industrious and observant interests studies stenography and
type-writing, moves to the vicinity of offices, but is then caught up in
the life of a farmer-husband who shifts her center of activity to a farm
in Idaho where she must devote herself to entirely different activities,
form new associations, think in new terms, respond to new emotions, and
adjust herself to her farmer-husband's personality. When, after
twenty-five years, she has reared a family of children, and when
improved circumstances enable them to move up to the county seat, she
confronts many of the conditions for which she originally prepared
herself, but with farm habits, diminishing adaptability and diminishing
power of appealing to her husband. His powers are still comparatively
unimpaired, and as a dealer in farm produce or farm machinery his
interests undergo slight change. In general, it may be said that a
woman's life falls into three great periods of twenty-five years each.
The first twenty-five years of childhood and girlhood is a time of
getting ready for the puzzling combination of her personal needs as a
human being, her needs as a self-supporting social unit, and her
probabilities of matrimony. The second twenty-five years, the domestic
period of her life, is a time of adjustments as wife and mother, which
may instead prove to be a period of barren waiting, or a time of
professional and industrial self-direction and self-support. The third
twenty-five years is a time of mature and ripened powers, of lessened
romantic interests, and if the preceding period has been devoted to
husband and children, it is often a time of social detachment, of
weakened individual initiative, of old-fashioned knowledge, of
inefficiency, of premature retirement and old age.

On the moral side, as Professor Thomas has so admirably pointed
out,[15] women have evolved a morality of the person and of the family,
while men have evolved a morality of the group and of property. Since