I might have reanimated ages of stone and of bronze; might have shown you women, through slow centuries, inventing the arts of spinning and weaving, and pottery molding; learning to build, to till the earth, to grind and to cook grains, to tan skins for clothing against the cold.  No one taught them these things.  Out of their brains, as undeveloped and as primitive as the brains of men, they would never have conceived so much wisdom.  The vague mind of the savage woman never sent her to the spider, the nesting bird, and the burrowing squirrel to learn to weave and to build and to store.  When we find exactly what it was that taught primitive woman how to lay the first stones of civilization, we have a perfect philosophical understanding of all women.

I chose to interpret the woman mind through the modern American woman, partly because she has learned the great lesson of organization, and has thus been able to work more effectively, and to impress her will on the community more strikingly than other women in other ages.  What she has done is apparent and easy to prove.

Also, I chose the American club woman because she represents, not an unusually gifted type, but the average intelligent, well-educated, energetic, wife-and-mother type of woman.  The club woman is not radical, or at least not consciously radical.  She has not, like the progressive German and Russian woman, theories of political regeneration or of family reconstruction.  What she desires, what ideals she has formed, I think must fairly represent the desires and ideals of the great mass of women of the twentieth century.

When we survey the activities the club women have engaged in, when we discover why they chose exactly these activities, we have a perfect philosophical understanding, not only of the modern woman mind, but of the cave woman mind and all the woman mind in between.

The woman mind is the most unchangeable thing in the world.  It has turned on identically the same pivot since the present race began.  Perhaps before.

Turn back and count over the club women’s achievements, the things they have chosen to do, the things they want.  Observe first of all that they want very little for themselves.  Even their political liberty they want only because it will enable them to get other things—­things needed, directly or indirectly, by children.  Most of the things are directly needed,—­playgrounds, school gardens, child-labor laws, juvenile courts, kindergartens, pure food laws, and other visible tokens of child concern.  Many of the other things are indirectly needed by children,—­ten-hour working days, seats for shop girls, protection from dangerous machinery, living wages, opportunities for safe and wholesome pleasures, peace and arbitration, social purity, legal equality with men, all objects which tend to conserve the future mothers of children.  These are the things women want.