Even that large and substantial body of well-bred, upper and middle-class women to whose dispassionate, matronly sense of the traditional proprieties this relation of status commends itself as fundamentally and eternally right-even these, whose attitude is conservative, commonly find some slight discrepancy in detail between things as they are and things as they should be in this respect.

But that less manageable body of modern women who, by force of youth, education, or temperament, are in some degree out of touch with the traditions of status received from the barbarian culture, and in whom there is, perhaps, an undue reversion to the impulse of self-expression and workmanship--these are touched with a sense of grievance too vivid to leave them at rest.
In this "New-Woman" movement--as these blind and incoherent efforts to rehabilitate the woman's pre-glacial standing have been named--there are at least two elements discernible, both of which are of an economic character.

These two elements or motives are expressed by the double watchword, "Emancipation" and "Work." Each of these words is recognized to stand for something in the way of a wide-spread sense of grievance.
The prevalence of the sentiment is recognized even by people who do not see that there is any real ground for a grievance in the situation as it stands today.

It is among the women of the well-to-do classes, in the communities which are farthest advanced in industrial development, that this sense of a grievance to be redressed is most alive and finds most frequent expression.

That is to say, in other words, there is a demand, more or less serious, for emancipation from all relation of status, tutelage, or vicarious life; and the revulsion asserts itself especially among the class of women upon whom the scheme of life handed down from the regime of status imposes with least litigation a vicarious life, and in those communities whose economic development has departed farthest from the circumstances to which this traditional scheme is adapted.