The woman’s position at its head is hard.  The result of her pains and struggles are rarely what she hopes, either for herself or for any one connected with her, but this is true of all human achievement.  There is nothing done that does not mean self-denial, routine, disillusionment, and half realization.  Even the superman goes the same road, coming out at the same halfway-up house!  It is the meaning of the effort, not the half result, that counts.

The pain and struggle of an enterprise are not what takes the heart out of a soldier; it is telling him his cause is mean, his fight in vain.  Show him a reason, and he dies exultant.  The woman is the world’s one permanent soldier.  After all war ceases she must go daily to her fight with death.  To tell her this giving of her life for life is merely a “female function,” not a human part, is to talk nonsense and sacrilege.  It is the clear conviction of even the most thoughtless girl that this way lies meaning and fulfillment of life, that gives her courage to go to her battle as a man-in-line to his, and like him she comes out with a new understanding.  The endless details of her life, its routine and its restraints, have a reason now, as routine and discipline have for a soldier.  She sees as he does that they are the only means of securing the victory bought so dearly—­of winning others.

From this high conviction the great mass of women never have and never can be turned.  What does happen constantly, however, is loss of joy and courage in their undertaking.  When these go, the vision goes.  The woman feels only her burdens, not the big meaning in them.  She remembers her daily grind, not the possibilities of her position.  She falls an easy victim now to that underestimation of her business which is so popular.  If she is of gentle nature, she becomes apologetic, she has “never done anything.”  If she is aggressive, she becomes a militant.  In either case, she charges her dissatisfaction to the nature of her business.  What has come to her is a common human experience, the discovery that nothing is quite what you expected it to be, that if hope is to be even halfway realized, it will be by courage and persistency.  It is not the woman’s business that is at fault; it is the faulty handling of it and the human difficulty in keeping heart when things grow hard.  What she needs is a strengthening of her wavering faith in her natural place in the world, to see her business as a profession, its problems formulated and its relations to the work of society, as a whole, clearly stated.

Quite as great an injustice to her as the belittling of her business has been the practice, also for campaigning purposes, of denying her a part in the upbuilding of civilization.  There was a time “back of history,” says one of the popular leaders in the Woman’s movement, “when men and women were friends and comrades—­but from that time to this she (woman) has held a subsidiary and exclusively feminine position.  The world has been wholly in the hands of men, and they have believed that men alone had the ability, felt the necessity, for developing civilization, the business, education, and religion of the world.”