Not long since I read a book called “The New Woman.”  It was a novel by an Englishman.  In it the author takes a beautiful young girl, about eighteen years of age, through a “Gretna-Green” experience with a young man of twenty.  She is the daughter of a widow; he, the only son of a wealthy London merchant.  They run away and after a month’s search are found by the father of the young man in southern France.  The girl is sent home to her mother; the young man sent to India in order to get him far away from his wife.  The novelist makes the young man a noble character, who is determined to prove himself worthy of his wife, and he toils to send her means for support.  The young wife becomes a mother, and the young husband toils the harder to care for his wife and babe.  When time hangs heavy on the hands of the young mother, she is invited to join a woman’s club.  Here she imbibes the spirit of the new woman.  She soon neglects her child and appears before the public for a lecture.  She wears a low neck dress, paints her cheeks, blondines her hair, smokes cigarettes and drinks wine.  A millionaire in India, who loses his own son, adopts the hero of the novel, dies and leaves him the great estate.  Then the young man hurries back to his wife.  He arrives in the evening, but finds she is not at home; she is delivering a lecture in the opera-house.  He awaits her return; a storm rages outside; at a late hour she enters the door, throws off her wraps and stands before her husband, with blondined hair, painted cheeks, and eyes red with wine.  He stares, then starts toward her, when she brings him to a halt by her strange manner.  He asks, “Is not this my wife?” she answers, “No, I am the New Woman.”  She refuses to let him see their child, drives him out into the storm, then goes to her room, disrobes and lies down to dream of great audiences and applause.

It is an insult to any intelligent reader.  Where is the woman, who was a sweet, modest young mother, and who today is a public speaker, who has neglected her child, driven her husband without cause into the street, blondines her hair, paints her cheeks, drinks wine and smokes cigarettes?  She would be hissed from the platform.  The author simply shows his extreme prejudice in an abstract attempt to prove that to be a new woman means the surrender of all womanly graces.

Let me give you, not fiction but real history, that I may present to you the kind of new woman I indorse.  She was born in the State of New York, was well educated, and at proper age married a young physician.  They moved to a western city, where for a while the young physician did well; but in an evil hour he commenced to drink.  Like many a noble young man, he was too weak to resist the power of appetite, and soon his practice left him.  His wife, the mother of two boys, secured a position in the public schools and by her ability, won her way to a principalship.  The husband wandered away, while the brave wife and