be asked to do the work of the outer circle. The man can do
that satisfactorily if she does her part; that is, if she prepares him
the material. Certainly, he can never come into the inner circle and
do her work.

The idea that there is a kind of inequality for a woman in minding her
own business and letting man do the same, comes from our confused and
rather stupid notion of the meaning of equality. Popularly we have
come to regard being alike as being equal. We prove equality by
wearing the same kind of clothes, studying the same books, regardless
of nature or capacity or future life. Insisting that women do the same
things that men do, may make the two exteriorly more alike--it does
not make them more equal. Men and women are widely apart in functions
and in possibilities. They cannot be made equal by exterior devices
like trousers, ballots, the study of Greek. The effort to make them so
is much more likely to make them unequal. One only comes to his
highest power by following unconsciously and joyfully his own nature.
We run the risk of destroying the capacity for equality when we
attempt to make one human being like another human being.

The theory that the class of free women considered here would be fired
to unselfish interest in uncared-for youth if they were included in
the electorate of the nation is hardly sustainable. The ballot has not
prevented the growth of a similar class of men. Something more biting
than a new tool is needed to arouse men and women who are absorbed in
self--some poignant experience which thrusts upon their indolent
minds and into their restricted visions the actualities of life.

It should be said, however, that the recent agitation for the ballot
has served as such an experience for a good many women, particularly
in the East. Perhaps for the first time they have heard from the
suffrage platform of the "little mother," the factory child, the girl
living on $6 a week. They have done more than espouse the suffrage
cause for the sake of the child; they have gone out to find where they
could serve.

It is a new knowledge of that tide of life which breaks at her very
gate that the childless and the free American woman needs, if she is
to discharge her obligation to the uncared-for child. To force these
facts upon her, to cry to her, "You are the woman,--you cannot escape
the guilt of the woe and crime which must come from the neglect of
childhood in your radius,"--this is the business