A modern "captain of industry" has a brain so socially developed as to require for its proper area of expression an enormous range of social service. He gets it. He develops great systems of transportation, elaborate processes of manufacture, complex legislation or financial manoeuvres. Without reference to his purpose, to the money he may acquire, or the relative good or evil of his methods, the point to be noted is that he is exercising his full personal capacity.
His sister, his wife, has a similar possibility of brain activity, and practically no provision for its exercise. So great is the growth, so tremendous the pressure of live brains against dead conditions, that in our current life of to-day we find more and more women pouring wildly out into any and every form of combination and action, good, bad, and indifferent. The church sewing circle, fair, and donation party no longer satisfy her. The reception, dinner, ball, and musicale no longer satisfy her. Even the splendid freedom of physical exercise no longer satisfies her. More and more the necessity for full and legitimate social activity makes itself felt; and more and more she is coming out of the house to take her rightful place in the world.
Not easily is this accomplished, not cheaply and safely. She is breaking loose from the hardest shell that ever held immortal seed. She is held from within by every hardened layer of untouched instinct which has accumulated through the centuries; and she is opposed from without by such mountain ranges of prejudice as would be insurmountable if prejudice were made of anything real.
The obsequious terror of a child, cowed by the nurse's bugaboo, is more reasonable than our docile acquiescence in the bonds of prejudice. It is pleasantly funny, knowing the real freedom so easily possible, to see a strong, full-grown woman solemnly state that she cannot pass the wall of cloudy grandeur with Mrs. Grundy for gate-keeper, that seems to hem her in so solidly. First one and then another reaches out a courageous hand against this towering barricade, touches it, shakes it, finds it not fact at all, but merely feeling--and passes calmly through. There is really nothing to prevent the woman of to-day from coming out of her old shell; and there is much to injure her, if she stays in.