discover the direction whither these changes are driving us. It
indeed may well have been that the formal enunciation of the primary
importance of woman in the social organism has played its own part in
accelerating her rise into her destined lofty position, though in the
main, any philosophy can be merely the explanation and the record of
an evolution wherein we are little but passive factors.

This much is certain, that the insistent driving home by this school
of thinkers of woman, woman, woman, as the center and nucleus whence
is developed the child and the home, and all that civilization stands
for, and whose rights as an independent human being are therefore to
be held of supreme importance in the normal evolution of the race, has
served as an incessant reminder to practical workers and reformers in
the sphere of education as well as to leaders of the woman movement.
Especially has this been true when tackling the problems more
immediately affecting women, because these are the truly difficult
problems. Whatever touches man's side of life alone is comparatively
simple and easily understood, and therefore easier of solution. So in
the rough and ready, often cruel, solutions which nature and humanity
have worked out for social problems, it has always been the man
whose livelihood, whose education and whose training have been first
considered, and whose claims have been first satisfied. For this there
are several reasons. Man's possession of material wealth, and his
consequent monopoly of social and political power have naturally
resulted in his attending to his own interests first. The argument,
too, that man was the breadwinner and the protector of the home
against all outside antagonistic influences, which in the past he has
generally been, furnished another reason why, when any class attained
to fresh social privileges, it was the boy and the man of that class,
rather than the woman and the girl, who benefited by them first. The