and feeling their weight in the general balance.

And has political fever swept the American woman away, so that she has given herself wholly to voting and elections and confined her care to this side and no other, or do we find her awake to other problems in her life?

We may say that woman's concern with the other sides of life exceeds by degrees her concern with politics. In the economic sphere we find her an effective member of society: she fills most of the public positions, so that a stranger in America is apt to think at first glance that woman has monopolized all the jobs, and to wonder why man does not demand his rights! If you enter the stores or certain offices, schools, hospitals, and restaurants, or speak on the telephone, you find yourself dealing in the first instance with a lady, and you are pleased by her friendliness, her courtesy, her neat appearance, her com-petence, and her seriousness at work. And if you searched deeply into woman's economic condition in America you would find her occupying great positions in the state and drawing high salaries for them; you would find her in all the liberal professions; and you would discover that she owns businesses, industries, and very large fortunes — it is said that most of the American people's financial savings are in woman's hands. Then we find woman attentive to the study of her economic conditions and problems: after continual insistence with the government she has organized a department of her own in the ministry of labor, or the labor section of the government departments — the Labor Department. Through the specialized women officials of this department she studies the conditions of the women workers of the country, gathers statistics, submits proposals, and drafts just laws, then strives to have them applied through Congress.

As for the social side, it is the widest field of women's work. In it woman works with

complete freedom of movement, impelled by the democratic American spirit which enjoins upon the individual humanitarian service and self-sacrifice for the sake of the whole. Among the most important social institutions in America is the Red Cross society — in it men cooperate with women.

Woman takes an effective part in all the national projects, and to her belongs the greatest credit for gathering millions of dollars every year for all manner of humanitarian projects.

Among the most important women's institutions also is the Cooperation Club, and this is an international institution, its branches being spread through the various parts of the world. Among the women's institutions in America are the associations beyond counting or numbering, some of them tied directly to the church and some lay associa-tions, all of them serving various social ends. And there is the great institution that embraces most of the associations, the "American National Council of Women," which is a member of the International Council of Women. This international council embraces a great number of women's councils in most of the countries of the world. Nor does the women's movement end with the associations; there are the congresses that meet contin-ually, in which woman studies all manner of social problems and takes resolutions concerning them, striving always to carry them out with all seriousness and energy. And there are the famous women's clubs.

After this description of woman's ceaseless movement in America one asks: where are the home, the family, and the child? And where does woman stand with regard to all of these — is not the home her first field of work? There is no doubt that to woman belongs the greatest credit in the forming of the American home. The family in America is still one of the basic cornerstones on which the structure of the nation rests, despite the dangers

threatening it. The family is an institution which the American in fact tends with special care. It has beautiful traditions — religious, cooperative, and educa-tional — which every founder of a family follows spontaneously. American life is practical in its essence, and the American home is among the simplest homes I have known, together with order and organization in the internal management and the provision of all the means of comfort, all of which help to save time and to secure the happiness of every member of the family. The child is brought up soundly; his parents accustom him from child-hood to individual independence and self-reliance, and he absorbs the principles of democratic life in the home, at school, and in society, growing up a free citizen who knows his rights and does not squander them, with full consciousness of his duties and responsibilities and respect for the rights of others.

This is the American home in its reality; and today two disquieting dangers assail it. The first is the problem of divorce, and the second the disintegration among the members of the family, each member taking up an independent private life which he lives most of the time outside the home and cut off from his family. The pressure of these two dangers grows severe in the great cities such as New York and Hollywood and others. But be it known that woman has begun to face these two problems, and has begun to ask to what extent she is responsible for their emergence, and to what extent, also, modern American life, clamorous and complicated as it is, has its effect in the breaking apart of the family.

The real question, in my view, which every woman must face is how she looks at her responsibil-ities, and what among them she considers fundamental

and what secondary. This question has today taken an acute form for the American woman, because her domestic duties very often clash violently