. It is only significant now as showing the isolated position
of women, and the general impression which prevailed that they could
not and wou