o has arraigned her influence--Strindberg and Nietzsche among them.
You cannot turn a page of history that the woman is not on it or
behind it. She is the most subtle and binding thread in the pattern
of Human Life!

For the American Woman of to-day to allow woman's part in the making
of this nation to be belittled is particularly unjust and cowardly.
The American nation in its good and evil is what it is, as much
because of its women as because of its men. The truth of the matter
is, there has never been any country, at any time, whatever may have
been their social limitations or political disbarments, that women
have not ranked with the men in actual capacity and achievement; that
is, men and women have risen and fallen together, whatever the
apparent conditions. The failure to recognize this is due either to
ignorance of facts or to a willful disregard of them; usually it is
the former. For instance, one constantly hears to-day the exultant cry
that women finally are beginning to take an interest and a part in
political and radical discussions. But there has never been a time in
this country's history when they were not active factors in such
discussion. The women of the American Revolutionary Period certainly
challenge sharply the women of to-day, both by their intelligent
understanding of political issues and by their sympathetic cooeperation
in the struggle. It was the letters of women which led to that most
important factor in centralizing and instructing pre-revolutionary
opinion in New England, the Committee of Correspondence. There were
few more powerful political pamphleteers in that period than Mercy
Warren. We might very well learn a lesson which we need very much to
learn from the way women aided the Revolutionary cause through their
power as consumers. As for sacrifice and devotion, that of the woman
loses nothing in nobility when contrasted with that of the man.

If we jump fifty years in the nation's history to the beginning of the
agitation against slavery, we find women among the first and most
daring of the protestants against the institution. It was for the sake
of shattering slavery that they broke the silence in public which by
order of the Christian Church they had so long kept--an order made,
not for the sake of belittling women, but for the sake of establishing
order in churches and better insuring the new Christian code of
morality. The courage and the radicalism of women of the 30's, 40's,