This is indeed true, and women display, in their new-found enthusiasm, a singularly obstinate spirit.  All the legislatures south of the Mason and Dixon Line cannot make the Southern women believe that Southern prosperity is dependent upon young children laboring in mills.  The women go on working for child labor and compulsory education laws, unconvinced by the arguments of the mill owners and the votes of the legislators.  The highest court in the State of New York was powerless to persuade New York club women that the United States Constitution stands in the way of a law prohibiting the night work of women.  The Court of Appeals declared the law unconstitutional, and many women at present are toiling at night.  But the club women immediately began fighting for a new law.

The women of every State in the Union are able to work harmoniously together because they are unhampered with traditions of what the founders of the Republic intended,—­the sacredness of state rights, or the protective paternalism of Wall Street.  The gloriously illogical sincerity of women is concerned only about the thing itself.

I have left for future consideration women who having definite social theories have organized themselves for definite objects.  This chapter has purposely been confined to the activities of average women—­good wives and mothers, the eight hundred thousand American women whose collective opinion is expressed through the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.  For the most part they are mature in years, these club women.  Their children are grown.  Some are in college and some are married.  I have heard more than one presiding officer at a State Federation meeting proudly announce from the platform that she had become a grandmother since the last convention.

The present president of the General Federation, Mrs. Philip N. Moore of St. Louis, Missouri, is a graduate of Vassar College, and served for a time as president of the National Society of Collegiate Alumnae.  There are not wanting in the club movement many women who have taken college and university honors.  Club women taken the country over, however, are not college products.  If they had been, the club movement might have taken on a more cultural and a less practical form.  As it was, the women formed their groups with the direct object of educating themselves and, being practical women used to work, they readily turned their new knowledge to practical ends.  As quickly as they found out, through education, what their local communities needed they were filled with a generous desire to supply those needs.  In reality they simply learned from books and study how to apply their housekeeping lore to municipal government and the public school system.  Nine-tenths of the work they have undertaken relates to children, the school, and the home.  Some of it seemed radical in the beginning, but none of it has failed, in the long run, to win the warmest approval of the people.