I think that American women are beginning to realize that American men are played out at forty-five; or fifty, at the most.  There are exceptions, of course, but with the vast majority the strain is too great and the rewards are too small.  They cannot retire in time.  I have a friend who, after a brilliant and active career, has withdrawn to the communion of nature and become a philosopher.  He insists that all men should be retired by law at forty-five and condemned to spend the rest of their days tilling the soil gratis for women and the rising generation.  The outdoor life would restore a measure of their dissipated vitality and prolong their lives.

This may come to pass in time:  stranger things have happened.  But, as I remarked before, it is the present we have to consider.  It seems to me it would be a good idea if every woman who is both protected and untrained but whose husband is approaching forty should, if not financially independent, begin seriously to think of fitting herself for self-support.  The time to prepare for possible disaster is not after the torpedo has struck the ship.

A thousand avenues are open to women, and fresh ones open yearly.  She can prepare secretly, or try her hand at first one and then another (if she begins by being indeterminate) of such congenial occupations as are open to women of her class, beyond cooking, teaching, clerking.  Those engaged in reforms, economic improvements, church work, and above all, to-day, war relief work, should not be long discovering their natural bent as well as its marketable value, and the particular rung of the ladder upon which to start.

Many women whose energies have long been absorbed by the home are capable of flying leaps.  These women still in their thirties, far from neglecting their children when looking beyond the home, are merely ensuring their proper nourishment and education.

Why do not some of the public spirited women, whose own fortunes are secure, form bureaus where all sorts of women, apprehensive of the future, may be examined, advised, steered on their way?  In this they would merely be taking a leaf from the present volume of French history its women are writing.  It is the women of independent means over there who have devised so many methods by which widows and girls and older spinsters tossed about in the breakers of war may support themselves and those dependent upon them.  There is Mlle. Thompson’s Ecole Feminine, for instance, and Madame Goujon’s hundred and one practical schemes which I will not reiterate here.

Women of the industrial class in the United States need new laws, but little advice how to support themselves.  They fall into their natural place almost automatically, for they are the creatures of circumstances, which are set in motion early enough to determine their fate.  If they do hesitate their minds are quickly made up for them by either their parents or their social unit.  The great problem to-day is for the women of education, fastidiousness, a certain degree of ease, threatened with a loss of that male support upon which ancient custom bred them to rely.  Their children will be specialized; they will see to that.  But their own problem is acute and it behooves trained and successful women to take it up, unless the war lasts so long that every woman will find her place as inevitably as the working girl.