The initiative is now largely taken by women in departments in which they were formerly, if admitted at all, entirely and often unwillingly under the dictation of men. Philanthropists of both sexes, indeed, work harmoniously together, but in their joint undertakings the women now have their say and, instead of waiting to be told what men would have them think, feel obliged to think for themselves. The result is not discord but a fuller and freer harmony of action and intention. In industrial undertakings they still have far to go, but women will enter more and more into them and with happy results. The professions indeed supply the keystone to the arch of woman’s liberty. Not the intellectual training alone which fits for them, but the practical, technical knowledge which must accompany their exercise puts women in a position of sure defense against fraud and imposition. In the volume now given to the public the progress of women in all of these departments is presented by persons who have made each of them a special study, and who have done good and helpful work in them, with, moreover, the outlook ahead which is the important element in all labor and service. The world, even the American world, is not yet wholly converted to the doctrine of the new womanhood. Men and women who prize the ease of the _status quo_, and the imaginary importance conferred by exemption from the necessities which prompt to active exertion, often show great ignorance of all that this book is intended to teach. They will aver, men and women of them, that women have never shown any but secondary capacities and qualities. Women who take this ground often secretly flatter themselves that what they thus say of other women does not apply to themselves. A speaker representing this class lately asked at a legislative hearing in Massachusetts why women did not enter the professions? why they did not become healers of the sick, ministers, lawyers? One might ask how he could escape, knowing that in all of these fields, so lately opened to them, women are doing laborious work and with excellent results? A book like the present will furnish chapter and verse to substantiate what is claimed for the attainments of women. It will not, indeed, put an end to foolish depreciative argument, based upon erroneous suppositions, but it will furnish evidence to confute calumny, to convince the doubtful. II. THE EDUCATION OF WOMAN IN THE EASTERN STATES. BY MARY F. EASTMAN. The movement in behalf of the education of youth in America followed so closely upon the landing of the colonists on an unsettled and forbidding coast, and was continued so persistently and so successfully, under stress of poverty and peril, that it seizes upon the imagination, and justly stirs a profound sense of gratitude in succeeding generations.