To-day the women vote in four States and hold public office in all the States and under the National Government. There are women policemen and firemen, women locomotive engineers, women masons and plasterers and gunsmiths, women street-car drivers and conductors, women blacksmiths and coopers and steel and iron workers, and even women sailors--to take only a few occupations which, on the face, would seem to exclude women. In fact, there is not in this country a single department of skilled or unskilled labor, except only soldier and man-o’-war’s man, which has not its women workers in swiftly increasing numbers. In the professions there are thousands of women doctors, lawyers, authors, professors, musicians, artists, decorators, journalists, public speakers, and more than a hundred thousand women teachers. In the trades there are thousands of women hotel and restaurant keepers, insurance and real estate agents, bookkeepers, clerks, merchants, officers in corporations, saleswomen, stenographers, telegraph and telephone operators. In manufactories the women operatives almost equal the men in numbers. There are thousands of women who hold responsible positions in the management of manufacturing corporations. All these occupations, with the exception of such as nursing and teaching school and music, were once exclusively in the hands of men.
The cause of the change is the same as that which has revolutionized every part of modern society--the amazing discoveries of science, creating an enormous number of new occupations and revolutionizing the method of all the old occupations, from housekeeping to national administration.
War was the department of human endeavor which not only excluded women from itself, but also kept her fast anchored at home. Until the second quarter of the last century war was the chief thought, the chief pursuit of the human animal. He was either just going to war or just coming home from war, or engaged in war or preparing for imminent war. Obviously, so long as war occupied this position in human affairs woman was inevitably in the background, in the secondary places, a household drudge or plaything. But war is no longer the principal business of the race, with peace tolerated as a breathing spell now and then. Peace and its arts have become the serious business of civilization, the settled order, with war as a dreadful nightmare. The wars, if not fewer, are briefer and are carefully concentrated and confined. Civilization has been forced upon a peace basis not by enlightenment, but by commerce growing out of discovery and invention. It clamors for skilled hands, not for brutal hands. Hence the vast opening for women and the vast inrush of women. It is a democratic tide. Out of discovery and invention comes commerce; out of commerce and its intercourse, which is death to all forms of provincialism, both mental and physical, comes enlightenment; in the train of enlightenment, as day in the train of the sun, comes Democracy.