he race. It is easy to kill; it
requires a great spirit as well as a great mind to arouse the dormant
energies, to vitalize them and to make them creative forces for good."

One is reminded of the words of John Galsworthy, addressed to
workingwomen: "There is beginning to be a little light in the sky;
whether the sun is ever to break through depends on your constancy, and
courage, and wisdom. The future is in your hands more than in the hands
of men; it rests on your virtues and well-being, rather than on the
virtues and the welfare of men, for it is you who produce and mold the
Future."

There are 6,000,000 working women in the United States, and half of
them are girls under 21. One may go out any day in the city streets, at
morning or noon or evening, and look at a representative hundred of
them. The factories have not been able to rob them of beauty and
strength and the charm of femininity, and in that beauty and strength
and charm there is a world of promise. And that promise already begins
to be unfolded when to them comes Mrs. Robins with a gospel germane to
their natures, saying, "Long enough have you dreamed contemptible
dreams."

CHAPTER VII

ELLEN KEY

In these chapters a sincere attempt has been made not so much to show
what a few exceptional women have accomplished as to exhibit through a
few prominent figures the essential nature of women, and to show what
may be expected from a future in which women will have a larger freedom
and a larger influence.

It has been pointed out that the peculiar idealism of women is one that
works itself out through the materials of workaday life, and which seeks
to break or remake those materials by way of fulfilling that idealism;
it has been shown that this idealism, as contrasted with the more
abstract and creative idealism of men, deserves to be called
practicalism, a practicalism of a noble and beautiful sort which we are
far from appreciating; and as complementing these forms of activity, the
play instinct, the instinct of recreation, has been pointed out as the
parallel to the creative or poetic instinct of men.

Woman as reconstructor of domestic economics, woman as a destructive
political agent of enormous potency, woman as worker, woman as dancer,
woman as statistician, woman as organizer of the forces of labor--in
these it has been the intent to show the real woman of today and of
tomorrow.

There have been other aspects of her deserving of atten