The next step, purely a phenomenon of scientific progress, was woman's emancipation from the home. The era of electrical appliances, ingenious gadgetry, and pre-cooked foods gradually released her from confining chores with the result that she wandered into the outside world and liked it. Today women are entrenched in most fields of business and industry once dominated by men, as well as such unlikely occupations as serving on police forces, driving cabs, and bouncing unruly nightclub patrons. Where once they gamboled on the tennis courts and used bathing suits more for sunning than swimming, they now ski, bowl, shoot billiards, race autos, and win at poker. They have even entered the lively sports of wrestling, bull fighting, stunt flying, and tiger hunting. True, only a relatively small number of women engage in these last and similar activities; but neither are the occupations ordinary ones for men. The point is that women have found a place in them, not as freaks but as legitimate participants.

World War II also had a hand in leveling the sexes. It put American women in uniform and they still comprise an important part of the Armed Forces. The same emergency created a labor vacuum that drew them into most of the masculine fields they hadn't already invaded. In many instances they chose to remain, competing later with the men who came back. Others returned to their homes with typical masculine skills. The woman who had mastered intricate mechanics on an assembly line was no longer afraid of using pliers on the waffle iron or a wrench on the kitchen sink. It all took place in abnormal times, of course, but many traditions have had their beginnings in just such "temporary" arrangements.

Add to all this the progressive alterations in the American female's appearance, real and artificial. Long tresses, once the "crowning glory" of woman, have surrendered to the shears of hair stylists. Coiffures repeatedly approach the skullcap effect, until the only mode that seems left is the butch haircut. And Old World masters who once painted the female form in its natural dimensions and beauty would be numbed by the sight of the slim "boyish" hips of today's fashionable distaff.

What the girls haven't been able to change by diet and exercise they have tried to camouflage with attire. They have increased their heights with stilted heels, from time to time broadened their upper beams with shoulder pads, made jeans and slacks a standard supplement of their wardrobes. Manufacturers of women's undergarments made some headway in their admirable, if commercial, attempt to accentuate the female form with "falsies"; then along came that Parisian couturier's newest look: a chest-like flattening of the lines of the breast!

Finally I pondered the unhappy demands of modern economics. Young couples find it increasingly hard to meet the financial requirements of homemaking unless bride and groom can command separate incomes. In that event the wife learns an independence of spending that she sometimes refuses to surrender. Psychologically it has been disastrous for the male. No longer entirely dominant, no longer the sole provider in this home,* he must now share the wearing of the pants and to some degree the wearing of the apron.

Several years ago, for example, a survey showed that 25 per cent of all supermarket shoppers were men, and today the percentage no doubt is higher. Husbands who once got away with the lone womanly chore of doing the dishes are now lucky if this is only one of a dozen of their regular housekeeping responsibilities. Time sets a physical limitation on the accomplishments of

*Latest figures on percentage of housewives working range from a low of 21.3% in Salt Lake City to a bigh of 41.9% in Washington, D. C.

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