virtue, shall not fall into the easy temptation of letting the ordinary
ones slip through his fingers.

This instinct to conserve the old standards, combined with a distrust of
the new standard, is a constant difficulty in the way of those
experiments and advances depending upon the initiative of women, both
because women are the more sensitive to the individual and family
claims, and because their training has tended to make them content with
the response to these claims alone.

There is no doubt that, in the effort to sustain the moral energy
necessary to work out a more satisfactory social relation, the
individual often sacrifices the energy which should legitimately go
into the fulfilment of personal and family claims, to what he considers
the higher claim.

In considering the changes which our increasing democracy is constantly
making upon various relationships, it is impossible to ignore the filial
relation. This chapter deals with the relation between parents and their
grown-up daughters, as affording an explicit illustration of the
perplexity and mal-adjustment brought about by the various attempts of
young women to secure a more active share in the community life. We
constantly see parents very much disconcerted and perplexed in regard to
their daughters when these daughters undertake work lying quite outside
of traditional and family interests. These parents insist that the girl
is carried away by a foolish enthusiasm, that she is in search of a
career, that she is restless and does not know what she wants. They will
give any reason, almost, rather than the recognition of a genuine and
dignified claim. Possibly all this is due to the fact that for so many
hundreds of years women have had no larger interests, no participation