Women's housekeeping, or most of it, has gradually been withdrawn from the home and transferred to the municipality. There was a time when women could ensure their families pure food, good milk, clean ice, proper sanitation. They cannot do that now. The City Hall governs all such matters. Again the men find themselves facing the old dilemma. They must either support their women in idleness--do all their own as well as the women's housekeeping--or they must allow their women to leave the home and follow their housekeeping to the place where it is now being done,--the polls. Women are beginning to understand the situation. They are even beginning to understand how badly the men are providing for the municipal family. They are demanding their old housekeeping tasks back again. To this point has the Suffrage movement, begun in 1848 by a band of women called fanatics, arrived. CHAPTER XI IN CONCLUSION I have tried to set down in these pages the collective opinion of women, as far as it has expressed itself through deeds. I have not succeeded if any reader lays down the book with the impression that he has merely been reading the story of the American club woman. I have not succeeded at all if my readers imagine that I have been writing only about a selected group of women. What I have meant to do is to show the instinctive bent of the universal woman mind in all ages, reflected in the actions of the freest group of women the world has ever seen. I might have reanimated ages of stone and of bronze; might have shown you women, through slow centuries, inventing the arts of spinning and weaving, and pottery molding; learning to build, to till the earth, to grind and to cook grains, to tan skins for clothing against the cold. No one taught them these things. Out of their brains, as undeveloped and as primitive as the brains of men, they would never have conceived so much wisdom. The vague mind of the savage woman never sent her to the spider, the nesting bird, and the burrowing squirrel to learn to weave and to build and to store. When we find exactly what it was that taught primitive woman how to lay the first stones of civilization, we have a perfect philosophical understanding of all women. I chose to interpret the woman mind through the modern American woman, partly because she has learned the great lesson of organization, and has thus been able to work more effectively, and to impress her will on the community more strikingly than other women in other ages. What she has done is apparent and easy to prove.