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THE OTHER day for the first time in my life I saw a woman—a most personable creature —smoking a pipe in public. She was one of a panel of speakers at a meeting, facing a large audience. At once my mind took me swiftly back to more than 50 years ago when as a lad fresh from a Victorian household I watched a woman smoking a cigarette, and realized that a new age had dawned. Somehow the two episodes are now firmly placed in the puppetshow of my memory. They signify in vivid folklore fashion how far women have traveled in what is called their emancipation. Reflecting on the event, I realized once again how history is written in terms of the commonplace and not in dates and dynasties. At the same time, for no particular reason, I began thinking of the status of women a century ago, and