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143 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. vi (1929)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0143 and id is 1 raw text is: FOREWORD To AN increasing degree we are seeing today what seems to be a new woman- with new interests, new responsibilities, and new ways of doing things. What has changed and is still changing, of course, is not woman herself but her status in a rapidly developing social order, and her ways and means of securing satisfactions and making con- tributions to social life under the changed conditions in which she has to function. When the clash of opinion about the question of woman's sphere and of her activities viewed in the light of the traditional ideas about her sphere, subsides enough to permit a glimpse at the principles about whom the controversy rages, we are con- fronted with the rather simple phe- nomena of a group of human beings struggling with the age old problem of finding satisfactions for normal and universal desires and wishes under a particular set of physical and social arrangements. There is nothing new, then, in the fundamentals of the prob- lem confronting women to-day, which are the same as they have been in time past and will continue to be in the future, namely, adjustment to the world in which they live to the end that life may yield a maximum of satisfac- tion and development. Much of the confusion in thought over the vexed question of woman's sphere arises, on the one hand, because of the general tendency to view the whole range of woman's activities in the light of her child-bearing function; and, on the other, because of the fairly universal proneness to forget that ideas and institutions are products of experience and must inevitably change as experiences change if the same objec- tive is to be achieved, or if satisfactory adjustments once obtained are to be continued. To those who are accustomed to think of society in its dynamic rather than its static aspects, there is nothing surprising or unusual about the so- called woman movement; rather it appears as the normal and more or less to be expected result of the inevitable conflict that occurs when ideas and institutions originating and becoming formalized under one act of surrounding conditions are carried over into a changed setting and expected to serve as adequate standards and guides to conduct after the conditions under which they were formulated have long since ceased to exist. When it is once understood that habits of thought and institutions have a way of tending to persist long after their day of usefulness has passed, even though in time they may come to be the means of thwarting the very interests that they formerly served, what is happening in the woman movement will be recognized as a necessary revaluation of old standards and procedures as means of achieving certain ends, and not at all as a change in the ends themselves. Women are essentially the same today as they have always been (and with the developments of modern psychological knowledge may turn out to be much less different from men than was formerly supposed), and their problems are different only in the de- tails of their manifestation. To seek satisfaction and self expression in activity which is enjoyed in the pres- ence of and association with one's fellow human beings is no less a desirable pursuit for women than for men, and indeed has ever been the impelling force which has accounted for most vi

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