s is denied to
their English sisters of similar position but who live in older
established communities. And there are, of course, women in England who
lead lives as beautiful and as beneficent as are lived anywhere upon
earth. The miracle is that the American woman--and, again I say, not now
and again but in her tens of thousands--becomes what she is out of the
environment in which her youth has so often been lived.

It will be necessary later to refer to the larger part played by
American women, as compared with English, in the intellectual life of
the country,--a matter which itself has, as will be noticed, no little
bearing on the question of the merits and demerits of the co-education
of the sexes. The best intellectual work, the best literary work, the
best artistic work, is still probably done by the men in the United
States; but an immensely larger part of that work is done by women than
in England, and in ordinary society (outside of the professional
literary and artistic circles) it is the women who are generally best
informed, as will be seen, on literature and art. To which is to be
added the fact that they take a much livelier and more intelligent
interest than do the majority of Englishwomen in public affairs, and
assume a more considerable share of the work of a public or quasi-public
character in educational and similar matters. It might be supposed that
this greater prominence of women in the national life of the country was
in itself a proof that men deferred more to them and placed them on a
higher level; but when analysed it will be found far from being any such
proof. Rather is woman's position an evidence of, and a result of, man's
neglect. By which it is not intended to imply any discourteous or
inconsiderate neglect; but merely that American men have been, and still
are, of necessity more busy than Englishmen, more absorbed in their own
work, whereby women have been left to live their own lives and thrown on
their own resources much more than in England. The mere pre-occupation
of the men, moreover, necessarily leaves much work undone which, for the
good of society, must be done; and women have seized the opportunity of
doing it. They have been especially ready to do so, inasmuch as the
spirit of work and of pushfulness is in the atmosphere about them, and
they have been educated at the same schools as the men. The contempt of
men for idleness, in a stage of society when there was more than enough