What Eight Million Women Want | Page 4

woman accepted without the slightest difficulty these
new ideals of democracy and social service. Where men could do little
more than theorize in these matters, women were able easily and
effectively to act.
I hope that I shall not be suspected of ascribing to women any
ingrained or fundamental moral superiority to men. Women are not
better than men. The mantle of moral superiority forced upon them as a
substitute for intellectual equality they accepted, because they could not
help themselves. They dropped it as soon as the substitute was no
longer necessary.
That the mass of women are invariably found on the side of the new
ideals is no evidence of their moral superiority to men; it is merely
evidence of their intellectual youth.
Visitors from western cities and towns are often amazed, and vastly
amused, to find in New York and other eastern cities little
narrow-gauge street car lines, where gaunt horses haul the shabbiest of
cars over the oldest and roughest of road beds. The Westerner declares
that nowhere in the East does he find surface cars that equal in comfort
and elegance the cars recently installed in his Michigan or Nebraska or
Washington home town.
"Recently installed." There you have it.

The eastern city retains its horse cars and its out-of-date electric rolling
stock because it has them, and because there are all sorts of difficulties
in the way of replacing them. Old franchises have to expire or
otherwise be got rid of; corporations have to be coaxed or coerced;
greed and corruption often have to be overcome; huge sums of money
have to be appropriated; a whole machinery of municipal government
has to be set in motion before the old and established city can change
its traction system.
The new western town goes on foot until it attains to a certain size and
a sufficient prosperity. Then it installs electric railways, and of course it
purchases the newest and most modern of the available models.
New social ideals are difficult for men to acquire in a practical way
because their minds are filled with old traditions, inherited memories,
outworn theories of law, government, and social control. They cannot
get rid of these at once. They have used them so long, have found them
so convenient, so satisfactory, that even when you show them
something admittedly better; they are able only partially to comprehend
and to accept.
Women, on the other hand, have very few antiques to get rid of. Until
recently their minds, scantily furnished with a few personal preferences
and personal prejudices, were entirely bare of community ideals or any
social theory. When they found themselves in need of a social theory it
was only natural that they should choose the most modern, the most
progressive, the most idealistic. They made their choice unconsciously,
and they began the application of their new-found theory almost
automatically. The machinery they employed was the long derided,
misconceived, and unappreciated Women's Club.


CHAPTER II
FROM CULTURE CLUBS TO SOCIAL SERVICE

Unless you have lived in a live town in the Middle West--say in
Michigan, or Indiana, or Nebraska--you cannot have a very adequate
idea of how ugly, and dirty, and neglected, and disreputable a town can
be when nobody loves it. The railway station is a long, low, rakish
thing of boards, painted a muddy maroon color. Around it is a stretch
of bare ground strewn with ashes. Beyond lies the main street, with
some good business blocks,--a First National Bank in imposing granite,
and a Masonic Temple in pressed brick. The high school occupies a
treeless, grassless, windswept block by itself.
In the center of the residential section of the town is a big, unsightly,
hummocky vacant place, vaguely known as the park--or the place
where they are going to have a park, when the city gets around to it. At
present it is a convenient spot wherein to dump tin cans, empty bottles,
broken crockery, old shoes, and other residue. When the wind blows, in
the spring and fall, a fine assortment of desiccated rubbish is wafted up
and down, and into the neighbors' dooryards.
Everybody is busy in these live towns. Everybody is prosperous, and
patriotic, and law-abiding, and respectable. The business of "getting
on" absorbs the entire time and attention of the men. They "get on" so
well, for the most part, that their wives have plenty of leisure on their
hands, and the latter occupy a portion of their leisure by belonging to a
club, organized for the study of the art of the Renaissance, Chinese
religions before Confucius, or the mystery of Browning. The club
meets every second Wednesday, and the members read papers, after
which there is tea and a social hour. The papers vary in degree alone, as
the writer