Norahs will know their place no more.  Then the enlightened womanhood may have to begin at the foundation and glorify the kitchen again.  And good enough for her, in the wide as well as primitive sense of the phrase, and a grand turn in the history that repeats itself toward the old, forgotten, peaceful side of the cycle it may be!

But the argument does not rest upon any such points as these.  It rests upon the inside nature of a woman’s work; upon the need there is to begin again to-day at the heart of things and make that right; upon the evident fact that this can be done none too soon or earnestly, if the community and the country are not to keep on in the broad way to a threatened destruction; and upon the certainty that it can never be done unless it is done by woman, and with all of woman’s might.  Not by struggles for new and different place, but by the better, more loving, more intelligent, deep-seeing, and deep-feeling filling of her own place, that none will dispute and none can take from her.  We are not where woman was in the old brutal days that are so often quoted; and we shall not, need not, return to that.  Christianity has disposed of that sort of argument.  We are on a vantage ground for the doing of our real, essential work better than it has been done ever before in the history of the world; and we are madly leaving our work and our vantage together.

The great step made by woman was in the generation preceding this one of restlessness—­the restlessness that has come through the first feeling of great power.  It was made in the time when women learned physiology, that they might rear and nurse their families and help their neighborhoods understandingly; science, that they might teach and answer little children, and share the joy of knowledge that was spreading swiftly in the earth; political history and economy, that they might listen and talk to their brothers and husbands and sons, and leaven the life of the age as the bread in the mixing; business figures, rules, and principles, that they might sympathize, counsel, help, and prudentially work with and honestly strengthen the bread-winners.  The good work was begun in the schools where girls were first told, as George B. Emerson used to tell us Boston girls, that we were learning everything he could teach us, in order to be women:  wives, mothers, friends, social influencers, in the best and largest way possible.  Women grew strong and capable under such instruction and motive.  Are their daughters and grand-daughters about to leap the fence, leave their own realm little cared for—­or doomed to be—­undertake the whole scheme of outside creation, or contest it with the men?  Then God help the men!  God save the Commonwealth!

We are past the point already where homes are suffering, or liable to suffer, neglect or injury; they are already left unmade.  Shall this go on?  Between frivolities and ambitions,