The energy of our people has always been conspicuous in the case of women. The American woman, from the earliest days of our history, has refused to be prevented by the limitations of time or physique from trying to include the entire gamut of human feminine activity in her daily experience. There was a period when she could demonstrate successfully her ability to cook, sweep, rear and educate children, darn her husband’s stockings, and yet entertain delightfully, dress tastefully, and be well versed in literature and all the current phases of high thinking. The New England woman of fifty years ago was certainly an interesting specimen from this point of view, in spite of her morbid conscience and polar sexual proclivities. But among the well-to-do women of the nation to-day--the women who correspond socially to those just described--this achievement is possible only by taxing the human system to the point of distress, except in the newly or thinly settled portions of the country, where the style of living is simple and primitive.
In the East, of course, in the cities and towns the women in question ceased long ago to do all the housework; and among the well-to-do, servants have relieved her of much, if not of all of the physical labor. But, on the other hand, the complexities of our modern establishments, and the worry which her domestics cause her, make the burden of her responsibilities fully equal to what they were when she cooked flap-jacks and darned stockings herself. In other countries the women conversant with literature, art, and science, who go in for philanthropy, photography, or the ornamentation of china, who write papers on sociological or educational matters, are, for the most part, women of leisure in other respects. The American woman is the only woman at large in the universe who aims to be the wife and mother of a family, the mistress of an establishment, a solver of world problems, a social leader, and a philanthropist or artistic devotee at one and the same time. Each of these interests has its determined followers among the women of other civilizations, but nowhere except here does the eternal feminine seek to manifest itself in so many directions in the same individual.