It has been since the war, and as the result of the great quickening of women which it occasioned, that women have organized missionary, philanthropic, temperance, educational, and political organizations, on a scale of great magnitude. Without much blowing of trumpets, or unseemly boasting, they have overcome almost insuperable obstacles, have brought business abilities to their management of affairs, and have achieved phenomenal success. Their capacity for public affairs receives large recognition at the present time. They are elected, or appointed to such offices as those of county clerk, register of deeds, pension agent, prison commissioner, state librarian, overseer of the poor, school superintendent, and school supervisor. They serve as executors and administrators of estates, trustees and guardians of property, trusts, and children, engrossing clerks of State legislatures, superintendents of women’s State prisons, college presidents and professors, members of boards of State charities, lunacy and correction, police matrons, and postmistresses. They are accountants, pharmacists, cashiers, telegraphers, stenographers, typewriters, dentists, bookkeepers, authors, lecturers, journalists, painters, architects, and sculptors. In many of these positions women serve with men, who graciously acknowledge the practical wisdom and virtue that they bring to their duties. “And although many women have been appointed to positions in departments of government, and to important employments and trusts,” said Senator Blair of New Hampshire, from his seat in Congress, “as far as your committee are aware no charge of incompetence or malfeasance in office has ever been sustained against a woman.” Only a little more than a quarter of a century ago women were allowed to enter very few remunerative occupations. In 1836, when Harriet Martineau visited this country, to study its new institutions, that she might be able to forecast the type of civilization to be evolved from them, she especially investigated the position of women in the young republic. She was surprised to find them occupying a very subordinate position in a country calling itself free, and to find that they had entered only seven paying occupations. They were allowed to teach, to be seamstresses, tailoresses, milliners, dressmakers, household servants, and factory operatives. Hon. Carroll D. Wright, Chief of the National Bureau of the Statistics of Labor, in a recent report, has announced the number of remunerative professions and occupations in which women are working as three hundred and forty-two. In the cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Minneapolis, and San Francisco, women have established hospitals, and have managed them with admirable wisdom.[166] Two of the ablest legal journals of the West have been established by women, who are their editors and proprietors.