ABSTRACT
Women’s collective virtual control is considerably larger than their legal ownership indicates. In the realm of public affairs, the women of the French and Italian Renaissance are too well known to need mention. Feminism can no longer get up an argument on the thesis that women can do anything that men can do. All interest in that contention has died out; everybody has stopped thinking in those terms, and our militant feminists are reduced to pushing minor issues, to smoothing out relatively petty inequalities of legal status, and the like. In the greater concerns of life it is the absence of the impulse toward civilization that justifies women in their complaint that men are forever children. American society, mainly on account of its wealth and material prosperity, has always come in for an uncommon amount of observation and criticism.
