THE CONGRESS OE WOMEN.

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This is only a single example, for civilization has a general tendency to subvert woman either into the handmaid of labor or into the queen of the drawing-room. Only a few days ago I found in an American paper that civilization was claimed for a new place—Yellowstone Park, I think it was—on the ground that the ladies there changed their dresses three or four times a day. Is not this a false civilization? Has not Henrik Ibsen been applauded by the public, as well as by the critics, when he showed us in Hedda Gabler that the last kind of woman is no more likely to find true happiness than the first? The gifted and accomplished Hedda Gabler ends in suicide, because she cannot bear to live without influence. Take then a simple-minded woman, like the one old Pestalozzi paints, “Gertrud, who teaches her children.” In her humble way, just by teaching her children, she succeeds in reforming not only her own house­hold, but a whole village. And does not history, as well as poetry, teach us that the pioneers of new womanhood are the women who work and gain their influence through personal exertion? In the long run it is neither birth nor money, nor what can be bought for money, but personality which conquers the world. And, as in private life, so in public. Woman, when she demands her rights, is only taking back what belongs to her. Who cared for the sick, the poor, the children in olden times, if not the women ? Only when all these cares were put under public supervision was woman shutout from them, and now has to fight her way back to the duties which her mother heart and her womanly feeling cannot let alone. PAen political rights, for the first time in civil­ized life, have been taken out of her hands by modern constitutions. In 1661, when the last Danish parliament, according to the old constitution, was held, votes were passed for women owning property. Since then thousands and thousands of men, who had no rights formerly, have come in as voters, but no woman’s vote is now laid upon the scale in the old countries. As the New England women taught the Puritans that they could not do without free and equal women, so is the Western woman of America of our day teaching the world that womanhood must not be shut out from public life if we do not want it to be crippled, one-sided and poor. It is for the woman of civilization—nay, any woman, wherever she lives, if she knows how to reign—to make her influence felt for good, as the society lady does, and at the same time to work, to make herself real useful, as the factory girl does—it is she who is the pioneer of modern womanhood.