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In this, though, I have changed my mind. I realize now that the demand was impossible, that it was–oh, well, you know what women are!

We have given woman social superiority; rather she has acquired it through having earned it. Shortly she will have been put on a basis of political equality with men in all the states of the Union. Now she thinks she wants economic equality. But she doesn’t; she only thinks she does. If she should get it she would refuse to abide by its natural limitations on the one side and its natural expansions for her sphere of economic development on the other. For, temperamentally, God so fashioned her that never can she altogether quit being the clinging vine and become the sturdy oak. She’ll insist on having all the prerogatives of the oak, but at the same time she will strive to retain the special considerations accorded to the vine which clings. If I know anything about her dear, wonderful, incomprehensible self, she belongs to the sex which would eat its cake and have it, too. Some men are constructed after this design. But nearly all women are.

Give her equal opportunities with men in business–put her on the same footing and pay to her the same salary that a man holding a similar job is paid. So far so good. But then, as her employer, undertake to hand out to her exactly the same treatment which the man holding a like position expects and accepts. There’s where Mr. Boss strikes a snag. The salary she will take–oh, yes–but she arrogates to herself the sweet boon of weeping when things distress her, and, when things harass her, of going off into tantrums of temper which no man in authority, however patient, would tolerate on the part of another man serving under him.

Grant to her equal powers, equal responsibilities, equal favors and a pay envelope on Saturday night containing as much money as her male co-worker receives. That is all very well; but seek, however gently, however tactfully, however diplomatically, to suggest to her that a simpler, more businesslike garb than the garb she favors would be the sane and the sensible thing for business wear in business hours. And then just see what happens.

A working woman who, through the working day, dresses in plain, neat frocks with no jangling bracelets upon her arms, no foolish furbelows at her wrists, no vain adornments about her throat, no exaggerated coiffure, is a delight to the eye and, better still, she fits the setting of her environment. Two of the most competent and dependable human beings I know are both of them women. One is the assistant editor of a weekly magazine. The other is the head of an important department in an important industry. In the evening you would never find a woman better groomed or, if the occasion demand, more ornately rigged-out than either one of these young women will be. But always, while on duty, they wear a correct and proper costume for the work they are doing, and they match the picture. These two, though, are, I think, exceptions to the rule of their sex.

Trained nurses wear the most becoming uniforms, and the most suitable, considering their calling, that were ever devised. To the best of my knowledge and belief there is no record where a marriageable male patient on the road to recovery and in that impressionable mood which accompanies the convalescence of an ordinarily healthy man, failed to fall in love with his nurse. A competent, professional nurse who has the added advantage on her side of being comely–and it is powerfully hard for her to avoid being comely in her spotless blue and starchy white–stands more chances of getting the right sort of man for a husband than any billionaire’s daughter alive.

But I sometimes wonder what weird sartorial eccentricities some of them would indulge in did not convention and the standing laws of their profession require of them that they all dress after a given pattern. And if the owners and managers of big city shops once lifted the rule prescribing certain modes for their female working staffs–if they should give their women clerks a free hand in choosing their own wardrobes for store hours–well, you know how women are!