Iwould have done at once if she had been a man. She had climbed steadily until she came to the clump of laurels before the mouth of the cave. She knew the cave was there. But she was unaccountably overcome by a diffidence, the maiden in her drew back abashed, and she had seated berself upon the ledge of rock where Logan discovered her.

"Then why didn't you come in?" he insisted.

"I concluded that it was not worth while. I wanted to-" she did not finish.

"You wanted to give me a curtain-lecture about the rights of women and about stilling liquor, I reckon."

"Sit up and cry and wait for you when you were up here at night!" she finished for him.

"No, she shouldn't do that!" be exclaimed.

"But she would! She couldn't help it -being 'just a woman,'" she put in.

Could he believe his ears? Was there a deeper, softer note in her voice? "Do you think she'd care that much for me?" he asked quickly.

"If she loved you, yes. That is, I suppose so from what I have seen of wives," she added, looking away from him.

Suddenly he flung himself upon the grass beside her, leaned forward to gaze at her averted face. "Mary, give it up, this foolish notion about women leading reforms and voting."

"No," she answered listlessly.

"Mary, I hate you, but God, how I love you! Give it up!" he cried, seizing her hands and attempting to draw her to him.

Instantly both were upon their feet, gazing sorrowfully and accusingly into each other's faces.

"Which you also own and control. We are not even good or bad according to our own will, but according to the whim of your protection. We do not choose our virtues. You thrust them upon us-the ones that praise you within the gates. Solomon's perfect woman was only a good servant, an excellent forewoman of a weaving factory! All these things we have done for love and then you forget us there in the house, at the loom, upon our knees praying. You forget us, and our children," she said, with a sob.

He listened gravely, watching her face change from wisdom to pain. But when she wept, he drew her to him. He laughed as he folded her in his arms. "And to think I did not know how dear and sweet you are," he cried.

"I'm not," she moaned, against his breast. "You love me, my darling!"

"I do not want to love you," she protested.

"But you do," he laughed.

Mary felt her convictions concerning the rights of women dying down in her like a pain which is suddenly and miraculously eased. She made an effort to recover herself, the missionary suffragist from Silver City. She laid her hands upon his breast and thrust him from her.

"I cannot marry you, you are wicked," she cried.

"I know it, darling! And to think that you love me in spite of that!" He almost shouted his triumphant laughter; he rejoiced in her defeat; and when she lay once more upon his breast, shamed and happy, he was ready to consider a certain

matter.

"I'm going to make you a present of the still, Mary. It isn't much, but it's all the visible property I have!"

"You will give it up, Logan?" she breathed.

"I'm giving it to you; you can do what you please with it," he answered. "I've hated it every hour since that night you rode behind me through the storm."

"And I've loved you ever since," she admitted.

"You are too nearly right-handed when it comes to reforming men," he suggested slyly. "A woman has to be left-handed and helpless to do that."

She did not believe it, but it was indicative of her present state of submission that she made no attempt to defend herself.

I'

T has been just a year since a woman in these United States of America carried a vital matter-literally a matter of life to some public officials, and by so doing forced the hand of the civil powers in as fastidious a question as can agitate nations. Her relation to the officials was that of employee. Their relation to their community was that of trustee; so that her question was really put to the people as a body politic. It served to center attention, in the most critical way, upon the interassociation of the economic and the social service of women, and the extent to which the state may, with the best of intentions, become entangled between the two. More than that, it showed in a sharp new light the involvement of the state in the biologic function of women; and it brought out the grandest jumble between civic guardianship and domestic relations ever translated into

social terms. The woman was a highschool teacher, the officials were the members of the Board of Education of the City of New York, and the question was:

"May I have a year's leave of absence from my desk in the schoolroom for the purpose of bearing and rearing a child?"

The new and crucial element in the situation was candor. Married women teachers had had leaves of absence before, and, it is said, had borne children during those absences; but if so, they had evaded and concealed and lied, and never, so far as anyone seemed able to recall, had the New York Board been asked frankly and fairly to come out into the open and pass on this question. It was as if the woman had said:

"There is much elaborate language about the 'yeoman service' that women render to the state through motherhood. Music is

made, stories are written, songs are sung to glorify the state's immeasurable debt to women who produce citizens for it. Do you mean it? Is it actually worth something to the state? Stop the music, the songs, and the stories long enough to let me get from the state an authoritative answer to this: Is the social service of motherhood actually worth a year's social service as teacher?"

Confining itself strictly to traditions that motive certain of its by-laws and policies, the Board dismissed the poser, or tried to, by denying the request. Meantime the teacher had taken the limited leave of absence allowed for illness under the by-laws, summer had come on, adding vacation time to her prerogatives of absence, and when school reopened last autumn there she was, back at her desk, with no offense charged against her. And the baby which the Board had not seen its way clear to accommodate was at home crowing triumphantly.

Perhaps the incident would have passed quietly into school history under the chapter heading, "The Baby That Got the Best of the Board," had not a supplementary case in the elementary schools intensified the situation. In February of 1913 an elementary teacher of eighteen years' standing advised the authorities that owing to a disease of the ears she was compelled to absent herself from school. A doctor's certificate vouched for the truth of this. In April she gave birth to a child.

It was the committee on elementary schools that had the case in charge, and in its majority report, submitted in June, this committee tried to make a clean sweep of the whole question for the teacher-mother, both in the classroom and in the nursery. To begin with it said, "It must be conceded that our main and primary function is the education of the child"; and to end with it said, "The only subject of this controversy is the teaching efficiency of the teacher under the existing circumstances." But in the middle it said, "In considering this question we must not lose sight of the home." Then, knotting up a posy of private predilections for the "old-fashioned home," it presented them to the teachermother with its hand on its heart, projecting for her the while the home routine that it considered most conducive to the welfare of herself and her child, not even forgetting the diet.

"We still believe," it said, "that the old

fashioned mother who considers it her primary function to rear (sic!) and maintain a pure and proper home"-you can raze a house but can you rear a home?—“is doing yeoman service to the state. The home can never fulfil its true function when its head is an absent mother . . . the child in the early stages of its development needs the constant and watchful care and attention of a conscientious mother. Artificial feeding can never replace what nature requires."

Next it did a curious thing; it set "lessons of truth, high conceptions of life, the relationship of the home to the school, of the child to the mother, high ideals of marriage and motherhood" over on one side, as desirable theoretical teaching for girls; and on the other, the presence of a prospective mother in the schoolroom as an inimical influence to the preservation of "a girl's greatest charm, natural reserve."

Hosts of people eager to agree that it would be a beneficent social dispensation that allowed any mother of young children to be with them, to her and their content, gasped at this. Perhaps the criticism invoked was partly from shock, partly for the forensic fun involved in tearing to tatters so artless an argument, and partly from resentment that reasoning so loose and phrasing so careless should have been adopted by a civic body in whose advantages of intelligence and culture a susceptible public longs to believe.

The committee also got sorry for the single women waiting on the eligible lists and contrasted their incomeless condition with the condition of the married women with two incomes. The money the single women might earn "is necessary for the support of parents, brothers, and sisters. They have spent many years qualifying for the positions and are now confronted with the condition that those who are in possession of two incomes debar them from alleviating the sad effects of poverty and distress."

Which raises the question, What has the economic situation of the woman applying for the position to do with it? Elsewhere the Board lays down its right to the best for the classroom. Is it to jeopard that best because of a kindly disposition to make room in the wage-earning world for some struggling female? No woman of ability will use her misfortunes as a plea for economic recognition. She will not allow them to be so used. Particularly is the time

school founded by Mrs. John Franklin Johnston. Mrs. Johnston's methods. though they depart radically from most schoolroom procedures, by their

proval of great numbers of educators. She takes counsel of the mother in her and teaches other children as she would

Own

coming when the
teacher, of all
others, will be
most upright
and forthright
about this,
because the
time is com-
ing when she
will be re-
cruited wholly
from among
the highest-
grade women,
both in native
ability and in
culture. With

her heart and her mind filled with an exalted conception of her calling and its demands, it will be impossible for her to urge her own recognition for any other reason than that

think that a committee that accepts responsibility for the home welfare of the teacher's child would not draw the line at responsibility for the teacher's morals. But one member of the committee found himself in a minority when he called attention to the fact that to penalize motherhood and marriage by removing teachers for childbearing would be to encourage abnormal and immoral restrictions. They told him he was a sentimentalist. Then they passed a resolution finding the elementary teacher "guilty"-guilty of motherhood.

of her ability to do well by the classroom. There are many teachers who take that stand today. More and more women resent any false reasoning that pretends to favor them economically. Economic favor is a paradox. The law of economics is, be as good as the best or be doomed. It was not equal pay for poorer work, but equal pay for equal work that the women teachers of New York fought for and won.

Twist, turn, and argue as it might, the Board could not escape the coils in which custom, precedent, and assumption had entangled it. Absent for some physical incapacitation other than childbearing, the

In order to understand the situation better, it is well to have in mind the by-laws which guide the Board through such crises as those invoked by these two cases. One subdivision of these by-laws has a direct bearing. It interdicts the appointment of a married teacher, unless her husband be incapacitated from physical or mental disease. to earn a livelihood, or has continuously abandoned her for not less than one year prior to the date of the appointment. The Board once went even farther and made a by-law to the effect that any teacher who married was, by the act, automatically dropped from the teaching lists. It was a beautiful by-law from the viewpoint of the Board, but the civil courts upset it.

It is interesting to note that under the interdiction of appointments of married. women, the availability of a Mme. Montessori or an Ella Flagg Young for the New York schools would depend, not on the philosophy of teaching she might have evolved, not on the executive ability she might have displayed, not on the teaching record she might have made, but on whether her husband was sick, or dead, or absent. And it is also interesting to note in this connection how much of the original work done in experimental pedagogics has been done by married women. One wonders why and wondering remembers, besides Dr. Montessori and Mrs. Young, women in this country like Mrs. Cora Wilson Stewart, who, with her "moonlight schools" for grown-ups, has struck the hardest blow against illiteracy that the Kentucky mountains have had to withstand; Mrs. John Franklin Johnston, who has worked out a theory of "organic education" and is applying it in her "do-as-you-please schools" down on Mobile Bay; Mrs. Marie Turner Harvey, whose enthusiasm for the model rural school has carried her into a practical demonstration on a lonely Missouri prairie; Mrs. Josephine Preston, state superin

tendent of schools of Washington, who directs a working force of eight thousand through an elaborate program of school development and improvement-but there are too many to enumerate.

In its opposition to the married woman teacher, the Board of Education of the City of New York has been not unlike other school boards. The situation that has developed in New York may develop at almost any time in almost any state in the Union. School boards everywhere have been invested with or have assumed discretionary powers with regard to the appointment, retention, and dismissal of married women teachers. Everywhere discrimination against the mother-teacher has been based on the assumption that she neglects her classroom duties more than the childless teacher does. Everywhere there is the assumption that the teacher-mother's classroom efficiency is impaired through more absences, and more prolonged, than the childless teacher has to have. Everywhere there is the assumption that, because she leaves her wits at home with her own child, the teacher-mother's efficiency, even when she is present, is impaired to a point below the childless teacher's efficiency.

On assumption alone, the New York Board of Education was for settling this problem that involves the earning power, the professional career, and the life-happiness of nearly twenty thousand women in New York City alone, not to mention the thousands upon thousands more indirectly involved through the establishment of precedent. The only person who seemed to wish to have some facts was the minority member who had taken a stand for the mother-teacher in the committee on elementary schools. Struck early with the advantage of concluding from premises instead of premising from conclusions, he had been asking questions of the educational authorities in forty-two states. From his lists of answers one discovers that the categorical answer to the question, "In your observation, has the married woman teacher proved less efficient than the unmarried?" is "No!"

Seventeen states go on record unqualifiedly in her favor. One, Kentucky, may be counted both ways, because it says "she is not less efficient," but that experience with her has "not been altogether satisfactory"

it does not say why. Montana sends in a personal opinion, "I do not see how a married woman can attend to the duties of her