Women -- Employment -- United States; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women in politics -- United States
And so an emancipated army of leisure has been formed which has
transformed the very nature of the culture with which it has busied
itself. Books, periodicals, musical instruments, travel became cheaper
and cheaper as the demand increased. Wholesale production makes almost
any luxury accessible to every one. It is also possible to find modern
and agreeable forms for older academic exercises. If Greek and Latin
were too full or too difficult, courses in Romanic and Germanic
philology would do as well. Anglo-Saxon gave way to Old English; and
Chaucer to the Lake Poets. Philosophy struggled for favor with the
English novel on equal terms. The works of Raphael were photographed and
lithographed until the Sistine Madonna became as commonly known as the
face of any strenuous and popular statesman of the day. With the aid of
these art productions, and John Addington Symonds, every woman with
leisure became an art critic. If economics was not interesting,
sociology was available; and it could be democratized to any degree
desired. If travel was troublesome, one could leave it to Cook; buy a
ticket and he would do the rest.
If these awakening hungers and corresponding opportunities had affected
only the period of life formerly thought available for education, these
changes would have come about much more slowly than they have. But the
genetic conception of life, steadily popularized since 1870, has led us
to see that education is coterminous with life. It seems strange that we
should have ever thought that mental activity belongs alone to youth.
Dorland's study shows that in a list of four hundred fairly
representative great men, only 10.25% ceased their mental activity
between the ages of forty and fifty; 20.75% between fifty and sixty; 35%
between sixty and seventy; 22.5% between seventy and eighty; and 6%
after eighty.[28]
[28] W.A. NEWMAN DORLAND, _The Age of Mental Virility_. New York: The
Century Company, 1908.
The recognition of such facts as these has given us a new genetic sense
of life, under the influence of which mothers and grandmothers have
joined the younger women in the pursuit of culture. They have formed
clubs--study clubs, current events clubs, camera clubs, art clubs,
literary clubs, civic clubs. They have organized courses of university
extension lectures; enrolled in Chicago University correspondence
courses; and have flocked to Chautauqua by the thousand in the summer,
when not abroad. It is not through the generosity of men that liberal
culture has come into the possession of women; they have carried it by
storm and have compelled capitulation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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