“That gentleman,” she whispered in reply, “is one of the owners of a great mail order department store in Chicago.”  She sighed deeply, as she added:  “During the first week of the panic that store discharged, without warning, five hundred girls.”

These typical examples of the reasoning processes of men are offered without the slightest rancor.  They had to be given in order that the woman’s habit of thought might be explained with clearness.

Women, since society became an organized body, have been engaged in the rearing, as well as the bearing of children.  They have made the home, they have cared for the sick, ministered to the aged, and given to the poor.  The universal destiny of the mass of women trained them to feed and clothe, to invent, manufacture, build, repair, contrive, conserve, economize.  They lived lives of constant service, within the narrow confines of a home.  Their labor was given to those they loved, and the reward they looked for was purely a spiritual reward.

A thousand generations of service, unpaid, loving, intimate, must have left the strongest kind of a mental habit in its wake.  Women, when they emerged from the seclusion of their homes and began to mingle in the world procession, when they were thrown on their own financial responsibility, found themselves willy nilly in the ranks of the producers, the wage earners; when the enlightenment of education was no longer denied them, when their responsibilities ceased to be entirely domestic and became somewhat social, when, in a word, women began to think, they naturally thought in human terms.  They couldn’t have thought otherwise if they had tried.

They might have learned, it is true.  In certain circumstances women might have been persuaded to adopt the commercial habit of thought.  But the circumstances were exactly propitious for the encouragement of the old-time woman habit of service.  The modern thinking, planning, self-governing, educated woman came into a world which is losing faith in the commercial ideal, and is endeavoring to substitute in its place a social ideal.  She came into a generation which is reaching passionate hands towards democracy.  She became one with a nation which is weary of wars and hatreds, impatient with greed and privilege, sickened of poverty, disease, and social injustice.  The modern, free-functioning woman accepted without the slightest difficulty these new ideals of democracy and social service.  Where men could do little more than theorize in these matters, women were able easily and effectively to act.

I hope that I shall not be suspected of ascribing to women any ingrained or fundamental moral superiority to men.  Women are not better than men.  The mantle of moral superiority forced upon them as a substitute for intellectual equality they accepted, because they could not help themselves.  They dropped it as soon as the substitute was no longer necessary.