Under varying conditions but to similar purpose, there was an equal movement among Northern womanhood. Timidly at first, for they too had their prejudices to conquer, the women of the North sought to enter into the great competition for the means of existence; and, having once tasted independence, they found it sweet. There was almost the same hesitancy and the same circumscription of womanly calling in the North as in the South; but the Northern woman, with her stronger sense of independence in right-doing, sooner shook herself free from the shackles of tradition. Had there been equal need in both sections, the North would doubtless have taken and maintained the lead in the emancipation of women from the servitude of the obligations of caste as in those days held; but because of the greater incentive among the women of the South these were in the van in the new movement until that movement became so general that there was no longer front or rear thereto. That time was not long in coming; revolutionary as were its theories, the country had long unconsciously been prepared for them, and when they were set up they were almost universally acknowledged as the proper standard. There still remained some whose prejudices in this respect were irrefragable, but they gradually found themselves in a constantly weakening minority. The worker in the hive of humanity found herself not only tolerated, as she had hoped as the best possible, but honored, even more than the queen bees; she found herself, though originally forced there by circumstances, in an environment which was in all ways congenial to the best of her nature. Not a little of this result, it must be proudly admitted, was owing to the chivalry of the American man. With all respect, as all courtesy, he welcomed to participation in his pursuits the woman whom he had looked upon as by training and even nature cut off from such participation, and he gladly embraced the opportunity to prove to the women of the land that his deference for their sex was not limited to the bounds of the drawing room, but was a thing which was unlimited in application. With their contact with the world of affairs thus made easy for them by those upon whose hitherto exclusive territory they were intruding, the women of America found their new life not only tolerable but pleasant.