generous
donor.

"That gentleman," she whispered in reply, "is one of the owners of a
great mail order department store in Chicago." She sighed deeply, as
she added: "During the first week of the panic that store discharged,
without warning, five hundred girls."

These typical examples of the reasoning processes of men are offered
without the slightest rancor. They had to be given in order that the
woman's habit of thought might be explained with clearness.

Women, since society became an organized body, have been engaged in the
rearing, as well as the bearing of children. They have made the home,
they have cared for the sick, ministered to the aged, and given to the
poor. The universal destiny of the mass of women trained them to feed
and clothe, to invent, manufacture, build, repair, contrive, conserve,
economize. They lived lives of constant service, within the narrow
confines of a home. Their labor was given to those they loved, and the
reward they looked for was purely a spiritual reward.

A thousand generations of service, unpaid, loving, intimate, must have
left the strongest kind of a mental habit in its wake. Women, when they
emerged from the seclusion of their homes and began to mingle in the
world procession, when they were thrown on their own financial
responsibility, found themselves willy nilly in the ranks of the
producers, the wage earners; when the enlightenment of education was no
longer denied them, when their responsibilities ceased to be entirely
domestic and became somewhat social, when, in a word, women began to
_think_, they naturally thought in human terms. They couldn't have
thought otherwise if they had tried.

They might have learned, it is true. In certain circumstances women
might have been persuaded to adopt the commercial habit of thought. But
the circumstances were exactly propitious for the encouragement of the
old-time woman habit of service. The modern thinking, planning,
self-governing, educated woman came into a world which is losing faith
in the commercial ideal, and is endeavoring to substitute in its place a
social ideal. She came into a generation which is reaching passionate
hands towards democracy. She became one with a nation which is weary of
wars and hatreds, impatient with greed and privilege, sickened of
poverty, disease, and social injustice. The modern, free-functioning
woman accepted without the slightest difficulty these new ideals of
democracy and social servi