ABSTRACT
Nothing is easier in the investigation of extensive social changes than to confound cause and effect, influence and result. For the gradual emergence of a particular social form is frequently promoted and accelerated by the very conditions, whether psychological or physiological, which, after the event, it is believed to have brought about. Let any one reflect, for instance, on such apparently obvious results of the New Woman movement as the claim of sex-equality and the decline of domesticity among modern women, and consider the difficulty of determining how much of both anteceded the movement by many scores of years, and actually favored its progress.
