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251 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. vii (1947)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0251 and id is 1 raw text is: FOREWORD THIS is the third volume of THE AN- NALs devoted entirely to the subject of the position of women in American so- ciety. The first volume, issued in 1914, edited by James P. Lichtenberger, en- titled significantly Women in Public Life, was a prophetic volume. It re- flected admirably the social ferment and the intensified social consciousness regarding the inevitable enlargement of the enfranchised classes and the immi- nent tapping of new sources of social fuel. Many of the contributors to this first ANNALS volume on the subject of women perceived that the separate skirmishes being fought to abolish eco- nomic and legal disabilities and to es- tablish the principle of equality in edu- cation and political participation were all part of a larger evolutionary move- ment toward self-government.. They saw that the expansion of human inter- ests in the field of government action necessitated the inclusion within the governing brackets of those groups rep- resenting the new interests. As public health, public welfare, and public edu- cation were slowly lifted from the level of parochial to that of national concern, and the complex machinery of govern- ment was broadened to include the dis- charge of such responsibilities, they conceived that the door was opening wide through which women would march into public life. While the actual passage of the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the fran- chise was still six years in the future, this 1914 volume was filled with a sense of impending change. Objectives seemed fairly clear, and the emphasis on the vast and untried responsibilities ahead was very definite and sharp. In 1929 THE ANNALS again reviewed the position of women, with a volume entitled Women in the Modern World, edited by Viva B. Boothe. The period surveyed by this volume was looked upon as a transitional one between two eras. A new woman was visible, with new interests, new responsibilities and new ways of doing things. Areas of achievement were mapped by suc- cessive contributors; distances very measurable indeed were seen to have been traveled in the decade since women had acquired the franchise; and lines of future progress were marked out. Even making the necessary ad- justments for the somewhat oversan- guine hopes and aspirations of 1914, the way ahead appeared unobstructed, and the joy bells were still sounding in the ears of those who had won the vic- tory in 1920. Nearly two decades have passed since the 1929 volume, and almost exactly a hundred years since a little group of embattled American women first came together in a Suffrage Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, to right their collective wrongs. The struggle they launched for equality and freedom co- incided with other forces-such as ad- vancing industrialization with its with- ering effect on the family as a produc- ing and consuming unit, and the vast extension of individual interests through education and technological change- to produce a social upheaval the dust from which has not even yet begun to settle. Women find themselves today in the midst of profound social and eco- nomic changes, accelerated by World War II but in full evidence before that. They find their relationships with their fellow human beings undergoing altera- tion in innumerable ways. The time appears ripe, therefore, to make an- other systematic survey of how altera- tions in economic patterns, in social and political institutions, and, still more, in cultural mores, are affecting the lives of women. Vii

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