For this state of affairs women, imperfectly educated, wrongly, sillily educated, in fact, practically uneducated, are in the main responsible. Our women, like our men, inherit the American energy and restlessness. Where circumstances compel, they work in the home, the shop, the factory, the office, in the fine American way. But where circumstances do not compel they seek other outlets for their restless energy. And thus we find rich wives and daughters organizing elaborate establishments and fashionable sets and international circuits, and devoting themselves to erecting the life of frivolity and show into a career that will at once fill their idle hours, gratify their vanity, and give them the sense of doing something ambitious, of “getting on in the world.”
Among a people who have always yielded a commanding position to women, the power of this new American woman--attractive in dress and in surroundings, so often fascinating in personality, usually clever and so plausible that she deceives no one more completely than herself--could not but be enormous. Is it strange that she weakens the hold of the old ideals upon her husband and upon the men who are drawn to her attractive house? Is it strange that they persuade their consciences to let them neglect to-day’s duties while they help her amuse them and herself? Is it strange that she has sons and daughters devoted to her ideals? Is it strange that she gathers about her more and more backsliders from the democratic conception of life?
Organized as we are, there is absolutely no useful place for a leisure class. We do not purpose to be ruled, but, on the contrary, insist that our public administrators shall be chosen from the main body of toilers and shall execute, not direct, the popular will. Since leadership in public and private activity thus falls to the toiler in a Democracy, these fashionable “sets” provided by the women of the rich class are wholly alien and hostile to us as a democratic people. And they inevitably become a menace as their influence extends over the men and women of superior education or natural endowments who should be the leading exemplars of the American ideal. And this menace threatens to erect itself into what pessimists would call a “peril,” as the “community of interest” creates monopolies so intertwined with our individual structure that to assail them is to jeopardize it, and perpetuates wealth in certain families and groups.