The modern woman finds herself educated to recognize a stress of social obligation which her family did not in the least anticipate when they sent her to college.  She finds herself, in addition, under an impulse to act her part as a citizen of the world.  She accepts her family inheritance with loyalty and affection, but she has entered into a wider inheritance as well, which, for lack of a better phrase, we call the social claim.  This claim has been recognized for four years in her training, but after her return from college the family claim is again exclusively and strenuously asserted.  The situation has all the discomfort of transition and compromise.  The daughter finds a constant and totally unnecessary conflict between the social and the family claims.  In most cases the former is repressed and gives way to the family claim, because the latter is concrete and definitely asserted, while the social demand is vague and unformulated.  In such instances the girl quietly submits, but she feels wronged whenever she allows her mind to dwell upon the situation.  She either hides her hurt, and splendid reserves of enthusiasm and capacity go to waste, or her zeal and emotions are turned inward, and the result is an unhappy woman, whose heart is consumed by vain regrets and desires.

If the college woman is not thus quietly reabsorbed, she is even reproached for her discontent.  She is told to be devoted to her family, inspiring and responsive to her social circle, and to give the rest of her time to further self-improvement and enjoyment.  She expects to do this, and responds to these claims to the best of her ability, even heroically sometimes.  But where is the larger life of which she has dreamed so long?  That life which surrounds and completes the individual and family life?  She has been taught that it is her duty to share this life, and her highest privilege to extend it.  This divergence between her self-centred existence and her best convictions becomes constantly more apparent.  But the situation is not even so simple as a conflict between her affections and her intellectual convictions, although even that is tumultuous enough, also the emotional nature is divided against itself.  The social claim is a demand upon the emotions as well as upon the intellect, and in ignoring it she represses not only her convictions but lowers her springs of vitality.  Her life is full of contradictions.  She looks out into the world, longing that some demand be made upon her powers, for they are too untrained to furnish an initiative.  When her health gives way under this strain, as it often does, her physician invariably advises a rest.  But to be put to bed and fed on milk is not what she requires.  What she needs is simple, health-giving activity, which, involving the use of all her faculties, shall be a response to all the claims which she so keenly feels.