as for the man, and as necessary in order to put her in _rapport_
with the eternal springs of all life and its varied forms of activity.

The first impulse of the awakened woman is to unite herself with other
women; her next to learn that which she does not know in regard to
art, literature, peoples, races; the countries she has never visited,
the kinsmen and kinswomen she has never seen, and the degree in which
their progress has kept pace with or gone beyond her own. This
knowledge comes to her through her club or literary society.

The woman's club has become the school of the middle-aged woman. It
has brought her up to the time. It has enabled her to keep pace with
the better advantages given to her sons and daughters. It has put an
interest into her life which it had never previously possessed, and
made her more humanly companionable because better able to judge and
more willing to suspend judgment. The clubs of women in America--the
growth mainly of the past twenty years--can now be counted by the
hundreds, and their membership by many thousands, and the history of
them all is practically the same.

It is this woman, born of women's clubs, who is the woman of to-day.
She is the centre of the intellectual activity of townships and
neighborhoods all over the country. She forms stock companies, and
builds athenaeums; she is at the head of working guilds; she organizes
classes, teaches what she knows, while she is being taught what she
did not know; and in mental activity, and labor which is not routine,
has renewed her youth, and added to her attractions. She is at the
same time far removed from a lobbyist. She is able to look at
different sides; she is socially at home with the best people in every
sense of the word. She is a lady as well as a woman, and does not