LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
 
 i 
 
 ©|ap + itt yijrigl jl Ifs. 
 
 Shelf._..i^.lfe5l 
 : : — _ o o 
 
 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
.1 AY 19 
 
THE 
 
 FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN, 
 
 /' 
 
 By HELEN EKIN STARRETT; 
 
 MEN, WOMEN, AND MONEY 
 
 By FRANCES EKIN ALLISON. 
 
 1 
 
 1 
 
 
 CHICAGO: 
 JANSEN, McCLURG, AND COMPANY. 
 
 1885. 
 
 B 
 
 Ay 
 

 h^ 
 
 Copyright 
 
 By JANSEN, McCLURG, AND CO.. 
 
 A.D. 1885. 
 
TO THE MEMORY OF 
 
 OUE FATHEE, 
 
 THE LATE REV. JOHN EKIN, D.D., 
 
 WHO, MORE THAN A QUARTER OF A CENTURY AGO, LOOKING 
 UPON HIS FAMILY OF FIVE DAUGHTERS, THOUGHT 
 OUT, FAR IN ADVANCE OF HIS CONTEMPO- 
 RARIES, ALL THE CONCLUSIONS EM- 
 BODIED IN THESE ESSAYS, 
 
 THEY ARE AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED BY 
 
 HIS DAUGHTERS. 
 
THE 
 
 Future of Educated Women. 
 
 During the year 1878 there appeared in that 
 highly esteemed English periodical, The Nineteenth 
 Century, two notable articles written by two repre- 
 sentative English women, Mrs. Sutherland Orr, and 
 Mrs. Milicent Garrett Fawcett, wife of the eminent 
 Prof. Fawcett, which were, apparently, a summing 
 up of all that is to be said pro and con on that 
 subject which, as Mrs. Fawcett says, for want of a 
 better name, is called "The Woman Question." 
 The article by Mrs. Sutherland Orr entitled "The 
 Future of English Women" was republished by 
 the Appletons in the final issue of their supple- 
 ment to the Popular Science Monthly. Mrs. Faw- 
 cett' s article in reply to Mrs. Orr has never, I be- 
 lieve, been republished in this country, but both 
 articles attracted very wide attention at the time 
 and excited much comment both among Eng- 
 lish and American readers. Ever since their ap- 
 pearance I have expected that some student of 
 sociology and observer of the evolution of society 
 
2 THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 
 
 would take up and point out more fully the funda- 
 mental weakness of the first article on the Future 
 of English Women, and also add somewhat to the 
 reply of Mrs. Fawcett. No such attempt, in so 
 far as I know, has yet been made; and believing 
 that in reality the vitalest reason of "the move- 
 ment" has not yet been fully set forth nor its most 
 important consequences foreseen or predicted, I 
 bring my contribution of observation, experience 
 and conviction towards the farther solution of the 
 problem. That it is one of the most important 
 problems engaging the attention of thoughtful men 
 and women cannot be doubted, involving as it does 
 the right adjustment of the complex relations of 
 women to social and domestic life and the compen- 
 satory employments of civilized society. 
 
 The article on the Future of English Women by 
 Mrs. Sutherland Orr purports to be a calm, dispas- 
 sionate, philosophical consideration of the certain 
 results of what she is pleased to call "female eman- 
 cipation ;" this being accomplished as she avers by 
 the full admission of women to the medical pro 
 fession. She says, and truly: 
 
 "When once the medical profession has been 
 thrown open to women the question of sexual dis- 
 abilities is at an end. The line which may still be 
 drawn between the female doctor whose functions 
 
THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 3 
 
 are exercised in the sick room and the woman 
 whose professional arena would be the ehurch, 
 the law-court or the chamber of legislation, holds 
 good in theory but will be found to be non-existent 
 in practice. The suffrage may be withheld and if 
 so there will be no female members in Parliament, 
 and, what is more to the immediate point, no direct 
 female influence in political life. But whether 
 politically represented or not, the destiny of wo- 
 men will be the same. They will triumph by rea- 
 son of their social independence, which will be an 
 indirect political power. Directly or indirectly, 
 actually or potentially, for good or for evil, the 
 battle for female emancipation will have been won." 
 The whole drift of Mrs. Orr's long and carefully 
 considered article is to prove that it will be for evil. 
 She very candidly admits that up to a certain 
 point the movement for the emancipation of women 
 has been a beneficent one ; she admits that thus far 
 it has borne excellent fruit in the elevation of the 
 character and intelligence of women; in enlarging 
 the scope of their vision; in increasing their self- 
 respect; and as a consequence commanding for them 
 the increasing respect of men. Nevertheless she 
 deplores that the leaders cannot be induced to call 
 a halt; she laments that they do not see that they 
 have gone far enough; she wishes they could be in- 
 duced to stay the rising tide of progress and say, 
 'thus far and no farther;' for in her opinion, car- 
 
4 THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 
 
 ried to its logical conclusion, it will result in the 
 utter decomposition of society. "Admitting," she 
 says, "that women will achieve all that it is prophe- 
 sied they will be able to achieve when all the occu- 
 pations of life, all avenues to profitable employment, 
 all the learned professions are as free to them as to 
 men, and are carried on indifferently by men or 
 women, the ultimate result will be, they will not be 
 superior women, they will only be inferior men;" 
 and she adds: "The one fatal result of female 
 emancipation is this: that in its full and final 
 attainment not only the power of love in women, 
 but for either sex its possibility will have passed 
 away." 
 
 So extravagant a statement, and one so utterly 
 unsupported by proofs might well be passed by 
 with a mere smile but for the fact that it finds op- 
 portunity for utterance in a publication of such 
 high authority as The Nineteenth Century, and 
 also calls forth a careful reply from Mrs. Fawcett, 
 a lady equally eminent with her husband as a stu- 
 dent of socidl and political economy. Mrs. Fawcett 
 very properly refutes this statement by a cita- 
 tion of facts. Resorting, as all students of so- 
 cial science should, to the scientific method of 
 proof or disproof, she cites the case of the large 
 class of women in England from which female 
 
THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 5 
 
 servants are drawn. She says that practically these 
 women are in this condition of emancipation so 
 dreaded by Mrs. Orr. They work independently 
 for a livelihood from their early youth; they are at 
 an early age their own mistresses; they earn and 
 control their own money; there is no pressure of 
 any kind, either social or otherwise, put upon them 
 to marry; they do, in many cases, hard muscular 
 work, and yet they love and are loved, desire mates 
 and are sought in marriage, marry and bear chil- 
 dren just as do the women of even the most favored 
 and protected classes, and she does not perceive 
 that their natural instincts and affections are a whit 
 less susceptible, or that they are any less faithful 
 and tender in all the domestic relations of life on 
 account of their independent and self-supporting 
 lives. 
 
 But though this illustration may satisfactorily dis- 
 prove this sweeping statement of Mrs. Orr's, we 
 are yet obliged to admit that many of the most 
 candid and just thinkers upon this subject, both 
 men and women, among those who have the 
 very best interests of humanity deeply at heart, 
 feel many misgivings as to the ultimate result of 
 the general entrance of women into all depart- 
 ments of the activities of life. Many yield the as- 
 sent of reason but withhold the assent of feeling. 
 
6 THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 
 
 Their heads are convinced but their hearts shrink 
 from accepting the life of a worker as the best life 
 for woman. They perceive the necessities that 
 compel women to go out into the world to do battle 
 for themselves and earn their living; they depre- 
 cate the injustice that would add a single feather 
 to the weight which they may carry or the disad- 
 vantages they may labor under on account of their 
 sex; with the true chivalry of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury they say, "Make the crooked places straight 
 and the rough places plain for these tender feet 
 which must perforce walk alone over the difficult 
 paths of life;" but they inwardly feel, "Oh, that 
 such necessity might not be laid upon them." They 
 regard the necessity simply as the result of an 
 abnormal condition of society, and the money- 
 making efforts of women only as an acceptance of 
 the lesser evil. In their hearts they would prob- 
 ably coincide with Mrs. Orr in her statement that 
 "We can think awa^ the woman question simply 
 by imagining the proportion of our marrying men 
 to be as great as it once was." That is, if there 
 were but a good husband for every woman there 
 would be no such thing as "The Woman Move- 
 ment." 
 
 And the advocates of the emancipation of wo- 
 men and of such a training and education for them 
 
THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 7 
 
 as shall fit them for all the activities of life, for 
 self-support and for independence of men, in so far 
 as supporting themselves is concerned, and of giving 
 into their hands that power which helps to mould 
 and compel society through possession of a voice in 
 making its laws, occupy an inherently weak posi- 
 tion if they argue for all these things only on the 
 ground that they are necessary in order to protect 
 women from the emergencies, the catastrophies, 
 the abnormal conditions of life. Their opponents 
 might very justly reply, "It is our duty, not to adapt 
 and prepare women for abnormal conditions, but 
 rather to work for such a re-organization of society 
 as shall cause the abnormal conditions to disappear. 
 The normal condition of woman is that of wife and 
 mother; and the urging of women to independent 
 careers and their education for and entrance upon 
 money-making professions tends directly to the ex- 
 tension and perpetuation of an abnormal condition 
 of society, and is therefore in direct opposition to 
 the laws of nature, and to the highest and best so- 
 cial life." 
 
 But let us go a little farther back and see if it is 
 not really a natural law, and not an external neces- 
 sity that is at the bottom of this movement; and if 
 so let us not conclude that nature is no longer to be 
 trusted. Let us see if there are not immutable 
 
8 THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 
 
 laws at work in the evolution of organized society, 
 just as we have learned there are in the evolution 
 of organized life, which shall enable us rightly to 
 interpret this "woman movement" and solve our per- 
 plexities as to its ultimate beneficent results. The 
 environment of woman has changed entirely with 
 the progress of civilization. The law of organic life is 
 that the individual and the species constantly adapt 
 themselves to their environment. May it not be that 
 this law of adaptation is so mightily at work in a plas- 
 tic social condition that the changes effected by it 
 are constantly apparent to the most casual observer ? 
 If there is a natural law of adaptation at work at- 
 tempting to harmonize woman's nature with pro- 
 gressing and chariging intellectual and social con- 
 ditions let us learn if possible what it is. Let us 
 see if a study of the nature of woman and of the 
 conditions necessary to her well-being and happi- 
 ness as an intellectually and morally developed 
 being will not furnish us with a clue to the harmon- 
 izing of the apparently conflicting demands of life 
 upon her. 
 
 First then we note that modern civilization has 
 educated woman. All her natural and mental fac- 
 ulties have been permitted to expand, and have been 
 cultivated and stimulated to active growth. Now, 
 the first and the necessary immediate effect of the 
 
THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 9 
 
 development of the natural faculties is a desire to 
 use them. This is an immutable law of all life. 
 Teach a child to read and a thirst for reading is de- 
 veloped ; teach it to draw and it will seek gratifica- 
 tion in representing objects on paper or canvas; 
 teach it music and it will wish to sing or play upon 
 an instrument; develop a love of knowledge and you 
 have set in play forces and desires which nothing 
 but death can still. Cultivate any or all of the nat- 
 ural faculties and at the same time is developed a 
 wish for power and opportunity to use or express 
 those faculties. It was the remark of a noble wo- 
 man who had observed much of life and pondered 
 long on the defective conditions and suppressive lim- 
 itations of womanhood, and who was a most earnest 
 student of the causes of the agitated and unrestful 
 spirit of the social and domestic life of to-day, that 
 "what wonian needs is opportunity for expression" 
 No sage could more perfectly formulate the natural 
 and rational demands of her being; nor can speech, 
 it may be added, embody more correctly and epi- 
 grammatically the true spirit of the woman move- 
 ment. 
 
 What woman needs is opportunity for expression. 
 This we recognize both as a great philosophical and 
 great practical truth. It is the truth concerning 
 the nature not only of women, but of every intel- 
 
10 THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 
 
 ligent, aspiring human being, man or woman. It 
 contains a statement of the true conditions for 
 the healthful development of human character for 
 usefulness and happiness. It is indeed the essen- 
 tial problem of life and happiness formulated for 
 direct and certain solution. 
 
 In the expression or exercise of our natural fac- 
 ulties we find content and happiness; in their 
 repression we realize pain and deformity. The spir- 
 itual nature is informed with a growing, living force 
 just as the physical nature is, and must have room 
 for growth and exercise under penalties correspond- 
 ing to those which result when the body is fettered 
 in growth and restrained in action. Our natural 
 faculties seek to express themselves objectively 
 in creative work. Has any one an artistic faculty ? 
 Delight and repose of spirit are found in the exer- 
 cise of that faculty in the expression of itself in mu- 
 sic, in painting, in sculpture, in literature. Has any 
 one a faculty for understanding the natural sciences ? 
 Kepose and delight of spirit are found in the study 
 and application of the principles of science. Has 
 any one a faculty for organizing, for planning, for di- 
 recting others, for acquiring property ? Eepose and 
 content and delight of spirit are found in the exer- 
 cise of such faculties. From their repression the re- 
 sult will be pain and unrest and deformity of spirit. 
 
THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 11 
 
 From our observation and study of these facts of 
 our spiritual and intellectual natures we easily ar- 
 rive at this generalization: As intelligent human 
 beings we are happy in the exercise of our natural 
 faculties through that mode of expression which is 
 correlated by a result outside of ourselves; which 
 results in something; which externalizes and em- 
 bodies inward consciousness and spiritual activity; 
 which results in achievement, in equilibration, in 
 reaction, in embodied life. Matthew Arnold says 
 in his preface to Essays In Criticism, that "it is 
 undeniable that the exercise of a creative power, 
 that a free creative activity is the true function 
 of man; it is proved to be so by man's finding in it 
 his true happiness." In this saying he has formu- 
 lated the true theory of life for all intelligent hu- 
 man beings. We are happy when we are working 
 at that which produces something ; which rewards us 
 with tangible results. One of the first things we 
 observe in the natural development of the faculties 
 of children is that they are happy when they are 
 working towards the accomplishment of a particu- 
 lar object. Whether it is in the making of a wagon 
 with spools, or a doll, or a sled, or even demolish- 
 ing some toy to see how it is made, we find that 
 we have secured a child's content and happiness so 
 long as a definite object inspires its labors. This is 
 
12 THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 
 
 a law of intellectual life and growth, and it is inhe- 
 rent in both boys and girls, in both men and wo- 
 men. We are impelled to the exercise of our fac- 
 ulties, and we want to exercise them in such a way 
 as shall embody our ideas, shall accomplish a spe- 
 cific result. When our labor accomplishes this spe- 
 cific result there is a sense of reward that is a re- 
 storer from fatigue, a real spiritual and mental as 
 well as physical nutriment and tonic. 
 
 And it is in the endeavor to conform to this 
 law of nature in the midst of changing social 
 conditions, that we find the real, vital principle of 
 the "woman movement." The education of the fac- 
 ulties of woman prompts with all the force of the 
 immutability of natural law to new forms of ex- 
 pression. There is that within woman by virtue of 
 the fact that she is a human being that constantly 
 impels her to action — to work. The nature and di- 
 rection of the activities in which she should engage 
 are clearly defined by nature. The parent who 
 has seen two beautiful infants of originally the same 
 size and bodily contour develop healthily under 
 the same regime, the one into a great muscular, 
 strong-limbed, sturdy, rough -skinned boy, the other 
 into a graceful, slender girl with round, small-boned 
 limbs, small hands and feet, and a skin of flower- 
 like delicacy and bloom, quickly and rightly con- 
 
THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 13 
 
 eludes that activities requiring great muscular 
 strength, and exposure to wind and weather are not 
 for the girl, and are for the boy.* But the wisely 
 observant parent will not conclude that the activi- 
 ties of the girl child are to be restrained in any di- 
 rections not indicated by nature. The girl will run 
 and play and use her fingers and sing and draw, and 
 her mental faculties will develop exactly as the boy's 
 faculties develop. There will be no danger of two 
 and two making five in the girl's arithmetic; her 
 constructive faculties will be the same, just as her 
 digestion is the same as her brother's, and the wise 
 parent will not attempt to create any artificial dis- 
 tinctions. As they grow up together the same law 
 will be observed to control both, namely, they will 
 be happy and contented in proportion as they find 
 satisfactory expression for their faculties. 
 
 Living in the present advanced age of the world 
 they will probably be educated in the same uni- 
 versities — certainly in the same studies. They 
 will assimilate the same truths. In the article by 
 Mrs. Sutherland Orr she says that "one of the de- 
 plorable tendencies of the times is that towards 
 educating boys and girls in the same schools to 
 
 * There are few parents in these days who will argue that the boy's 
 superior physical strength gives him any inherent right to control or 
 compel his sister, or that on account of the differences in their phys- 
 ical development her interests should be subserved to his. 
 
14 THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 
 
 think and feel alike." I should like to ask her what 
 method she would suggest by which to teach them 
 to think and feel differently. The object of thought 
 is the perception of truth; the moral nature is cul- 
 tivated that feeling may be just, humane, truth- 
 ful. Perhaps we might teach girls to think dif- 
 ferently from boys by having a different set of 
 text books for them. We might teach the girls 
 that the earth was square, and teach the boys 
 that it was round. We might teach, say, the 
 greenback theory to girls, and the hard money 
 theory to boys; we might have the girls taught 
 protectionist theories, and the boys free trade; we 
 might teach the girls pity for all suffering crea- 
 tures, and the boys vivisection; we might teach 
 girls that truth and honesty are the principal 
 things, and teach the boys that business is business, 
 and that it is impossible to tell the tiuth in tran- 
 sacting it. In no other way that I can imagine can 
 boys and girls be taught to think and feel differently 
 on subjects where truth and morality — the principal 
 things in life — are concerned. But to return. Their 
 curriculum of school studies having been completed 
 they stand side by side on commencement day with 
 their diplomas in their hands, and it is a very differ- 
 ent question that is presented to the girl from that 
 presented to the boy when it is asked "What next ?" 
 
THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 15 
 
 The question is easily answered for the boy. In 
 obedience to the law of his being he enters at once 
 upon a life of happy rewarding activity. His edu- 
 cation has but furnished him with the tools where- 
 with to carve the fortune of life. From henceforth 
 he is to know the delight of using those cultivated 
 faculties in achieving. He may do whatever he 
 finds delight in, and if he does it well, aside from 
 the pecuniary reward he secures he will also have 
 the approbation of the world. But the girl — her 
 faculties, too, are all alive and eager for expres- 
 sion — action. Shall her parents say to her: My 
 daughter your normal condition and destiny is that 
 of wife and mother. Come now and occupy your- 
 self contentedly with domestic tasks until the 
 happy youth appears who shall complete your 
 destiny. 
 
 Can two laws of nature conflict ? By the law of 
 the necessity for the expression of her faculties the 
 girl will find that the penalty of their neglect or 
 disuse is pain and discontent. She will also find 
 that to employ them without any special object in 
 view is impossible. All the so-called feminine work 
 of modern society (considered feminine because it 
 commands no pay — results in nothing permanent or 
 valuable) is vanity and vexation of spirit to the active 
 minded, rightly educated girl. She imagines how her 
 
16 THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 
 
 educated brother would feel fooling away his time in 
 the occupations allotted by society to her. Is it 
 replied that this is because she is unwomanized by 
 her education ? Will the objector take the other 
 horn of the dilemma and assert that she ought not 
 to be educated ? If so the logic must be pressed 
 to its ultimatum. Either forbid women to learn 
 the alphabet or concede all that a knowledge of the 
 alphabet implies. Either repress and root out 
 every tendency to mental growth and activity or 
 prepare to accept the results when the mental 
 faculties of women grow out into the full sunshine 
 of eternal truth. 
 
 But let us go back to nature again; let us see if she 
 does not suggest a solution to this problem. There 
 was a period in our social development when this 
 problem of finding rewarding activities for girls in 
 the home did not give trouble. It was in the days 
 of domestic manufactures. When women spun and 
 wove and made linen and starch and soap and 
 candles and cheese and the clothes both for them- 
 selves and the men of the family they really had 
 stimulating, happifying and rewarding occupation. 
 Why? Because the results of their labors were 
 tangible. They were the outward and visible re- 
 sults of an inward living activity. It is often com- 
 plained that our industrious grandmothers were far 
 
THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN, 17 
 
 happier and more contented than their luxurious 
 and cultivated granddaughters. So they were. 
 Well they might be. They found ready to their 
 hands rewarding, productive industries. In their 
 great rolls of cloth which their hands had spun and 
 woven, in their stacks of home-made blankets and 
 quilts, in the innumerable articles of use of domes- 
 tic manufacture in their homes they had something 
 to show, and the inspiring correlative of their work 
 was tangible wealth. 
 
 Through no fault of women, but in consequence 
 of the working of the great central law of modern 
 civilization, the organization and division of labor, 
 and in consequence of the introduction and perfec- 
 tion of machinery, all domestic manufactures that 
 are productive have been removed from the home 
 to the manufactory. The occupations of the home 
 now, with the exception of the care of children, 
 consist mainly in repairing the ravages of daily 
 life. Woman no longer finds in the home the cor- 
 relative of her powers and faculties in rewarding, 
 stimulating, wealth-producing work. Can she 
 adjust the balances of her life, can she find the 
 proper equilibration of her powers without it? Or 
 shall she go outside of the home to seek it ? We 
 shall soon find that we are going in direct opposi- 
 tion to nature's laws if we accept inaction, stag- 
 
18 THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 
 
 nation or even mere occupation as the necessary 
 alternative. By the unhappiness and ennui she in- 
 flicts, nature will do all she can to compel us to find 
 another way. it will be a new phase of the old 
 struggle of the organism with the environment. 
 
 What then is the impelling power that causes an 
 educated womanhood everywhere to seek for more 
 opportunities for the expression of educated facul- 
 ties and for a greater share in the true work of the 
 world? Why are women organiziDg in every little 
 town and hamlet their clubs for social, literary and 
 benevolent purposes? Why are they interesting 
 themselves in school systems and benevolent institu- 
 tions and asking that their work and influence may 
 be utilized in the boards that control these institu- 
 tions? Why are they seeking to obtain an inde- 
 pendent share in the pecuniary interests of the 
 world ? Why, indeed, are they declaring that they 
 want a voice in the choosing of law- makers, and also 
 that women should have a share in administering the 
 government ? Why do they ask that every profes- 
 sion and every avocation of life be freely opened 
 to them? It is because they feel the impulsion 
 of that immutable law of growth which demands 
 scope for development. The walls of the individual 
 home can no more afford sufficient scope for action 
 for the expanding and growing powers of women 
 
THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 19 
 
 than the bulb can contain the hyacinth when it feels 
 the impulse of the spring. It is not simply in 
 order that they may be able to defend themselves 
 against the necessities and the emergencies of life, 
 that this wider scope for action is required; for it 
 would not mend the matter or solve the problem 
 were every educated woman fully defended pecuni- 
 arily from all the adversities of life. Woman's ex- 
 panding powers would still demand for their satisfac- 
 tion, work — rewarding ivork. This is still the in- 
 satiable demand of the immortal spirit as it ex- 
 pands and unfolds through intellectual develop- 
 ment. Rewarding activity is the only content; it 
 is the only condition in which is possible true re- 
 pose of spirit. 
 
 Recognizing, then, the necessity that exists from 
 the very nature of things that educated young wo- 
 men shall find worthy occupation for their time and 
 talents, — not merely because a necessity exists or 
 may some time be laid upon them to earn their own 
 living; not merely because they are disposed to be 
 "strong-minded," and to "think and feel like men" 
 in the sense that Mrs. Orr means, but because 
 their right relation to life demands scope for 
 their intellectual energies and mental and bod- 
 ily activities, and because their happiness re- 
 quires work that commands some commensurate 
 
20 THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 
 
 reward — the most important problem that presents 
 itself to parents of the educated young women 
 of to-day is that of suitable and satisfying and 
 rewarding occupations for them. Society has al- 
 ready advanced far enough on this subject to 
 recognize the fact that the parents of any young 
 woman who during her school years develops a 
 special talent for some of the higher forms of 
 work, as literature, music, painting, or who feels 
 drawn towards teaching in its higher departments 
 as a congenial work, are fortunate. In our country 
 at least it is most honorable for educated young 
 women, the daughters of parents in comfortable 
 or even wealthy circumstances, to devote themselves 
 to remunerative work in any of these higher de- 
 partments of labor. The problem of life is in the 
 main solved for them, as it is for any human being 
 when a congenial life-work is found. As Carlyle 
 impressively says, "There is a perennial nobleness 
 and even sacredness in work .... The whole soul of 
 a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the 
 instant he sets himself to work .... Destiny has on 
 the whole no other way of cultivating us. A form- 
 less chaos, once set it revolving, grows round and 
 even rounder, ranges itself by mere force of gravity 
 into strata, spherical courses; is no longer chaos but 
 a round compacted world." And again he says, 
 
THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 21 
 
 "Blessed is he who has found his work, let him ask 
 no other blessedness .... Labour is life : from the 
 inmost heart of the Worker rises his God-given 
 Force, the sacred celestial Life-essence breathed 
 into him by Almighty God; from his inmost heart 
 awakens him to all nobleness, — to all knowledge, 
 'self-knowledge' and much else, so soon as work 
 fitly begins." But even Carlyle failed to recog- 
 nize the fact that this grand fundamental truth 
 which he announced applied to women as well as 
 men. * This is the truth that society is just wak- 
 ing up to perceive; this is the natural law whose 
 manifestations are so perplexing and bewildering 
 to thousands of good people of the present age and 
 generation. To this law all normal, social and do- 
 mestic life must and will yet adjust itself. 
 
 But outside of these higher occupations; outside 
 of cases of exceptional talent and adaptability to 
 special high pursuits, where are we to find scope for 
 the activities of educated young women in the or- 
 dinary walks of life? 
 
 * Since this paper was written the publication of Carlyle's Reminis- 
 cences and of the Life and Letters of Mrs Carlyle have given the 
 world an insight in to the heartworkings of that home which ought to 
 have been one of the happiest, but was not. But how suggestive of 
 one of the main causes of that unhappiness is this extract from one of 
 Mrs. Carlyle's letters: "To be sure, it is hard on flesh and blood 
 when one has nothing to keep one at home, to sit down in honest life- 
 weariness and look oat into unmitigated zero; but, perhaps, it would 
 oe a great advantage just to go ahead in that; the bare-faced indigence 
 of such a state might drive one, like the piper's cow, to 'consider,' 
 and who knows but in considering long enough one might discover 
 what one has wanted— an essential preliminary to getting it." 
 
22 THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 
 
 It would be well to digress a moment here to 
 mark the strong emphasis which belongs to this 
 question. Especially do I wish that I could 
 gain the ear of fathers upon this point. Men are 
 so apt, in the pressure of business and their own 
 affairs, to forget women. They say, in a kind of 
 general way, "Oh, we don't want women to work; 
 it is our duty and pleasure to support them, and to 
 guard them against the necessity of engaging in 
 anything but domestic occupations. Do let them 
 be quiet and contented, and for heaven's sake let 
 them be domestic. We will give them everything 
 they want if they will only not be progressive and 
 strong-minded." And then they go off to their 
 daily occupations and engage in them with the zest 
 that comes from remunerative work, and their ed- 
 ucated daughters seek in vain for some mode of 
 satisfactory expression for their cultivated faculties 
 in the home. There is no longer any rewarding 
 occupation there. There is no work to be accom- 
 plished, nothing to show as the worthy correlative of 
 educated powers and cultivated, active minds. Do 
 men have any idea of the dreadful ennui that con- 
 sumes thousands of well-educated, bright, aspiring 
 girls in thousands of comfortable homes ? "What 
 shall I do, papa ?" was the weary question of one 
 of these. "Do, my dear! do — do? Well, suppose 
 
THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 23 
 
 you do me a worsted dog on a pair of slippers." It 
 is this lack of satisfying and productive occupation in 
 the home, brought about by the inevitable progress 
 of industrial organization, that has given rise to 
 what a satirical writer has called the decorative art 
 craze. If women could not do anything else that 
 was satisfactory, they could at least decorate their 
 homes. This is all very well as far as it goes, and 
 if not carried too far; but many a house, with its 
 wilderness of useless bric-a-brac, tidies, ornamented 
 paper-holders and shoe- bags, embroidered rugs and 
 stools, which men stumble over and then mutter 
 words not meant for polite ears, is a pathetic ap- 
 peal for something to do for the daughters of the 
 household. "Something to do, something to do," 
 is still the insatiable cry of the active, growing child, 
 who, in uttering it, express es one of the immutable 
 laws of being. It is still the insatiable demand of 
 the immortal spirit as it expands and unfolds 
 through intellectual development. 
 
 Difficult as is at present the problem of suitable 
 and remunerative employment for educated women, 
 it is one that is constantly growing easier of solu- 
 tion because of the rapid changes which are taking 
 place in the modes of domestic and social life owing 
 to the wonderful effects wrought by the industrial 
 organization of society. Hitherto it has been the 
 
24 THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 
 
 fashion to insist upon, as of paramount importance, 
 the domestic training of girls, but this has in a 
 large measure lost its meaning since the organiza- 
 tion of labor and the introduction of machinery 
 has so nearly removed from the home all the arts 
 of domestic production. And he is a superficial 
 observer of the signs of the times who does not 
 perceive that it will not be long until all the re- 
 maining domestic arts will follow those already de- 
 parted out of the home. Even cooking will ere long 
 become in cities and villages an outside organized in- 
 dustry just as laundry work and clothes-making have 
 become. Institutions specially planned for the pur- 
 pose will in the near future send us our appetizing 
 ready- cooked meals promptly into our houses, and the 
 perplexing servant question in the home will in the 
 main be solved by the removal of all the unpleasant 
 drudgery by outside industrial organization. We 
 will then need in our homes only helpers in the 
 care and training of our children, and these may 
 be educated, refined, companionable young women. 
 In the almost entire removal of this general 
 mass and muss of disorganized housework from our 
 homes, one of the greatest difficulties in the way of 
 specializing and thus rendering effective and remun- 
 erative the work of educated women will be re- 
 moved. Every daughter in the home can feel free 
 
THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 25 
 
 to select and follow some special occupation — in 
 fact will feel that this is the proper thing to do 
 just as do her brothers. What such occupations 
 shall be, time will more fully develop. A great 
 many pleasant and remunerative occupations are 
 now open to women, and more will constantly open 
 as girls more generally undertake to follow them 
 and as the conditioDs of home and social life favor 
 their entrance into them. 
 
 And in the outside organized work of the world 
 all the lighter and more delicate departments of 
 manufacturing will in time be given over to women; 
 clerical work, the great departments of distributive 
 production, including the selling of goods, book- 
 keeping, etc., will more and more give employment 
 to educated young women."* Here let me digress to 
 say a word as to what I consider the true chivalry 
 of the nineteenth century. We sometimes hear 
 
 * To those parents who shrink, as doubtless many do, at the thought 
 of their daughters going out from the refined and protecting surround- 
 ings of the home to engage in wage-earning occupations there is en- 
 couragement in observing how the surroundings of labor, especially 
 in the great departments of manufacturing and distributing produc- 
 tion, are being improved and made even beautiful and elegant by our 
 great commercial princes. In Boston, in New York, in Chicago, there 
 are establishments where hundreds of girls and women are employed 
 under such conditions and with such surroundings of convenience and 
 elegance as ensure health and comfort. The increase of the number 
 of great buildings specially planned for the admission of air and light, 
 with elevators and fire-escapes, with appointments for the comfort of 
 those employed in them as elegant as in first-class hotels, is one of the 
 best signs of the approaching paradise of labor where our daughters 
 shall follow special occupations under desirable conditions and with 
 refined surroundings. Alas that for so many of the uneducated, un- 
 cared for classes of women-workers the exact reverse now obtains! 
 
26 THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 
 
 people sigh for the chivalric age when beautiful 
 maidens lived in castles and their brave knights 
 thought it their highest pleasure and honor to de- 
 fend them from robbers and wild beasts and the 
 shocks of war. That age has passed away; there 
 are no longer great forests in which bandits and 
 robbers and wild beasts prowl and hide. Woman's 
 life and honor and happiness are no longer endang- 
 ered by these; but they are endangered by subtlei' 
 foes from which only her own hand can defend her. 
 Lack of employment, lack of power, lack of oppor- 
 tunity, lack of education, a feeble physical devel- 
 opment — these are the foes of womanhood in this 
 age of the world/ He is the true knight errant who,' 
 says to woman: "Here is an easy place where you 
 can earn independence and comfort; take it and I 
 will get out and hunt me a harder place which you 
 cannot fill." He is the truly chivalric man who 
 says: "Here! there are thousands of refined and 
 educated women who want remunerative work — 
 who are endangered by lack of it. Clear out these 
 offices; remove those spittoons; carpet these floors; 
 stop swearing and talking roughly; bring in these 
 fair women and give them a chance — an equal 
 chance with ourselves at the work of the world." 
 And as for the man who in addition to all this says: 
 "and we will give them equal pay for equal work," 
 
THE FUTURE OP EDUCATED WOMEN. 27 
 
 he is the noblest knight errant of them all, for he 
 thus expresses and illustrates the noblest human 
 virtue, Justice. 
 
 We will hope and expect however that our edu- 
 cated daughters, many of them, will open up new 
 avenues for themselves and achieve great things. 
 Here allow me to remark that I have as I believe 
 arrived at a correct definition of a feminine occu- 
 pation — or at least of what has hitherto been re- 
 garded by the world as a proper feminine occupa- 
 tion. It has been said that women cannot general- 
 ize — or rather that they generalize from one fact. 
 As the result of one of my first attempts at gener- 
 alization I would define a feminine occupation to 
 be one that is not organized and that has no money 
 in it. Take for instance washing and ironing! 
 Although the very hardest kind of work with the 
 very poorest kind of pay, so long as it is done by 
 women singly and alone it is a strictly feminine occu- 
 pation. Get up a steam laundry, organize the work 
 and do it so as to make money by it and it becomes 
 an honorable masculine occupation, and, as I have 
 before remarked, in large cities laundry work is 
 passing largely into the hands of men, where, 
 doubtless, it properly belongs. Spinning and weav- 
 ing were feminine occupations until the power loom 
 was invented and cloth woven by the million yards, 
 
28 THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 
 
 when it at once became an honorable and desirable 
 masculice occupation, and not a woman ever 
 thought to quote the bible to prove that women 
 alone should use the distaff and spindle. So of 
 soap- making, starch -making, cheese-making, can- 
 dle-making, clothes-making — any occupation that 
 women ever did engage in — just as soon as it can 
 be so organized as to make money and evolve 
 power it ceases to be a feminine occupation. I am 
 sure a close scrutiny into this subject will prove 
 that hitherto whatsoever things were weak, whatso- 
 ever things were small, whatsoever places or occu- 
 pations were without, power, or influence, or pay, 
 or were disagreeable, have been considered truly 
 feminine. 
 
 A woman who has achieved great things for her- 
 self has said that she receives a thousand letters 
 every year from girls and women asking her what 
 they shall do. She says she has but one reply 
 for each and all, and that is "Thou alone canst an- 
 swer." While we should endeavor to prepare the 
 way by all means in our power for the recognition 
 of our daughters as rightful co- laborers with our 
 sons, and justly entitled to equal opportunities 
 to earn and control their wages, yet let us remem- 
 ber that if our daughters would achieve great 
 things, they must pay the price in struggle and 
 
THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 29 
 
 anxiety. Eschylus says that glories are the chil- 
 dren of hardship and God's favor. Our daughters 
 must know that no one achieves great things with- 
 out earnest, long sustained effort; that discourage- 
 ments must be bravely encountered, defeats and 
 disappointments accepted without allowing these to 
 cause them to swerve from their course if they 
 would accomplish great things. 
 
 When young women are thus prepared by a lib- 
 eral education for lives of usefulness and self-sup- 
 port we shall expect the question of their marriage 
 to be one which they shall be as free to decide 
 as are our young men. If for any reason they 
 choose to remain single the title "old maid" will not 
 have any stigma for them. It is inevitable that the 
 removal of any external pressure of necessity to mar- 
 ry for the sake of a home and a support will have a 
 tendency to elevate the standard of marriage, first 
 among women and then among men. One of the 
 greatest foes to happy marriages is the existence of 
 the mercenary spirit on the part of parents and 
 daughters. Nothing will so effectively remove it as 
 the possession by young gir!s and women of satis- 
 factory, honorable, remunerative occupations, and 
 the countenance and approbation of society in their 
 pursuit of them. We have now before us so many 
 beautiful examples of single women who live happy, 
 
30 THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 
 
 useful and independent lives in charming homes of 
 their own, and who occupy the highest social posi- 
 tion, that our educated daughters need not fear if 
 for any reason they choose in this respect to imi- 
 tate their example. Alice and Phoebe Cary, in their 
 beautiful home, once the center of one of the most 
 charming and cultivated social circles in the world, 
 Harriet Martineau, Jean Ingelow and others occur 
 to our minds as representatives of happy, honored 
 maiden life. Time would fail me to tell of Mary 
 Carpenter, Elizabeth Peabody, Florence Nightin- 
 gale, Caroline Herschel, Emily Faithful, Octavia 
 Hill, Maria Mitchell. These have all lived in faith, 
 and were persuaded that there is a high and holy call- 
 ing for women, even though they do not marry, — 
 are never wife and mother; and through faith and pa- 
 tience they have inherited the promise of old, that 
 to those who love truth and righteousness and fol- 
 low on to know the Lord there shall be given a 
 name and place better than of sons and daughters. 
 It is a very encouraging sign of the times that 
 many parents who occupy high social position 
 and have abundance of means to maintain their 
 daughters in luxury and idleness, were they so dis- 
 posed, are seriously considering the question of oc- 
 cupation for their daughters, and even taking practi- 
 cal steps towards securing it. I heard a wealthy bank- 
 
THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 31 
 
 er say, a short time since, that it was his intention as 
 soon as his daughter graduated, to take her into the 
 bank and have her thoroughly and practically in- 
 structed in bank business. I heard an eminent judge 
 declare a very few weeks ago that his two daughters 
 were to come into his law office on the completion 
 of their school education, and learn to do office 
 work. They were to be his clerks and amanuenses. 
 I was further delighted to learn that in both cases 
 these fathers expected to recognize the value of their 
 daughters' services by paying them in money. 
 
 The prejudice against the earning of money by 
 women, even among those fortunately situated in life, 
 has measurably passed away, even as has passed 
 away, or is passing away in the old world the prej- 
 udice against members of the nobility entering 
 upon commercial avocations, and as is passing away 
 the sentiment that condemned the artist or poet 
 who asked pecuniary reward for the creations of his 
 genius. Byron indignantly sent back a check to 
 his publishers when at the same time there was an 
 execution in his house for debt, but the poet Tenny- 
 son does not hesitate to make a good strong bar- 
 gain for so many pounds a line for his poetry when 
 negotiating with his publishers. And so we hope 
 the day is about past when women who do anything 
 to earn money must feel called upon to apologize 
 
32 THE FUTUKE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 
 
 for it; when the comfortably situated housekeep- 
 er who has a few boarders must feel it incum- 
 bent on her to explain that she only takes them 
 for company; or when the woman who teaches 
 music must assert that she only does it for the sake 
 of keeping up her own knowledge of the science. 
 And above all we hope the day is near at hand 
 when it will not be considered a reflection on fath- 
 er, brother or husband, that daughter, sister or 
 wife does something that is rewarded in money- 
 For money is the most wonderful and delicate in- 
 strument of power that civilization has ever pro- 
 duced. It is the agent by which we adjust our- 
 selves to life; it is the universal solvent by which 
 we transmute our labor from any one form into any 
 other form. It is the great emancipator. "When 
 labor ceased to work under the compulsion of the 
 lash and began to work for the incentive of pay, 
 the slave became the man. In this liberty to handle 
 as he pleased the money he earned, the most in- 
 spiring of human motives was presented to him. 
 All toil, even the most monotonous and disagreeable, 
 is ennobled and dignified by the money which is its 
 reward. The patient bricklayer, from early morn 
 till evening, with roughened hands and bended back 
 and grimy garments, picks up and lays down and 
 mortars his bricks, performing the same motions 
 
THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 33 
 
 endlessly over and over again. What prevents 
 him or any other routine toiler from becoming a 
 mere callous human machine ? It is the thought 
 of the money which his work will bring by which 
 this hard, monotonous toil is transmuted into food 
 and raiment and shelter, into comfort and even 
 beauty for his wife and little ones. This it is that 
 cultivates the best sentiments of humanity in his 
 heart, prevents him from becoming a clod, makes 
 a man of him. And since the progress of woman- 
 hood is in the direction of the acquisition of knowl- 
 edge, which is power ; since the one inevitable result 
 of woman's education will be desire for the exercise of 
 power, the next stage of her progress will be to 
 learn the use and value of the power and influence 
 which comes through the possession of money — all 
 the more enjoyable if this money represents work 
 done by herself — power evolved by her own life 
 forces. 
 
 Thus far I have considered the future of edu- 
 cated women in the aspect of its relation to the indi- 
 vidual only. I have endeavored to elucidate the 
 true relation to life held by women who instead of 
 "filling spheres" are spheres themselves, revolving 
 on/ their own axes, performing their own orbits. 
 Life's fairest prospect for them, however, must ever 
 be that of honored and beloved wifehood and happy 
 
34 THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 
 
 motherhood. What about their special occupations 
 then ? I hear it asked. I reply unhesitatingly that 
 in the case of a great many special occupations they 
 will probably have to cease while women are engaged 
 in the care of the infancy and youth of their children. 
 But that will not harm them. It will only leave 
 room in the world of work for those who are com- 
 ing on ready to fill their places. They will also 
 be possessed of the happy consciousness that if 
 necessity requires they can return to their spec- 
 ial occupations. They will not be oppiessed by 
 the fear that hangs like the sword of Damocles 
 over the heads of thousands of wives and mothers, 
 viz : that they may be deprived by death not only of 
 husband, but of home and support, and thrown 
 with their little ones helpless and dependent on 
 the cold charities of the world. 
 
 Several important advantages will result to edu- 
 cated women in married life from their practised 
 ability to earn money and fill important and reward- 
 ing positions in the world of work. In the first place 
 husbands and society in general will come to have 
 a more just appreciation of the value— pecuniary 
 value if you like — of a wife's work in the care of 
 her home and rearing of her family. The fact will be 
 better appreciated that when an intelligent, capable 
 labor-competent woman resigns all opportunities for 
 
THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 35 
 
 earning money, and thus independence and comfort 
 for herself, to devote all her powers and risk health 
 and even life itself for the sake of husband and 
 children, some commensurate recognition of this 
 sacrifice should be made in the partnership of the 
 home. The old fashioned idea that a wife is a de- 
 pendent, is supported, will give away to the more 
 just proposition that a wife should be regarded as 
 partner entitled to the recognition of her services 
 by sharing with her husband the control of his in- 
 come. Here I know I touch upon a delicate and 
 difficult subject, but I do not hesitate to take the re- 
 sponsibility of declaring that this matter of the 
 purse has been in times past, is now, in thousands 
 of otherwise happy homes, the source of more un- 
 happiness than good men have ever dreamed of. I 
 cannot explain my meaning in any way so well as 
 by drawing for you from life two pictures of two 
 educated women, asking which you shall choose as 
 the fairer. 
 
 Both women are young, beautiful, educated 
 talented, brilliant — the pride of their hus- 
 bands. Both are mistresses of large establishments 
 and keep numerous servants, a carriage, etc. Both 
 are the mothers of three little children. One hus- 
 band tells his wife to get everything she wants for 
 the house and herself and the children and have 
 
36 THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 
 
 the bills sent to hira monthly, and he never com- 
 plains no matter how large they are. He keeps his 
 wife supplied with a fairly generous amount of gen- 
 eral expense money, as he calls it, and occasionally 
 gives her besides twenty dollars, fifty dollars or even 
 in a special fit of generosity one hundred dollars. 
 But everything which she gets in money comes as a 
 gift from him ; it is by no means accorded to her as 
 a recognition of the faithful work she performs 
 in the conducting of their home, or of the fact that 
 she has all the care of their children. Now 
 this beautiful woman whose every want, is 
 supplied, feels that she works just as hard, 
 expends just as much strength and vitality, 
 exercises her brain forces just as much in the care 
 of their home and children as her husband does in 
 his office. In fact in this case she expends much 
 more vitality, for his business is organized and 
 runs smoothly, while hers is disorganized and runs 
 joltingly. Before her marriage as a very superior 
 musician she earned and controlled a sa^ry of two 
 thousand dollars a year. She has friends near and 
 dear who are poor. She has a widowed mother living 
 in comparative poverty; she has a young brother 
 struggling through college; she has a young sis- 
 ter with wonderful artistic tastes who needs assist- 
 ance in developing them in the shape of opportuni- 
 
THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 37 
 
 ty to study under good masters ; yet this sister who 
 is the wife of a rich man can do nothing for them 
 except she places both herself and her friends in 
 the light of beneficiaries of her husband. So very 
 often she sits in her sumptuous parlors, twisting 
 the diamond rings on her fingers, arid groans in 
 spirit to think that out of her husband's thousands 
 she cannot control or call her own five hundred 
 dollars. To be sure if she should ask him for 
 money for herself or to assist her mother or brother 
 he would probably give it — give it\ He would be 
 the benefactor and they the beneficiaries. Often is 
 the determination more than half taken to again 
 secure music pupils and have the proceeds of her 
 labor for her very own to handle and do with as 
 she pleases. 
 
 The other husband out of a generous income 
 places a certain amount to his wife's credit in bank 
 every month. When she has accumulated a con- 
 siderable amount — as she often does — he advises 
 her how to invest it in this direction and that. She 
 buys bank and railroad stock; she owns two or 
 three houses and collects the rent. She knows all 
 about notes and drafts and checks and mortgages, 
 and can calculate interest or discount. She can 
 subscribe five hundred dollars to a church or an 
 orphan aslyum; she can lend a struggling young 
 
38 THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 
 
 girl or a widowed friend a few hundred dollars. 
 She has none of that wretched feeling of being re- 
 garded as a dependent which is such a blight to the 
 lives of thousands of married women. She feels 
 that her labors in the sacred partnership of the 
 home are recognized in a tangible way, hence has 
 none of that feeling that so many housekeepers 
 have that they spend their strength in vain and 
 that their labor is for naught. And no one enjoys 
 this state of things more than her husband. He 
 often says that it is a source of constant satisfaction 
 to him that his wife has such a knowledge of busi- 
 ness that if he were called suddenly away he would 
 not fear but that she could manage all their proper- 
 ty interests. No trustees are needed to manage 
 her property (away from her) and the knowledge of 
 this fact is health to the heart of both husband 
 and wife. 
 
 My second picture illustrates the probable effect of 
 education on the married lives of our daughters when 
 as wives and mothers they give up their whole time 
 to the care of their homes and children. As the 
 majority of homes are now organized this almost 
 entire devotion of the wife's energies to the conduct 
 of the home seems necessary. It is in every case a 
 question of individual circumstances and disposi- 
 tion whether the wife shall have any other occupa- 
 
THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 39 
 
 tion. Certain it is, also, that it must be laid down as 
 an axiom around winch all true social life shall re- 
 volve that a mother's first duty is to her children. 
 That is, and will always be, an abnormal condition of 
 society which brings a pressure to bear upon moth- 
 ers to force them into money- making occupations 
 when their time is needed by their families and 
 homes. Nevertheless it is my opinion that as a 
 result of the organization of domestic labor by 
 which the most of the work of the home except 
 the care of children, will be taken out of the house 
 in cities or villages, the time is near at hand when 
 thousands of educated married women will aim to 
 have some specialty which they may still pursue 
 in their homes both as a satisfaction of their pow- 
 ers and as a means of earning money. 
 
 In homes of limited incomes I think the introduc- 
 tion of special work for the wives and mothers would 
 prove a great blessing. In defence of this opinion 
 I offer this simple illustration. We all know that 
 the wife of a man in moderate or limited circum- 
 stances, if she have a house and family, does a great 
 deal of work, and very hard work, too, besides tak- 
 ing care of her children. She cooks, she sweeps, 
 she bakes, she sews. In fact there is no more 
 common fallacy than to suppose that women who 
 are so "very domestic" as we phrase it, give unusual 
 
40 THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 
 
 care to their children; they do not, — they have not 
 the time. Their energies are mainly taxed to get 
 the household work out of the way; to have 
 breakfast, dinner and supper promptly on the 
 table; — and to their children it is — "Oh run away" 
 — "do go off" — "do keep from under my feet;" 
 and happy are you, my friends, if in homes of re 
 spectability you have never seen little children 
 die really of neglect while the busy mother's over- 
 taxed energies were all absorbed in keeping up 
 with the exacting routine of housework. I have 
 seen a little sick child, who should have had every 
 moment of its mother's attention and all her fresh- 
 est and best energies, left lying in its cradle while 
 she, poor woman, swept and cooked and worked; 
 and I have heard her wild anguish over its little 
 body when the frail life departed for want of the 
 necessary care to save it. Well, I will suppose the 
 case of the mother of a family where the husband's 
 income is so limited that the wife feels that she 
 must do all her own work including the washing 
 and ironing. To get her washing and ironing done 
 — taken clear away from the house, — will cost, say, 
 two dollars a week. Now suppose this woman was 
 an expert, say on a sewing machine or a knitting 
 machine, or in some kind of special work that 
 would command pay. Suppose that with her 
 
THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 41 
 
 house in order, her children playing about her, she 
 sits down for two or three hours a day to this spec- 
 ial work. If she did no more than pay the 
 money she earned for the laundry work she 
 hired done, who would say that this was not the 
 better way? But it is probable she would earn 
 considerably more. 
 
 This is only an illustration of a general principle 
 in regard to the work of women in the home which 
 must eventually be generally recognized in the 
 progress of education and of the organization of 
 labor. At the outset,however, one of the difficulties 
 to be met and overcome is the feeling on the part 
 of many husbands that they do not want their 
 wives to work — for money. Now this is a feeling 
 that has its root in a right sentiment, and I greatly 
 respect it, although I think that with changing so- 
 cial conditions we need also to change our opinions 
 and to beware of being governed by mere preju- 
 dice. It is a right and noble instinct that makes 
 every true man feel that he must and ought to be 
 the bread-winner for his family. Nevertheless no 
 man objects but rather prides himself on the fact 
 if he has an industrious, capable wife. If so, the 
 question simply becomes a choice of work. A man 
 who goes off to his work in the morning to remain 
 away till noon, and then till night, has no reason 
 
42 THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 
 
 for feeling happier if he knows that his wife in his 
 absence is doing some hard household work in 
 order to save money, rather than some easy special 
 work for which she receives money in return. I 
 have heard men boast of their wives' culinary ex- 
 ploits; I have seen them point with pride to the 
 immense household tasks of which they were capa- 
 ble; I have experienced far more satisfaction when 
 a gentleman in whose family I visited, showed me 
 with pride and pleasure the beautiful panel pic- 
 tures his wife painted and for which she received ten 
 dollars apiece, the occupation affording her both 
 delight and pecuniary reward. I have felt a 
 real happy inspiration in looking over a large varie- 
 ty of wood carvings done by a delicate wife, whose 
 husband also took pride and delight in her work, 
 such as I never experienced in contemplating an 
 elaborate meal cooked by an intelligent woman; 
 and I have said: all of these things are tokens of 
 an advancing civilization. 
 
 This principle holds good and becomes more and 
 more apparent as we rise from the less educated to 
 the more cultivated, capable and refined women of 
 our land. When we reach the class who are not 
 forced by necessity to endeavor to make their labor 
 productive we reach those who are impelled by the 
 inward forces, of which I spoke in the early part of 
 
THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 43 
 
 my paper, to do something, to accomplish some- 
 thing, that shall worthily correspond to their edu- 
 cated powers and faculties. Here I trust I shall 
 be pardoned for particularizing somewhat. For 
 many years, first as teacher in a large seminary and 
 afterwards in editorial work, I have been in a 
 position to learn much of the aspirations, the 
 efforts, the difficulties of educated women. I be- 
 lieve if it were generally known how many educated 
 women, married and unmarried, are now seeking 
 for opportunities to apply their cultivated 
 powers to some work that would in return 
 bring money, or in some way show a tangible, 
 practical result, all would agree with me that 
 such a general want indicates that a general 
 remedy must be near at hand. On this point I 
 speak authoritatively, for T speak what I know from 
 personal experience and observation. I am some- 
 times surprised to find how strong is the desire to do 
 something to earn money or to accomplish some 
 pecuniary object even among the wealthy,- -those 
 from whom one might suppose the idea would be 
 the farthest possible. A short time since a lovely 
 gray-haired woman, the mother of a family of sons, 
 showed me some poems and essays she had written, 
 and when I expressed pleasure at their excellence 
 and told her I thought she could get pay for them 
 
4A THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 
 
 from standard magazines, she said: "Do you think 
 so ? oh, I think it would be so delightful to earn a 
 little money." I may say that she sent the poems 
 where I advised and received a check in return 
 which seemed to delight her exceedingly. I know 
 a very accomplished and elegant lady, the daughter 
 of one senator and the wife of another, who has 
 written a very successful cook-book. It is said her 
 income from the royalty is about two thousand dol- 
 lars a year, and many are the expressions that fall from 
 the lips of her lady friends of "How fortunate she 
 is!" "How she must enjoy having an independent 
 income of her own!" "I wish I could write a cook- 
 book," etc. Let no one condemn women, and let 
 not women condemn themselves, for their earnest 
 longings to realize worthy proportional results 
 for their labors. Let them not be condemned for 
 looking beyond the walls of the home to find op- 
 portunity for securing these results. This is not 
 mere irrational discontent; rather it is the effort of 
 growth. The unrest and disquietude of spirit that 
 is so often coincident with such effort are a kind of 
 spiritual growing pains which will pass away when 
 that which fetters growth is removed. No feeling 
 is more normal, more commendable than that 
 which impels us to seek to effect results in some 
 degree commensurate with our powers, and to feel 
 
THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 45 
 
 dissatisfied and unhappy when we fail to do so. 
 I well remember the deep impression made upon 
 my mind many years ago by listening to the con- 
 versation of a highly educated and highly gifted 
 woman who had been a successful teacher before 
 her marriage, as she half humorously, half patheti- 
 cally detailed some of the experiences of her early 
 married life. What she said was in effect this: 
 "When my husband and myself settled down in 
 our cozy little home after marriage the question of 
 how I should occupy my time was a grave one. At 
 first I undertook to do my own work. I observed 
 that to get our little breakfast, wash the dishes and 
 put my house in order took about four hours of my 
 time. An equal amount of time spent in teaching 
 before my marriage earned for me seventy-five dol- 
 lars a month. I observed that to secure the result of 
 three loaves of good bread my attention 
 was kept on the stretch for about twelve 
 hours. Accustomed before my marriage to 
 methodical work and large results, the con- 
 sciousness of spending such an amount of 
 time and energy every day simply in getting three 
 meals for two people really caused the most distres- 
 sing sense of wasted and misdirected effort. I be- 
 gan to fear my teaching had rendered me undo- 
 mestic in my tastes, and yet I loved my husband 
 
46 THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 
 
 and my home. I finally solved the problem, by 
 hiring my housework done by a woman with more 
 muscle and less brains than myself, who was exces- 
 sively glad to get the work and the three dollars a 
 week I paid her for it, while I betook myself to 
 teaching private classes in literature, occupying my- 
 self just as I had done before marriage,earning there- 
 by a handsome income. I was far happier in doing 
 so and my home suffered no loss in consequence. 
 Even after my children came I found that I was 
 better in heart and richer in pocket for continuing 
 my teaching, which was both a diversion from too 
 constant household care and a source of personal 
 income which was most enjoyable." 
 
 I have said that such a general social want 
 indicates that a general remedy must be at hand. 
 In nature and in the divine economy (which 
 some call evolution) we see this constant 
 provision for the newly developing needs of the hu- 
 man race. New articles of food, new methods of 
 communication and transportation are constantly 
 being discovered as humanity needs them. Years 
 ago great alarm was expressed because it was dis- 
 covered that the whale fisheries would not much 
 longer be able to supply the demand for oil for 
 light; yet before the whale fisheries were exhausted 
 we had discovered rivers of oil in the depths of the 
 
THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 47 
 
 earth. England is occasionally agitated by the dec- 
 laration of scientists that it is but a question of 
 time till her coal-fields are exhausted; but before 
 the coals are exhausted, scientists have told us that 
 we shall get both heat and light from 
 electricity, and we are probably about to realize 
 this prediction. As the populations of the old 
 world have become too dense, ocean steamers and 
 trans-continental railways have multiplied so as to 
 meet the necessities of the people by bringing them 
 to the great fertile fields of the new world. So in 
 society. Since there is a necessity that women en- 
 gage in other work than simply the care of chil- 
 dren, and since in the rapid progress of industrial 
 organization it is evident that no other work will 
 much longer be distinctively the work of the home, 
 it is evident that we are tending to such a change 
 in social conditions as shall give to women general- 
 ly an opportunity to share in the work and wages 
 of the world, in their homes if necessary, or by a 
 different arrangement of home life permitting them 
 to leave their homes for a portion of every day to 
 engage in remunerative labor. 
 
 And this change but presages other vital, rapidly 
 approaching changes. Educate women and they 
 will wish to exercise their cultivated powers in a 
 way that will produce a commensurate result. The 
 
48 THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 
 
 readiest form which that result will take will more 
 and more be money. The control of money gives 
 power. Power is sweet to every human heart. 
 Once exercised it is never willingly relinquished by 
 any human being. Women will learn the value of 
 money and of the power which its possession gives 
 and will naturally wish to learn to take care of it. 
 This will lead them into a new domain of thought 
 and experience, for it will make them practical and 
 intelligent participants in the social economy. 
 
 Property rights are great educators. Women 
 who are as unable to see the connection between 
 individual welfare and the law making power — in 
 other words the ballot — as the common sailor is to 
 understand the. relation between compass and chro- 
 nometer and the movements of the stars — women 
 who are unaffected by any logic of argument are 
 very quickly taught by the logic of experience the 
 vital connection there is between self protection 
 on the part of property owners and the possession 
 of that little instrument which makes or unmakes 
 legislators. Women who feel the grasp of taxation, 
 or who personally experience the hurt of some un- 
 fair law, are at once led to ask the questions: Who 
 make the laws and to whom are lawmakers respon- 
 sible ? Since my money helps pay the taxes, since 
 my property is disposed of by the law, I want a 
 
THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 49 
 
 voice in saying what shall be done with the taxes, 
 and in saying who shall make laws to govern me." 
 This of course is primarily a selfish interest in the 
 law making power, but it is the first interest that 
 will be taken by the awakening mind because it 
 lies so near the individual and its connec- 
 tion is so apparent.* I have known women, who 
 scouted the idea of wanting the ballot, very quickly 
 converted to an exactly opposite opinion when the 
 question of grading streets through their property, 
 or of building a new school -house in their ward 
 brought the relation directly home to them. 
 
 It takes a higher order of comprehension, a 
 higher interest than personal selfishness to make 
 women realize and wish for the power to help in 
 forming social institutions through a voice in 
 making the laws that create and govern them. 
 That woman's mental and moral nature is develop- 
 ed to some purpose who, following her children out 
 from the hearthstone into life, longs for the power 
 to help mould the social conditions that surround 
 them. What if the mother-heart yearns over 
 the neglected children on the streets; over the 
 young men who are tempted into saloons ; over the 
 
 * In his essay on "The Progress of Culture" Emerson says: "Ob- 
 serve the marked ethical quality of the iunovations urged or adopted. 
 The very claim of woman to a political status is itself an honorable 
 testimony to the civilization which has given her a civil status new in 
 history. Now that by the increased humanity of law she controls her 
 property she inevitably takes the next step to her share in power." 
 
50 THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 
 
 crowds of young girls who labor under the most 
 unhealthful conditions; over the suffering and for- 
 gotten inmates of hospitals and insane asylums; 
 over the still more sadly forgotten inmates of 
 houses of correction and prisons; what if she feels 
 that there ought to be more of the public money 
 spent for educational and eleemosynary institutions 
 so that less would be required for the care of the 
 criminal classes ? That woman is educated to some 
 purpose who observing and thinking on these things 
 perceives that the way to render effective all these 
 hopes and wishes for the good of humanity is to 
 materialize them into effectiveness through the 
 possession of that wonderful and delicate instrument 
 of power which organizes social institutions, which 
 makes or unmakes laws, and which is even more ir- 
 resistible than the power of money. Here indeed is a 
 field of action for noble women in which they will 
 find a satisfaction in the good accomplished for hu- 
 manity far beyond that of any material reward. 
 The highest activity of which humanity is ca- 
 pable and that which brings the richest reward 
 is that of being co-worker with the Divine in mak- 
 ing better the conditions of human life. And these 
 conditions are made better or worse by human 
 agency through the exercise of that highest power, 
 the power to help make and administer the laws. 
 
THE FUTURE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 51 
 
 Here will finally be found the noblest field of ac- 
 tion for educated women. Men are the most nat- 
 ural, the most efficient money-makers of the world; 
 women are the most natural the most efficient care- 
 takers of society. Education and freedom of ac- 
 tion for women; the finding of activities which 
 shall worthily correspond to their faculties will 
 eventually give us the highest possible conditions 
 of organized social life. Fair is the prospect for 
 the future of educated women. Youth and maid- 
 enhood will be a period of happy, useful, rewarding 
 activity; marriage will be elevated to that high 
 plane where husband and wife shall each delight 
 in the other because both delight in the eternal 
 laws. The cares of maternity fulfilled, sons and 
 daughters having gone out into life for themselves, 
 the richest, the most useful period of the life of 
 the educated woman begins. I have only suggested 
 its possibilities. Shall I close with this little word 
 to my sisters, from the universal poet, Goethe ? 
 
 "Heard are the voices, 
 Heard are the sages, 
 The worlds and the ages, 
 
 'Choose well, your choice is 
 
 Brief but yet endless; 
 
 Here eyes do regard you 
 In eternity's stillness; 
 Here is all fulness, 
 Ye brave, to reward you. 
 Work and despair not.' " 
 
Men, Women and Money. 
 
 Theseus: My country shall be thine, and there thy state regal. 
 
 Hippolyta: Am I a child? Give me my own and keep for weaker 
 heads thy diadems. — Landor. 
 
 In his Spirit of the Laws Montesquieu says "The 
 possessor of property is ever possessed of power." 
 The truth would pass undisputed without high au- 
 thority. 
 
 Probably one of the very strongest forces in the 
 world's history is money. 
 
 A contempt for money is no part of the philos- 
 ophy of modern society, nor has it ever really 
 been of any society since civilization began. As 
 stored energy, as a tangible and convertible result 
 of labor, it is an ever present force, and it were as 
 sensible to entertain a contempt for electricity as 
 for money. 
 
 While the interests of men and women are so 
 closely interwoven that they might be considered 
 as the warp and woof of which society is the fin- 
 
 53 
 
54 MEN, WOMEN AND MONEY. 
 
 inished web, and while it is a futile reasoning 
 which attempts to treat them as separate races with 
 opposing interests, yet their relation to money has 
 become so individual and personal that in consider- 
 ing it we must necessarily inspect the individual 
 strands composing the fabric. 
 
 A glance at the world's history shows the co- 
 incidence of the diffusion of power with the dif- 
 fusion of property, from the time when all wealth 
 was vested in the king, and his subjects were also 
 his property, — down through the tribal and patriar- 
 chal systems and the varying stages of property 
 rights of the heads of families to the present state 
 of sole and individual property rights of men. But 
 for lack of money kings would have ruled forever; 
 and the degree in which men have been able to 
 wrest from them the right to control money has 
 measured the power which men individually and 
 collectively could control. 
 
 Hitherto men have been, and to an overwhelm- 
 ing extent still are the earners of money, the bread- 
 winners of the world, and consequently the posses- 
 sors of its wealth; while women have been the de- 
 pendent disbursers and exhibitors of that wealth. 
 Comte says: "That man should provide for woman 
 is a law of the human race ; a law connected essen- 
 tially with the domestic character of woman." 
 
MEN, WOMEN AND MONEY. 
 
 Everywhere men toil for money. In grimy mills^ 
 in dingy shops and offices, in dark mines, under 
 burning suns, on the broad prairies, on the high 
 seas, in crowded cities, in the marts of trade, in the 
 bank parlors, in the counting rooms, on the wharfs, 
 on the streets, are the anxious throngs of men toil- 
 ing for money, and if some woman, more often 
 two or three, as wife, daughter, mother, is not shar- 
 ing the gold he earns the man is not a representa- 
 tive man; it is largely true of the man of the pres- 
 ent generation that the heart has gone from his 
 work if there is no woman on whom he can spend 
 the money he has earned. 
 
 Standing on one of the great thoroughfares of 
 a great city at the hour in the evening when the 
 day's work is over and the crowds of laborers are 
 returning to their homes it will be an impressive 
 thought, as it is an undoubted fact, that of all this 
 toiling throng of men ninety- nine out of every 
 hundred have been working all day long for some 
 woman and her children. Somewhere is a home 
 which he as a man maintains, and in it a woman 
 more or less attached to him on whose needs he 
 will expend the greater part of what he has earned 
 by the sweat of his brow. 
 
 Not that we fail to note also the living stream of 
 weary women, young and old, shop girls and sewing 
 
56 MEN, WOMEN AND MONEY. 
 
 women, scrubbing women and drudges of every 
 description returning from their day's work; but 
 these women do not represent the great earning 
 power and fortune making forces of society; many 
 of them do not earn as much in a week as a labor- 
 ing man in a day; they keep from starving, and at 
 the best eke out a bare living, but they do not ac- 
 cumulate a competence, or ever even dream of a for- 
 tune. If in a year from now one of these women is in 
 better circumstances in life, with more comforts and 
 more money to spend, it will not, in nine cases out 
 of ten, be the result of her own exertions, but be- 
 cause some man has commenced to earn her living 
 for her. Not that woman has not also been the in- 
 heritor of the curse of toil with her brother; she 
 has equally the curse, but has not yet inherited with 
 him the reward of that toil. 
 
 Looking at all the departments of the world's 
 work where money is earned, it seems to be a world 
 of men. But looking where money is spent the 
 actors change and we see a world of women. 
 
 Everywhere, in the crowds of pleasure seekers at 
 home and abroad, women largely predominate with 
 men enough along to do all the hard work. Women 
 fill our excursion steamers on the great lakes, float 
 down the broad rivers and swarm at noted pleasure 
 resorts; they are the special patrons at home and 
 
MEN, WOMEN AND MONEY. 57 
 
 abroad of theatres, concerts and operas. They 
 fill our great city dry goods palaces and jewelry 
 stores, and all kinds of stores in smaller towns. 
 Everywhere that money can buy luxuries, comforts, 
 necessaries, there you find woman at her post dili- 
 gently doing her duty, spending for man the money 
 he has earned. 
 
 This has been the ancient and hereditary rela- 
 tion of woman to money since she rose from the 
 condition of being a chattel herself. Nor could it 
 be otherwise in a less advanced stage of civilization 
 than the one which is presently dawning upon us. 
 A shuddering glance backward through the world's 
 history at woman's relation to society shows that 
 relation to have been solely maternal in the bald- 
 est, most physical sense so long as man's relation 
 to it was mostly warlike. The men whom she 
 agonized to bear strew the world's battle-fields; 
 and woman, when she did not share with them the 
 horrid fortunes of war, wept unheeded over her 
 children slain. 
 
 The climax of man's brutality and woman's help- 
 lessness is recorded in the words of Napoleon to a 
 woman so late as the beginning of this century, 
 when his bloody wars had swept from France all 
 the flower of her manhood, and the conscription 
 was hurrying away to fresh slaughter regiments 
 
58 MEN, WOMEN AND MONEY. 
 
 composed of youths of seventeen: "Madame" said 
 this only recently unmasked monster, "what France 
 needs to-day, is mothers." So long as war was the 
 business of mankind it necessarily followed that 
 woman's place in the world was a subordinate and 
 degraded one; but after the fall of the Roman Em- 
 pire came the establishment of the feudal system 
 which determined the condition of society in which 
 originated any permanent property rights and, 
 through them, any stable power for women. 
 
 Man has ever had a tender heart towards his 
 daughter, and in such fashion as he could endeav- 
 ored to protect her from gross harm in a world 
 where he well knew the law of the strongest pre 
 vailed, and property in land for women in the form 
 of dower-right was speedily engrafted on the feudal 
 system. It is more than a coincidence that the 
 age of chivalry soon followed and woman ac- 
 quired an additional charm in the eyes of her lover. 
 This acquisition of property rights was a great 
 stride in the advancement of women to a more 
 equal place in the society of men. 
 
 John Stuart Mill, in his exhaustive essay on 
 the subjection of women, distiDctly states that 
 "through ail the progressive periods of human his- 
 tory the condition of women has been approaching 
 nearer equality with men;" yet he touches but 
 
MEN, WOMEN AND MONEY. 
 
 lightly on the advancing property rights and pe- 
 cuniary independence of women as an elevating 
 power, because, as he says, "institutions, books, 
 education, society, all go on training human beings 
 for the old long after the new has come, much 
 more when it is just coming;" he thus almost 
 laughably illustrates his own reiterated statement 
 of the impossibility of any man knowing what any 
 woman really thinks on most vital questions. It is 
 more than probable the wife of John Stuart Mill, 
 idolized as she was by her husband, never told him 
 how much she hated to ask him for a five pound 
 note. 
 
 The money independence of woman has been an 
 almost unnoted force in her elevation to anything 
 like equal power in the world, but it is one which 
 must precede her possession of political power as 
 surely as the blade precedes the full corn in the 
 ear. 
 
 The possibility of the development of the earning 
 power of woman has only just dawned; but the 
 alphabet of the new and higher knowledge has been 
 learned and full education must inevitably follow. 
 
 It is scarcely three generations since women, 
 with very rare exceptions, have even begun 
 to try their capacity in the quiet and easily accessi- 
 ble fields of the intellectual world, and it is only in 
 
60 MEN, WOMEN AND MONEY. 
 
 the present generation that women have developed 
 an extreme longing for independence in their re- 
 lations to money. It is in this generation that wom- 
 an stretches out her hand towards labor and its re- 
 wards. Finding that custom and the usages of 
 society have barred her from multitudes of avenues 
 of money-making enterprises, and lack of education 
 and training from many others, she has crowded 
 those where she might enter to the point of suffo- 
 cation. 
 
 It is a pitiful sight to the lover of humanity to 
 look at the records of labor during the last century, 
 the painful conditions of which still endure and 
 must endure for some time yet. Thousands of weary, 
 half -starved women have impaled their lives on the 
 point of the needle. Nor has the modern sewing 
 machine improved their condition. 
 
 The great army of women teachers we now hive 
 always with us, whose ranks are constantly crowded 
 with new recruits. The legions of shop-women come 
 and go on our streets. Many women are knocking 
 at the forbidding looking doors of the professions 
 with varying success, and thousands strive to eke 
 out a living with the pen. 
 
 Underlying all this effort is the one constant and 
 imperious longing not only for the wherewithal to 
 sustain life but also for the expression of the fun- 
 
MEN, WOMEN AND MONEY. 01 
 
 damental necessity in the lives of the cultivated 
 and educated for pecuniary independence ; while at 
 the same time the actual condition of things has 
 passed into the proverb, "Men make fortunes, 
 women make livings." 
 
 Individual property and the tangible reward in 
 dollars and cents for the work of her hands and 
 her brains has come to be the universal desire of 
 the better and more highly educated class of women; 
 and although the office of prophet is a cheap one, 
 and with little honor, it may safely be assumed 
 long enough to say that undoubtedly the superior 
 woman of the future will not be supported. 
 
 This desire of woman for independence in money 
 matters is but a natural development of her advanc- 
 ing position in society from a dependent and infer- 
 ior state of childhood and tutelage towards the 
 full stature of womanhood and equality with her 
 brother. It is a state from which he too has 
 formerly emerged, and unless woman is to remain 
 in the world of achievement where Darwin has 
 placed her in the physical, " an arrested develop- 
 ment," she must aspire to this independent posi- 
 tion. 
 
 ConcerniDg the unmarried woman, the echo of 
 the question, "Is she obliged to?" — meaning, "Can 
 not her father or her brother support her ?" — is still 
 
62 MEN, WOMEN AND MONEY. 
 
 in the ears of this generation ; and her mother still 
 thinks it necessary to say, "She don't work for 
 the money but for the pleasure of doing the work." 
 All of which is only pitiful nonsense! The pleasure 
 of earning, possessing and controlling money is one 
 which every thinking woman has long envied her 
 brother; and that she should aspire to it as soon as 
 possessed of full education follows as surely as effect 
 follows cause. 
 
 In this country, in any considerable community, 
 may be counted many men, from the millionaire 
 down to the man with a competence, who have with 
 their own hands and brains and without inherited 
 means made their fortunes ; but the only rich women 
 are the wives of such men, rich by courtesy, or the 
 widows and daughters whose husbands and fathers 
 dying left them wealth. A woman who has herself 
 made a fortune is a vara avis in any community, al- 
 though the women who support themselves are 
 legion. 
 
 Self-support is of course the first step on the 
 way to competence, and the multitude of women, 
 like the multitude of men, will never reach a higher 
 plane; but there are women who will undoubtedly 
 turn their attention to the accumulation of money; 
 who will themselves strive for a home and a com- 
 petence, and dream of a fortune. 
 
MEN, WOMEN AND MONEY. 63 
 
 No woman who has read Harriet Martineau's de- 
 scription of the joy and satisfaction with which she 
 took possession of her house and her field, earned 
 by herself, but has felt a stirring of the pulses at the 
 achievement, an answering thrill and a wish to do 
 likewise. 
 
 The home which the Gary sisters made for them- 
 selves, and from which they shed the steady light 
 of their gentle influence, shines as a star among the 
 traditions of literary New York. 
 
 Despite the modern multiplication of boarding 
 houses I cannot but believe that the love of a home is 
 inherent in woman's nature, and as inseparable from 
 it as the instinct of nest building from the nature 
 of birds. 
 
 And truly a woman advanced in life, without a 
 home and occupation, is a picture without a frame, 
 a barren fact which is lacking in the dignity of fit 
 surrounding circumstances. A home of her own is 
 what every woman craves whose original impulses are 
 not vitiated by false aims. If there is a husband in it, 
 — ah ! delightful ! but any way, at all events, a home. 
 
 In the vast and ever advancing organization of 
 industries, which is one of the phenomena of modern 
 life, homes must come to be more and more delight- 
 ful places, and the lighter and less cumbrous 
 tasks must fall to feminine hands. Whether women 
 
64 MEN, WOMEN AND MONEY. 
 
 can ever in great numbers earn more than a bare 
 living remains to be seen; but the desirableness uf 
 such a state of things cannot be questioned. It is 
 undoubtedly true that the unknown quantity in 
 every woman's life is marriage; not only in youth 
 but up to middle life. It is this which stands as a 
 barrier between her and every occupation for which 
 years of training are required. Lawyers do not 
 want clerks who may only half learn the profession. 
 Telegraph operators find it a serious objection to 
 teaching a girl that she may marry before she has 
 completed her apprenticeship; and so on through 
 all the trades and occupations in which men succeed ; 
 in fact a woman only seems to increase her chances 
 for marriage by going out into the world to make a 
 living because of the closer and more frequent re- 
 lation in which it throws her with men. Observa- 
 tion seems to show that as soon as a girl can make 
 a living for herself she is almost sure to marry. 
 Aside from other considerations marriage has been 
 the shortest way to a competence and other desira- 
 ble conditions for women. 
 
 Disraeli, in his novel of Endymion, makes one of 
 his young men wish that he were a woman in order 
 that he might cut short the weary struggles for ad- 
 vancement in the world. Speaking of the years of 
 toil which a man starting with nothing must give 
 
MEN, WOMEN AND MONEY. 65 
 
 to gain an advanced position in life he contrasts 
 them with the lot of a woman in similar circum- 
 stances who may meet a fortune and position in the 
 drawing room, sit next it once or twice at dinner 
 and the next month possess it by marriage. 
 
 It is impossible that ever such a state of society 
 should exist that it would be better on the whole for 
 a woman's happiness for her to remain unmarried. It 
 is true to-day as it always has been that no better 
 lot can come to a woman than has come if a good 
 man has loved her and she has married him. 
 
 And now the fact that the great majority of women 
 are and will always be married women brings us to a 
 consideration more especially of the present relation 
 of married women to property. 
 
 Without entering into the entangling details of 
 the laws in relation to married women and prop- 
 erty it is sufficient for our purpose to state that 
 broadly speaking, they are at present in most of 
 our states in favor of the wife in the event of the 
 death of her husband or her divorce from the mar- 
 riage relation. But during her married life she 
 occupies the same position towards her husband's 
 property as her children. 
 
 Most married women's ideas are in a state of 
 chaos on the subject of money and property rights. 
 
 Marrying young, usually at an age when men 
 
66 MEN, WOMEN AND MONEY. 
 
 could not have made any start in the direction of a 
 competence, they are generally dazzled with the 
 silly notion that all that is their husband's is theirs; 
 which is a most false and pernicious idea of which 
 every thinking woman should speedily divest herself; 
 for money is no more a condition of the atmosphere 
 between two people because they are married than 
 it is in the outside world. It is in fact a most indi- 
 vidual entity, and resides with one or the other of 
 the parties to the contrav. 
 
 Examined into she will find that, beyond purely 
 personal expenditures, her property is by all law, 
 custom and usage purely one of expectation; a 
 doleful waiting for "dead men's shoes," a property 
 of which it is a treachery to a beloved husband 
 even so much as to think; and by which, so far as 
 present control avails, she might as well try to en- 
 rich herself as by reading over the accounts of for- 
 eign specie imports. She will find herself con- 
 fronted with the perplexing paradox, that she has 
 only what money she spends, and if she saves it she 
 don't have it. Most men resent the wish in their 
 wives to have a separate purse or individual accu- 
 mulation of property as a reflection on themselves, 
 though this feeling is unreasonable and entirely 
 one of education and tradition. 
 
 As culture advances this position of married 
 
MEN, WOMEN AND MONEY. 67 
 
 women toward the purse becomes more and more 
 irksome. Admitting that in the ideally perfect 
 marriage the question of money is no question, 
 yet, as a wide observer of married life has said, 
 most marriages are fragmentary, and since it is so 
 it is idle to expect ideal results from imperfect con- 
 ditions. In this direction of the money question 
 lies a vast, undiscovered domain of sensitive and 
 refined misery among otherwise happily married 
 women. 
 
 Montesquieu says: "The community of goods .... 
 between husband and wife is extremely well 
 adapted to a monarchical government because 
 women are thereby interested in domestic affairs and 
 compelled as it were to take care of their families. 
 
 It is less so in a republic As women are in a 
 
 state that furnishes sufficient inducements to them 
 to enter into marriage the advantages which the 
 laws give them over the property of their husbands 
 are of no service to society." This was written 
 nearly three centuries ago and the "sufficient in- 
 ducement" then was woman's extreme defenseless- 
 ness. It is evident the philosopher never contem- 
 plated a state of society in which women would be 
 possessed of independent property within the mar- 
 riage relation, and consequently possessed of that 
 power which he said always belongs to property, any 
 
MEN, WOMEN AND MONEY. 
 
 more than he contemplated the existence of such a 
 republic as the United States when he says "it is 
 impossible republics can long exist except they be 
 very small." 
 
 The making of a home and the maternal func- 
 tions do not absorb all the energies of married wo- 
 men except during a portion of their lives, but 
 hitherto there has been no present money value 
 to the office" of motherhood; and the business of 
 housekeeping, beyond a maintenance, is one of the 
 unremunerative industries. 
 
 Yet mankind has ever extolled the office of the 
 wife and mother and home maker, placing her ser- 
 vices beyond price, and doubtless it is this exagger- 
 ated estimate which has silenced her when she 
 would ask for her own; but women would be much 
 happier to accept a lower estimate for the sake of 
 a more tangible reward. 
 
 A man takes care that his wife shall have her 
 own when he is no longer able to protect her, and, 
 as before stated, in the event of the death of her 
 husband the law runs in favor of the wife; but 
 dower and many life insurance policies simply 
 represent the accumulated and unpaid wages of 
 married women; property which comes to her from 
 the hand of death which she should have enjoyed 
 during her husband's life-time ; that which he should 
 
MEN, WOMEN AND MONEY. 69 
 
 have helped her to accumulate and manage as her 
 own property, and to enter into which would require 
 no process of law and ministry of sorrow. 
 
 Take an ordinary case of two young people com- 
 mencing life with a modest sum. Let years and 
 prosperity follow: at forty the husband has a home, 
 wife, children, an income, and property; his wife, 
 with the exception of the children and richer per- 
 sonal surroundings, is no better off than she was 
 twenty years ago; controls no more money, still 
 spends what her husband gives her, and is gen- 
 erally extremely ignorant on the subject of the 
 proper management of property. She is also in 
 the uncomfortable position of a person who spends 
 personally, and on whom is spent, ihe most money, 
 but who has none to command. It is the position 
 of a child and a minor from which the husband, 
 the children and the home life all suffer. 
 
 As such a woman goes on toward middle 
 life and old age the circumstances are more and 
 more depressing, resulting generally in a nar- 
 rowing of her whole nature and a painful repres- 
 sion of her best impulses. 
 
 Any changes for the better in this condition 
 of things must come, first from a changed mode 
 of thinking on the part of married women them- 
 selves on the subject of property, and than from 
 
70 MEN, WOMEN AND MONEY. 
 
 concessions to that change on the part of men. 
 
 Married women must divest themselves of the 
 childish notion that their husband's property is 
 their own. That is not property which one does not 
 control, and it needs only a little thinking to con- 
 vince a woman that only in the event of her hus- 
 band's death does she really own the vaunted and 
 traditional "one third." 
 
 Let her calmly take stock and enquire, "What 
 property have I? What do I earn? What is so in- 
 disputably my own that without any shadow of 
 wronging my husband, I might, if I saw fit, with 
 dignity bestow alms upon the beggar whom he dis- 
 likes ?" If she finds herself without either money 
 or goods, she will at least be a step in advance of 
 the fallacy of supposing she has something when 
 she has nothing. 
 
 Mill, speaking on a kindred subject, says: "There 
 are no doubt women, as there are men, whom equal- 
 ity of consideration will not satisfy; with whom 
 there is no peace while any will or wish is regarded 
 but their own. Such persons are proper subjects for 
 divorce. They are fit only to live alone, and no hu- 
 man beings ought to be compelled to associate their 
 lives with them. But legal subordination tends to 
 make such characters among women more rather 
 than less frequent. If the man exerts his whole pow- 
 
MEN, WOMEN AND MONEY. 71 
 
 er the woman is of course crushed; but if she is 
 treated with indulgence and permitted to assume 
 power there is no rule to set limits to her en- 
 croachments. The law not determining her rights, 
 but theoretically allowing her none, practically de- 
 clares that the measure of what she has a right to is 
 what she can contrive to get." 
 
 This reasoning is particularly applicable to the 
 spending of money by married women ; the amount 
 of embarrassment a silly and unscrupulous woman 
 can cause her husband is incalculable. 
 
 A woman who had nothing when she married, 
 and whose services to the married partnership have 
 not been worth her maintenance, can, if she choose, 
 embarrass a fortune which she neither earned nor 
 inherited, and to which she has no just claim. 
 
 It is a case of privileges without corresponding 
 obligations, and should give way to the individual 
 and independent ownership of property among 
 cultivated and refined people. 
 
 Mill further says: "When the support of the 
 family depends not on property but on earnings, 
 the common arrangement by which the man earns 
 the income and the wife superintends the domestic 
 expenditures seems to me in general the most suit- 
 able division of labor between two persons." 
 
 This is quite true, but there should be a money 
 
72 MEN, WOMEN AND MONEY. 
 
 value to both sides in the division of labor, and 
 that belonging to the making of a home should be 
 paid, not to the man, but to the woman individu- 
 ally. 
 
 "In an otherwise just state of things," says the 
 same writer, "it is not a desirable custom that the 
 wife should contribute by her labor to the income of 
 the family, though the power of earning is essen- 
 tial to the dignity of a woman if she have not in- 
 dependence and proper by." 
 
 But if her labor as the maker of a home receive 
 from the family income its just and due reward in 
 present possessions without waiting for the hand of 
 death to deal out to her a just portion, the making 
 of homes would rise to the highest point in the 
 scale of occupations for women. 
 
 The best interests of society demand that this 
 change shall speedily be brought about. 
 
 Marriage with the advent of children, while it 
 can never be to woman the episode merely which 
 it is to a man in his life-work, yet by no means oc- 
 cupies more than a part of her life; and as "there is 
 nothing after disease, indigence and guilt so fatal to 
 the pleasurable enjoyment of life as a want of a 
 worthy outlet for the active faculties," so to most 
 women, as to most men, the management of in- 
 dividual property interests would furnish this outlet. 
 
MEN, WOMEN AND MONEY. 
 
 "There are abundant examples of men who, after 
 a life engrossed by business, retire with a compe- 
 tency to the enjoyment, as they hope, of rest; but 
 to whom, as they are unable to acquire new interests 
 to replace the old, the change to a life of inactivity 
 brings ennui, melancholy and premature death. 
 Yet no one thinks of the parallel case of so many 
 worthy and devoted women who, having paid their 
 debt to society — having brought up a family blame- 
 lessly to manhood and womanhood, having kept 
 house as long as they had a house needing to be 
 kept— are deserted by the sole occupation for 
 which they had fitted themselves and remain with 
 undiminished activity, but with no employment for 
 it.". 
 
 As I said before, woman must work out the solu- 
 tion of this problem herself. No laws, no legisla- 
 tion can help her. 
 
 A woman who is making a home and rearing 
 children does her position great injustice in allow- 
 ing herself for a moment to think she is supported. 
 
 Beside the sentimental and affectionate partner- 
 ship in marriage there should be a money partner- 
 ship which should plainly state her individual 
 financial condition, and both husband and wife 
 should regard with favor the accumulation of her 
 individual and separate property side by side with 
 
74 MEN, WOMEN AND MONEY. 
 
 his, though perhaps and necessarily much smaller. 
 True,there would be more accounts kept, but there 
 would be more solid happiness. 
 
 If in the course of time the earning power of 
 woman shall approximate more nearly that of man, 
 and she can engraft on the occupation of marriage 
 and maternity one which shall serve her for that 
 part of her life when that occupation shall have de- 
 serted her, a state of things will arrive where a 
 mature woman can abundantly exercise the per- 
 fected powers of glorious womanhood; a state of 
 things in which property in the marriage relation 
 will be no more entangled than in any ordinary 
 business partnership between two persons; a state 
 which will lead in time to the desuetude of the 
 dower-right. 
 
 When this grand old fortress founded in the feu- 
 dal ages by mankind and strengthened by them 
 through centuries for the protection of women in 
 the marriage relation, much defaced by the con- 
 stant attacks of divorce and alimony has become 
 an unused refuge and deserted ruin, grown over 
 with the moss and ivy of tradition, that will be a 
 freer race of women who will contemplate with in- 
 terest its ancient, massive walls and deep founda- 
 tions. 
 
 Secure in the wider, nobler conditions of inde- 
 
MEN, WOMEN AND MONEY. 75 
 
 pendent womanhood she will none the less find her 
 heart most surely at rest in the sacred relationship 
 of marriage with the man of her choice; that one 
 human relationship, 
 
 — upon whose tranquil breast 
 The heads of little children may securely rest.