About the same time a similar census was made in the part of New York City lying on Manhattan Island.  The women were in excess by 171,749, and formed 69 per cent. of all attendants.  Even church service, if not entirely tied to set forms, must seek to interest those who occupy the pews; and no observer can fail to note in both England and America, a movement toward ritualism on the one hand, and on the other, toward popular, personal, concrete and sometimes sensational preaching.  The same general changes are taking place in libraries, in the drama, in concerts, in all group activities connected with learning and the fine arts.

But on the other side, if emancipated women had not applied themselves, since 1870, to the direction of education, literature, religion and amusements, all these interests must have suffered serious neglect and probable deterioration through the concentrating of the interests of the ablest men in engineering, manufacturing, commerce and other fields of pure and applied science.  By popularizing these interests, women have really humanized them, as all similar revolutions have done in the past.  In breaking up old forms and intellectual conventions they have set free new and vital impulses.  Whether the historian of the future will consider this period of democratization and feminization a time of advance may be uncertain; but it is certainly a time of liberated energy and of broadening participation in all that is best in life.

V

The Economic Independence of Women

Nowhere does a human being escape compulsion.  Even were he alone in the world he would be forced to obey the physical laws governing gravity, heat, cold, hunger and disease.  No matter what his desires might be, he would find himself limited and constrained by fixed laws, the inexorable penalties of which he could escape only by obedience.  If the man were not alone, then each one of his companions would limit his freedom, and he would limit each one in the group, if they were to live together in peace and efficiency; and yet each of the man’s companions would help to free him from the tyranny of physical forces, from the social pressure of others, and even from the bondage of his own nature.

Independence is thus an ideal to be achieved only through obedience.  It begins in self-subordination and reaches its finest realization in social subordination.  Since the beginning of time men who thought have always dreamed of freedom; and for two hundred years now independence has been a word to conjure with.  But in so far as independence means freedom to follow one’s own unregulated desires, it is a fantastic and dangerous dream; and yet this dream of impossible independence has been among the greatest influences in furthering human development in the past.