While the value of prefaces has often been seriously questioned, it would seem that the first publication of an original reference book filling a new and heretofore unoccupied field calls for some kind of an introduction to explain its reason for being, its aim and scope.
The time has long passed since an apology was necessary for the publishing of a Who's Who. The idea originated in England about sixty years ago, but was kept in aristocratic bounds until about fifteen years ago, when Douglas Sladen, an Australian writer, revised the book and extended its scope into the useful British volume we know to-day.
Meanwhile, this present writer had Americanized and democratized the idea in making the first Who's Who volume covering United States subjects. It met instant acceptance and recognition, and since that the books of that kind, which he has created, have become the most consulted books of reference in regard to contemporary American people that have ever been issued from the press.
After coming to New York and engaging as editor for two editions of a Who's Who book relating to the notables of the Empire State, this writer became convinced that there was a need for a book of that kind which would deal entirely with women, and, with the late L. R. Hamersly, began to gather data for such a book. That venture was, however, soon after abandoned and never taken up again. Two years ago this present enterprise was projected and the writer was asked to undertake its editorial direction.
To gather fresh and original data for approximately ten thousand brief biographies involves much hard work and a strenuous campaign of research and inquiry, and the volume now presented represents two years of labor.
The reasons for a Woman's Who's Who are many. The general publications of the Who's Who class give comparatively little attention to women. The one most consulted has data of a few hundred women mixed in with the biographies of about seventeen thousand men, but even of these women, outside of those engaged in literature and education, the number is almost negligible.
Women's activities have increased by leaps and bounds. There is scarcely a single field of professional or intellectual endeavor which has not been entered by women, and in which they have not made good. There are those living who can remember the first opening of the means of collegiate education to women. Now the higher education is pursued by as many women as men. Outside of the collegiate institutions, there is a vast educative force in the thousands of women's clubs, found in all the cities and most of the villages and hamlets of the country, in which women are studying literature, civics, sociology, current events, or are otherwise attaining greater light and broader culture. With education has come ambition, and thus we find womanhood asserting itself not only in those activities somewhat loosely grouped under the name of "the feminist movement," but also in competition or association with men in those avenues of endeavor formerly regarded as essentially masculine.
These activities and these movements, interesting in the mass, are the composite results of individual expression. The personalities behind them become objects of increasing interest, and it is the demand for information as to the careers of those
