Among the working population of Perry there are all manner of American characteristics manifest.  In a country where conditions change with such rapidity that each generation is a revelation to the one which preceded it, it is inevitable that the family and the State should be secondary to the individual.  We live with our own generation, with our contemporaries.  We substitute experience for tradition.  Each generation lives for itself during its prime.  As soon as its powers begin to decline it makes way with resignation for the next:  “We have had our day; now you can have yours.”  Thus in the important decisions of life, the choosing of a career, matrimony or the like, the average American is much more influenced by his contemporaries than by his elders, much more stimulated or determined by the friends of his own age than by the older members of his family.  This detaching of generations through the evolution of conditions is inevitable in a new civilization; it is part of the country’s freedom.  It adds fervour and zest and originality to the effort of each.  But it means a youth without the peace of protection; an old age without the harvest of consolation.  The man in such a battle as life becomes under these circumstances is better equipped than the woman, whose nature disarms her for the struggle.  The American woman is restless, dissatisfied.  Society, whether among the highest or lowest classes, has driven her toward a destiny that is not normal.  The factories are full of old maids; the colleges are full of old maids; the ballrooms in the worldly centres are full of old maids.  For natural obligations are substituted the fictitious duties of clubs, meetings, committees, organizations, professions, a thousand unwomanly occupations.

I cannot attempt to touch here upon the classes who have not a direct bearing on our subject, but the analogy is striking between them and the factory elements of which I wish to speak.  I cannot dwell upon details that, while full of interest, are yet somewhat aside from the present point, but I want to state a fact, the origin of whose ugly consequences is in all classes and therefore concerns every living American woman.  Among the American born women of this country the sterility is greater, the fecundity less than those of any other nation in the world, unless it be France, whose anxiety regarding her depopulation we would share in full measure were it not for the foreign immigration to the United States, which counteracts the degeneracy of the American.[1] The original causes for this increasing sterility are moral and not physical.  When this is known, does not the philosophy of the American working woman become a subject of vital interest?  Among the enemies to fecundity and a natural destiny there are two which act as potently in the lower as in the upper classes:  the triumph of individualism, the love of luxury.  America is not a democracy, the unity of effort between the man and the woman does