Now, when conditions are such that a few rise to great eminence from the ordinary ranks of life, it means a good general average.  The multitude of women of rare achievements, distinguishing the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary periods of American history are the best evidences of the seriousness, idealism, and intelligence of the women in general.  Their services in the war are part of the traditions of every family whose line runs back to those days.  Loyal, spirited, ingenious, and uncomplaining, they are one of the finest proofs in history of the capacity of the women of the mass to respond whole-heartedly to noble ideals,—­one of the finest illustrations, too, of the type of service needed from women in great crises.  But the rank and file which conducted itself so honorably in the Revolution was not a whit more noble and intelligent than the rank and file of the succeeding period.  It would have been impossible ever to have established as promptly as was done the higher and the general schools for girls if women had not given them the support they did, had not been willing, as one great educator of the early part of the nineteenth century has recorded—­“to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of the most rigid economy, that their daughters might be favored with means of improvement superior to what they themselves possessed.”  And back of this self-denial was what?  A desire that life be made easier for the daughter?  Not at all—­a desire that the daughter be better equipped to “form the character of the future citizen of the Republic.”

It is not alone that justice is wounded by denying women a part in the making of the civilized world—­a more immediate wrong is the way the movement for a fuller, freer life for all human beings is hampered.  A woman with a masculine chip on her shoulder gives a divided attention to the cause she serves.  She complicates her human fight with a sex fight.  However good tactics this may have been in the past, and I am far from denying that there were periods it may have been good politics, however poor morals, surely in this country to-day there is no sound reason for introducing such complications into our struggles.  The American woman’s life is the fullest in its opportunity, all things considered, that any human beings harnessed into a complicated society have ever enjoyed.  To keep up the fight against man as the chief hindrance to the realization of her aspiration is merely to perpetuate in the intellectual world that instinct of the female animal to be ever on guard against the male, save in those periods when she is in pursuit of him!