It read like book-learning when applied to other women.  It read like a revelation when applied to herself.  She thought what her mission was.  To make a home; to be a good wife; to understand and teach little children.  And where do you find the new woman now?  In the kindergarten colleges; in university settlements; attending mothers’ meetings; teaching ignorant mothers how to understand the tender souls and delicate bodies of the dear little creatures committed to their loving but unwise care.  You find them well prepared by a course of study to accept the responsibilities of life when their time comes.  Is that trivial?  Is that a subject to sneer at or to jest about?  Rather it is the hope of the nation.

Legislation cannot satisfactorily restrict immigration.  Laws do not forbid the criminal from marrying and the insane from being born.  All the masculine wisdom in the world cannot prevent the State from annually paying millions of dollars for the support of those who are foredoomed through generations of ignorance and crime—­crime which too often comes only from ignorance—­to fill your jails and asylums.  Who is doing anything to remedy?  The men.  Who is doing anything to prevent?  The women.  The new woman, the sneered at, the ridiculed and abused, caricatured by the cartoonist, derided by the press, is going quietly to work with jail-schools, with free kindergartens in tenement districts, with college settlements, to begin with the care of mothers and children.  That is just one of the things the new woman is doing.  Is she a poor creature?  Is she wearing bloomers?  Is she masculine or unwomanly?  Rather she possesses attributes almost divine in that she strikes at the very root of the matter, and begins a course of action which, if carried out, will do what all the men in creation can never cure.  She will prevent.

The new woman is young.  The new woman is oftener a pretty girl than otherwise.  They are not poor girls either, who are doing these things.  They are not obliged to earn their daily bread.  They are the daughters of the rich.  They are the travelled, cultured, delicately reared girls.  They are such girls as, two generations ago, would have disdained anything but accomplishments, who were only charitable with their money, and who never dreamed of giving their own time to such work.  They were girls who considered their education finished when they left school.

I glory in the new woman in that so often she is rich and beautiful.  It is easy enough to be good if you are plain.  In fact, there is nothing else left for a plain woman “to do.”  But take these lovely girls who are tempted by society to idle away their days and waste their lives listening to a flattery which may be but a thing of the moment, and let them have sense to see through its hollowness, and want to be something and do something, and it becomes heroic.

Perhaps it is only a fad.  Then Heaven send more fads.  If it is the fashion to have a vocation and to educate one’s self along these lines which never were heard of a few years ago, then for once fashion has accidentally become noble.