Any one who has associated intimately with women whose entire time is their own to employ as they see fit, or with women who have a few hours of leisure daily and who represent a large proportion of our prosperous middle class, must be impressed with the fact that there is a great waste of talent, ability, and culture. “The wives of tens of thousands of business men and well-paid employees enjoy unquestioningly, and as a matter of course, a degree of leisure such as formed the exclusive privilege of a small aristocracy in earlier centuries. The beneficent social and philanthropic activities of public spirited women and the baneful epidemic of gambling at cards which has run riot for several years and shows no tendency to diminish, are twin offspring of this unearned leisure.”[59] Although less practical than men because of the almost complete divorce of their mental activities from the duties of life, these women often represent a plane of culture superior to that of the men of their class, and possible only when advantage can be taken of intellectual opportunists, associated with leisure. The women are the ones who are able to attend public lectures and places of amusement during the day; and often they alone have sufficient energy to profit by the intellectual benefits which are offered for the public’s enlightenment. In every college community where free lecture courses are given for the benefit of the public, the audience is characteristically feminine. A safe measure of the increase of leisure of women of all ages and of the more prosperous classes is our institutions of higher learning. The proportion of young women graduating from the high schools in the United States is greater than that of young men; and if this tendency continues the same will eventually apply to our institutions of higher learning. This has been anticipated by a few of the universities limiting the number of girls who might attend. What might seem to be sex prejudice may be in reality a resistance to an effeminacy, arising out of leisure class standards, which is fondly designated as _culture_, in contrast to the practical application of knowledge. The general tendency of young women to seek education for self improvement rather than for practical usefulness indicates that they benefit by the financial surplus of the family. On the other hand, their brothers are expected to prepare themselves at an early age for the industrial field or the world of business. This is giving to the women of the family greater cultural opportunities than to the men. This is most evident where girls consider their brother’s associates their inferiors in the point of social prestige.