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Page 52
And yet the danger could be greatly reduced by proper education of
youth. At present we are educating 10,000,000 girls in the state schools
of America, and as many boys. They are spending eight to twelve years,
under the direction of celibate women teachers, sharpening their
intelligence. Their most important work in life is to be the making of
homes, but they are supposed to master this art through imitating the
homes in which they grow up. Many of these are unworthy of imitation,
and they are all in process of transition.
Every girl should be thoroughly trained in handling an income and in
spending money wisely. She should have a general knowledge of household
sanitation, of water-supply and sewage, of foods and their preparation.
She should know about clothes, their cost, wearing qualities and
decorative values. She should have a sense of the family and its
significance in life; of at least the social relations that husband and
wife must maintain toward each other if their partnership is to be happy
and effective. She should have the beginnings of a eugenic conscience
established in her, and she should know something of the care of
infancy. All this should be given in the school, if it is not definitely
given in the home, and no girl who goes through the eighth grade should
escape it. Before the girl is married, she should have wise counsel from
mature women who have lived and learned the art of living. Boys should,
of course, also be trained in comparable directions for this great part
of their lives.
Something is already being done in this direction through the
establishing of special courses in domestic science, and allied branches
in our schools. The fact that educational leaders are awake to the need
was shown by the applause that followed Superintendent Harvey's plea for
this training in his paper on the education of girls at the
Superintendents' Association in St. Louis in February, 1912.[58] The
leading educators of the country greeted his plea with an enthusiasm
called out by no other paper of the session.
[58] See _Report of the Department of Superintendence of the National
Education Association_, 1912.
Every woman, then, and every man, not debarred by disease or accident
and not specially dedicated to a work which precludes marriage, should
spend his life in a family group, not that the state may have more
soldiers, or factory employees, but that he may realize the deepest
significance of his life. In this life the woman should be as free as
the man, an equal financial partner, and should share in all the social
and political opportunities of the community. When she bears children,
she should have special protection, support and reverence; and support
should come from the father of her children. If he fails her, then the
group, in its capacity as a state, should care for her honorably. But to
justify this protection and reverence, she should bring to her special
functions as mother of the generations a strong body, an intelligent
mind, a eugenic conscience and an absolute devotion to the children born
of her love.
XI
Conclusion
The last two hundred years have revolutionized nearly all of our deepest
conceptions concerning the relations of human beings to religion,
government, property, and to each other. New knowledge has given us
partial control over vast forces of nature; and has so increased our
mobility as almost to free us from limitations of space. We have had
wonderful visions of the possibilities that lie in intelligent human
co�peration, and have begun to realize them in a hundred new forms. In
the midst of these compelling changes, women could no more remain
undisturbed, within the confines of kitchen and nursery, than men could
remain on their little New England farms or cobbling shoes and making
tin pans in the petty workshops of a century ago. But meantime the
special interests of women have been sadly confused because of the
larger changes in which all human relations have been involved in this
time of readjustment. Instead of talking of unquiet women to-day, we
should talk of an unquiet world.
In the midst of this confusion, most of those who have sought to secure
a truer relation of women to the life around them have worked on the
lines of minimizing sex differences. It has been felt that the
educational, industrial, social and political limitations under which
women rested were due to the desire of men to exploit them. Men, being
free, had developed for themselves an ideal world of thought and work;
and if women wished to be free and happy, they needed only to break down
the barriers separating them from this man's world.
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