Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 February 1910 — Women and Civilization. [ARTICLE]

Women and Civilization.

Woman had little to do directly with the shaping of old civilization, but we can not help thinking that our modern sense of life and its more real and human investment are largely and directly due not only to spiritual qualities and distinctively feminine, but to feminine initiative. In the clarified light of the soul womanhood has been translated. The woman is still the mother, but maternity has for our modern vision a significance which is not merely physical, but spiritual—in its fullest meaning it Is the liberation of humanity for finer uses. She Is nearer than man to the new Nature, as she was to the old. But onr ultra-modern naturalism has a pellucid atmosphere, full of light, and there is a clearer vision of truth. The humanities and, we might also say, the divinities, have been transformed. A delusive network of sophistication has vanished. The terms "masculine” and “feminine" have no longer their old elemental or conventional meanings. There is, or there is becoming, a new* woman and a new' man, and the distinction between them is not one of “spheres.” No exaltation of life, here or hereafter, could be humanly Interesting or at all human in which woman did not have her proper share and her peculiar distinction. This share and tjiis distinction woman has had in the . great modern renaissance. She first brought the creative imagination within homely bounds. But here we touch upon a field to which we must give separate consideration. —Harper’s.