“Women are vastly more interested than we are in the administration of the criminal law, in the preservation of law and order, and in the suppression and punishment of crime,” declared the Hon. Joseph Choate a few years ago in New York to a large group of women organized to help in the non-partisan ticket which had Mr. Jerome at its head for district attorney. Mr. Choate added that Mr. Jerome would owe his election more to the women than the men. His prediction proved true; but whether the women who worked so hard for Mr. Jerome were fully satisfied with his administration is another story. There are abundant reasons why women take so much interest in the whole problem of criminal law and correction. A great many crimes are definite offenses against women and children; their comparative defenselessness makes them suffer more than men from brutality, neglect, and vices; and there are certain technical legal requirements of the law that constitute, in the matter of punishment, sex discriminations which arouse rebellion on their part. Perhaps other reasons predominate, however. The interest in public correction is but a simple and inevitable extension of the function of private correction which has been generally allotted to women in the home and in the school. Even over husbands they have been urged by church and moralists of all kinds to exercise reformatory influences and their acknowledged sphere of “protection” and “prevention of delinquency” is evident in the popular explanation of every great man by the fact that “he had a good mother.” Again, middle-class women have more leisure than men under modern conditions of industry, and an army of women choose to spend their leisure mothering the poor and the friendless or in the prevention of poverty and dependence. Furthermore women spend more of the world’s wealth than men spend, and hundreds of well-to-do women are becoming, with their advancing education and travel and observation, satiated with material possessions, and are spending their wealth for social possessions—public health, public ornamentation, public recreation, protection of girls and boys, infant welfare, and the like. Even the “sheltered” woman has grown to realize that all children as well as her own need homes, protection, education, sympathy and justice; that even self-preservation and self-respect for herself, her husband and her children are endangered by proximity to vice, crime, neglect, disease, and immorality. Moreover, there is no class line in crime or vice and the need of their correction. No group or class of women has escaped the ravages of these evils, and thus a feeling of solidarity is evolved in the fight against the social evil and various forms of delinquency, which is not as yet developed in the fight against poverty, the sting of which is a class experience.