A Chain Of Women's Hotels And Schools

THE beseeching cry for hotel accommodations for women has been heard. No longer need the feminine sex be agitated because antediluvian, curmudgeon man hotel keepers refuse lodging to ladies arriving alone in a city at night. Hotels for women, not charity homes or yet female prisons for the time being, but real hostelries, where a woman is as free as a man, are rising here and there, and the number will soon be adequate for all the need. They are places where woman is not asked by old tabbies in black mitts where she has been when she stays out later than 10 at night. Nay; she is not even asked how old she is and what church she belongs to. Woman's world does indeed move.

Without fuss and feathers or blare of trumpets. one organization of women has established throughout this Union a series of hotels for their sister women. That organization is the Young Women's Christian association, though more old women than young ones are active in its deliberations. Briefly, when two or three small Y. W. C. A. boarding houses were opened twenty-five years ago as an experiment they were conducted still on the old timey female seminary plan. It was taken for granted that a girl was a weak and depraved creature who only wanted an opportunity to break out and do something dreadful; therefore she must be kept under and every movement spied on and nosed into lest she thus break out. There were likewise always at hand ancient tabbies ready to perform this task of nosing and repression with peculiar zest.

At first, too, the general impression of these Y. W. C. A. homes was that they were to be lived in only by poor working girls of the "lower classes." Even the ladies who managed the homes sometimes looked down from the throne of their own social state upon the women that lived in the homes.

But a beginning had been made of women's work for their own sex. After that the work itself did the rest. The spirit of love and kindliness from women to women, of understanding and consequently of tolerance and liberality grew apace. At the same time the old idea of a theological charity dropped away year by year. The Y. W. C. A. homes were transformed into business enterprises, philanthropic still, but in no sense suggestive of almsgiving. Boarders' affairs ceased to be nosed into, women found they could trust women to the utmost, and the boarders began to have liberty. This naturally drew to the homes a more intelligent class of self supporting women, who could pay good prices for food and lodging.

Today there is a chain of real hotels for women from one end of this land to the other, well kept and successfully managed under the auspices of the Y. W. C. A. They are real hotels because they admit, at least transiently, all women who behave themselves. The manager of the neat and handsome house in Worcester, Mass., said to me: "

I never turn a woman away unless she is intoxicated."

Respectable women traveling alone should know that in any large city in which they arrive they have only to inquire for the Y. W. C. A. boarding house or hotel to find a place where they can be comfortably accommodated for the time provided the establishment is not already full to overflowing. The grand women of this society have in many cases started schools, which are connected with the hotels. The home in Boston conducts with great success a school of domestic service, where green girls are instructed In cookery and all other branches of housekeeping. A commercial school is also maintained. In New York and many other cities the organization conducts instruction classes.

MARY EDITH DAY.