privilege of merely listening to the after-dinner speakers. Something
must have happened in the course of those eight years to make such an
astounding change in the attitude of the club women.

The fact is that until the club women had been at work at practical
things for a long period of years, they did not realize the social value
of their own activities. They thought of their work as benevolent and
philanthropic. That they were performing community service, _citizens_'
service, they did not remotely dream. There is nothing surprising in
their _naïveté_. It is a fact that in this country, although every one
knows that women own property, pay taxes, successfully manage their own
business affairs, and do an astonishing amount of community work as
well, no one ever thinks of them as citizens.

American men are accustomed to women in almost all trades and
professions. It doesn't astonish a New Yorker to see a hospital
ambulance tearing down the street with a white-clad woman surgeon on the
back seat. A woman lawyer, architect, editor, manufacturer, excites no
particular notice. In the Western States men are beginning to elect
women county treasurers, county superintendents of schools, and in
Chicago, second largest city in the country, a Board of Education,
overwhelmingly masculine, recently appointed a woman City Superintendent
of Schools.

Yet to the vast majority of American men women do not look like
citizens.

As for the majority of American women they have always until recently
thought of themselves as a class,--a favored and protected class. They
cherished a sentimental kind of delusion that the American man was only