Yet the efforts of the would-be female reformers, however, misdirected in their immediate aims, did good in rousing the women of America to a consideration of their place in the polity, at least in social matters, of the commonwealth. They might not care to go to the polls and struggle with the men in an endeavor openly to rule the destinies of the nation; but they awoke to a more intelligent interest than they had yet displayed in the theories of government and the social questions of the day. Many of the chief reforms in these matters which have come about during late years have been effected by the direct influence of the women of our land, either in leagues or through recognized and accredited representatives of some accepted theories. This feminine interest in the larger affairs of the nation, rightly directed to internal rather than to external policy, has been admirable in its results, and its rise and development may in large measure be attributed to the incitement of the reform spirit in other matters. That the concerted efforts of the women of our country are invariably wisely directed and governed it were folly to claim; but the spirit is always pure and high, and the masculine framers or advocates of legislation are not of such unimpeachable wisdom that they can afford to speak in scorn of the theories or work of the other sex in this wise, while at least the motives that direct feminine influence cannot be called into question. The tendency of the sex toward extremes, and its blindness, in its sense of the desirability of its end, to the unwisdom of the means which it sometimes proposes to use, are occasionally in evidence in matters of paternal legislation, but these are but minor flaws, and are not incorrigible.
So the era of Feminine Reconstruction resulted in the working woman and the thinking woman; and on these lies much of the hope of our country's future. Thus the Civil War at the last brought us a blessing instead of a curse, and in the halls of labor American womanhood once more joined hands in amity and became a unit in its aims and influence.
When a German woman residing in a Western city, but recently arrived in America from the midst of the conservative social circles of her native land, described American women at large as _furchtbar frei und furchtbar fromm_ [frightfully free and frightfully pious], she unintentionally paid a compliment to our feminine civilization. The accusation of piety calls for no rebuttal; and that of freedom was caused by the confounding, as was natural in European thought, of innocent simplicity with recklessness of deportment. The social manners of American women of the present is a subject of philosophy rather than history; but the fact of the freedom of intercourse between the sexes may be touched upon, since, however strange and reprobatory it may seem to European eyes, it is as much a national "institution" as our form of government itself, while its causes lie in the story of the past.