and the pretence that
this is desired of her wears thin. Still, the type will out.

She does not pass with impunity, the last exponent of true feminine
charm. The vulgar, the street boy, have evolved one of those strange
sayings that have the air of being fragments from some lost and
forgotten chant:

"She's the Army Contractor's Only Daughter,
Spending it now."

Or simply, "Spending it now."

She does not pass with impunity, but she passes. She makes her stilted
passage across the arena upon which the new womanhood of Western Europe
shows its worth. It is an exit. There is likely to be something like a
truce in the fashions throughout Europe for some years. It is in America
if anywhere that the holy fires of smartness and the fashion will be
kept alive....

And so we come to prophecy.

I do not believe that this invasion by women of a hundred employments
hitherto closed to them is a temporary arrangement that will be reversed
after the war. It is a thing that was going on, very slowly, it is true,
and against much prejudice and opposition, before the war, but it was
going on; it is in the nature of things. These women no doubt enter
these employments as substitutes, but not usually as inferior
substitutes; in quite a number of cases they are as good as men, and in
many they are not underselling, they are drawing men's pay. What reason
is there to suppose that they will relapse into a state of superfluous
energy after the war? The war has merely brought about, with the
rapidity of a landslide, a state of affairs for which the world was
ripe. The world after the war will have to adjust itself to this
extension of women's employment, and to this increase in the proportion
of self-respecting, self-supporting women.

Contributing very largely to the establishment of this greatly enlarged
class of independent women will be the great shortage for the next
decade of marriageable men, due to the killing and disablement of the
war. The women of the next decades will not only be able to get along
economically without marriage, but they will find it much more difficult
to marry. It will also probably be a period in which a rise in prices
may, as it usually does, precede the compensating rise in wages. It may
be that for some years it will be more difficult to maintain a family.
This will be a third factor in the fixation of this class of bachelor
women.

Various writers, brooding over the coming shortage of men, ha