There is no such simplifier of life as work. Its effect upon the dress, the home surroundings, the very expression and manners of women once accustomed to leisure, is enormous. It tends to make them far more attractive to their own sex and also to such men as are not afraid an intelligent, competent woman would at close range discover the shallowness of their posings and pretenses. Finally, it makes them democratic--all of them that have the wisdom to look on their work not as a sentence to drudgery from which they hope they can presently cajole some man into releasing them, but as a high dispensation of destiny in their favor. The “emancipation of woman” is no mere sonorous phrase. The new woman can, indeed must, retain all the virtues of the “old-fashioned” woman. Feminine is as eternal and immutable as masculine; and the other virtues of the old were the virtues inseparable from a life of busy usefulness. The new woman can and must, and therefore will, free herself from the vices of the old-fashioned woman--the vices of narrowness and irrationality, of artifice that harks back to the days when woman was the servant of man’s appetites and had to pander to them. The decisive advantage the men have had in the fifty years since Democracy set its powerful forces to work upon woman has been not their superior strength or skill or faithfulness or industry, but that woman has worked merely as a temporary expedient. She has tenaciously assumed that she would presently “quit work” and be supported by some man. This dream has been largely fanciful, though none the less potent for that. The woman, married, has usually found that she has not stopped working, but has undertaken a far more laborious and ever grudgingly paid occupation. The delusion has made her wages smaller. Who will not pay more to a worker who expects to go on working than to a worker who expects presently to stop work, and is meanwhile giving at least half her energy to another occupation, that of catching a husband? The delusion has also destroyed or impaired her ambition. Why struggle to rise in an occupation which one hopes and intends presently to abandon for another that is wholly different?