If we are to decide which ix the intellectual age, not of individual women. but of women in history, T should say that it is just about to enter on an unprecedentedly brilliant phase. The 19th century was $0 self-centred that during its Tntter half women had to fight for education as though women had never before had to do with things -|of the mind—as though there had been no learned Indies quietly enjoy= ing themselves through all the Middle Ages in their convent libraries, just as though the women of the Renaissance had not shared the delight of the new learning, Just as though intellectual women had not been part of the glory that was Greece and the grandeur, that was Rome.
That battle has been won, and the daughters and grand-daughters. of the victors have to face the fact that they must equip themselves for far longer intellectual lives than women have ever lived before. " The self-supporting woman can rarely retire as early as the old-fashioned matron did. She must continue to and feod her mind, (There after all, to be no biological her doing so.) The mother of the small modern family cannot Loan on it during half her lifetime or expect it to provide all her emotional interests, as the wearied mother of ten or twelve leaned and expected a generation ago, She, too, must learn to regard he self an individual, with mental. powers that are worth cultivating awhile life endures.
I wish it.were possible to lay odds that, a hundred years from now, the term "old women," og a term of contofipt, will be obsolete,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.