American women are no longer weak, ignorant, dependent. The present social order, in which military force is subordinated to industry and commerce, narrows the gulf between them, and places men and women physically on much the same plane. As for women's intellectual ability to decide their own legal status, they are, taken the country over, rather better educated than men. There are more girls than boys in the high schools of the United States; more girls than boys in the higher grammar grades. Fewer women than men are numbered among illiterate. As for the great middle class of women, it is obvious that they are better read than their men. Their specific knowledge of affairs may be less, but their general intelligence is not less than men's. Increasingly women are ceasing to depend on men for physical support. Increasingly even married women are beginning to think of themselves as independent human beings. Their work of bearing and rearing children, of managing the household, begins to assume a new dignity, a real value, in their eyes. In New Zealand at the present time statutes are proposed which shall determine exactly the share a wife may legally claim in her husband's income. American women may not need such a law, but they insist that they need something to take the place of that one which in eleven States makes it possible for a husband to claim all of his wife's income. CHAPTER V WOMEN'S DEMANDS ON THE RULERS OF INDUSTRY The big elevator, crowded with shoppers to the point of actual discomfort, contained only one man. He wore a white-duck uniform, and recited rapidly and monotonously, as the car shot upward: "Corsets, millinery, muslin underwear, shirt-waists, coats and suits, infants' wear, and ladies' shoes, second floor; no ma'am, carpets and rugs on the third floor; this car don't go to the restaurant; take the other side; groceries, harness, sporting goods, musical instruments, phonographs, men's shoes, trunks, traveling bags, and toys, fifth floor." Buying and selling, serving and being served--women. On every floor, in every aisle, at every counter, women. In the vast restaurant, which covers several acres, women. Waiting their turn at the long line of telephone booths, women. Capably busy at the switch boards, women. Down in the basement buying and selling bargains in marked-down summer frocks, women. Up under the roof, posting ledgers, auditing accounts, attending to all the complex bookkeeping of a great metropolitan department store, women. Behind most of the counters on all the floors between, women. At every cashier's desk, at the wrappers' desks, running back and forth with parcels and change, short-skirted women. Filling the aisles, passing and repassing, a constantly arriving and departing throng of shoppers, women. Simply a moving, seeking, hurrying mass of femininity, in the midst of which the occasional man shopper, man clerk, and man supervisor, looks lost and out of place.