There is another aspect to the question.  Not only is the mass of women better fitted than ever before for worthy occupation, there has never been a time nor a country in which their traditionary sphere has shrunk to so small dimensions.  Nowhere else are there so many women of such a station that they are not obliged to toil and spin, nor to sleep all day to make up for nights of dissipation.  For all those who do not have to concern themselves with the wherewithal of living, the art of living easily has been brought to a state of great perfection.  The general care of the house and of the children is still the duty of the woman, but the labor involved in acquitting herself of that duty is a very different matter from what it was a generation ago.  Then all her energies were needed to bring up a family well.  Brewing and baking and soap- and candle-making were all carried on in the house, and there were a dozen children to be kept neatly dressed with the aid of no needle but her own.  Now the purchase of the day’s supplies is the only important demand upon her time; well-trained servants, the descendants of the raw Irish girl her mother struggled with, are capable of carrying on the cooking and the scrubbing by themselves.  Sewing it is hardly worth her while to do in the house.  Stitching her linen collars was once an important item in her year’s work; now it is safe to say that there is not a single woman who does not buy her collars ready made.  Making cotton cloth into undergarments has become a manufacture in the unetymological sense of the word.  The Viscount de Campo-Grande, in addressing the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences at Madrid, two years ago, admitted that sewing was no longer an economy, but urged women to practise it still for the purpose of quieting their nerves.  But the modern American woman who has had a healthy bringing up, who has divided her girlhood between vigorous study and active out-door exercise, who can row and skate and play ball and tennis with her brothers, has no unquiet nerves.  She does not ask for sedatives, but for some high stimulus to call into play her strong and well-trained faculties.  Money-making, the natural sphere of man, has become a more and more absorbing pursuit, while the usual feminine occupations have become more than ever trivial and unimportant at the very moment when the feminine mind has taken a new start in its development.  The woman who is fresh from reading Gauss and Pindar, and who has taken sides in the discussion between the adherents of Roscher and of Mill, cannot easily content herself with the petty economies that result from doing her own cutting and fitting and dusting and table-setting.  Still less, if she has not married, is she satisfied to look forward to the position of nursery governess to her sister-in-law’s children.  Her education has fitted her for something better than to save the wages of an upper servant.  Again the question is forced upon her, where can she find a fitting field for the exercise of her powers?