This suspicion will never be dissipated until parents, as well as daughters, feel the democratic impulse and recognize the social claim.
Our democracy is making inroads upon the family, the oldest of human institutions, and a claim is being advanced which in a certain sense is larger than the family claim.

The claim of the state in time of war has long been recognized, so that in its name the family has given up sons and husbands and even the fathers of little children.

If we can once see the claims of society in any such light, if its misery and need can be made clear and urged as an explicit claim, as the state urges its claims in the time of danger, then for the first time the daughter who desires to minister to that need will be recognized as acting conscientiously.
This recognition may easily come first through the emotions, and may be admitted as a response to pity and mercy long before it is formulated and perceived by the intellect.
The family as well as the state we are all called upon to maintain as the highest institutions which the race has evolved for its safeguard and protection.

But merely to preserve these institutions is not enough.
There come periods of reconstruction, during which the task is laid upon a passing generation, to enlarge the function and carry forward the ideal of a long-established institution.

There is no doubt that many women, consciously and unconsciously, are struggling with this task.