The new woman whom I mean is silk-lined.  She is nearly always pretty.  She is always clever.  She is always a lady, and she is always good.  Perhaps, to the cynical, that combination sounds as if she might not be interesting; but she is.  Of course not always.  One may have all those gifts, and yet not know how to make use of them for other people’s benefit.  The gift of being interesting is a distinct one by itself.  But the new woman, having fresh and outside interests, is generally able to talk of them delightfully.

The new woman is new only in the sense that she has opened her eyes and has begun to see the value of the simple, common, everyday truths which lie nearest to her.  The whole world becomes new to those who suddenly awake to the beauties which they never had thought of before.

Once women taught their daughters housekeeping and sewing from stern principle, and made it neither beautiful nor attractive.

Then house-keeping went out of fashion.

Feather-headed boys married trivial girls, and began to make a home without the first gleam of knowledge as to how the thing should be done.  The foolish little wife knew not how to cook or sew.  The foolish little husband said he was glad of it.  He didn’t want his wife to wear herself out in the kitchen.  Servants could do such things.  So they hired servants more ignorant than themselves, “and the last state of that man was worse than the first.”  Children came to them.  That was the most pitiful part of all.  A house may be badly managed and ignorantly cared for, and people do not die of it, or become warped or crippled, but the soul of a child, to say nothing of the helpless little body, can be ruined utterly through the irresponsibility of the criminally ignorant people to whom the poor little thing is sent.  Their ignorance is so dense and deep-searching that they never know that they are ignorant.  But back of it all there is a reason.  A bigoted, senseless, false, and misnamed delicacy.  Mothers reared their daughters and sent them to fulfil their mission in life, of being wives and mothers, versed in everything except the two things they were destined to be.  It was as if a physician were taught architecture, music, and painting, and then sent out to practise his unskill in medicine upon a helpless humanity.

Then the new woman opened her eyes.  She read those sturdy words which are much quoted, but which never can be repeated too often:  “The situation which has not its duty, its ideals, was never yet occupied by man.  Yes, here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal; work it out therefrom, and working, live, be free.  Fool! the Ideal is in thyself; thy condition is but the stuff thou art to shape this same Ideal out of; what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the form thou give it be heroic, be poetic?  Oh, thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth—­the thing thou seekest is already with thee, ‘here, or nowhere,’ couldst thou only see.”