Clara E. Collet

“ The real work of intelligence is the induction which supplies the premisses, the selection of premisses suitable to the purpose in view and the application of the conclusion. The working of intelligence is prompted, strengthened, and directed by interest and emotion; and here it is that men and women differ, and always will differ, a woman inheriting as she does, with a woman’s nervous organization, a woman’s emotional nature. It is on this difference between men and women, amidst much which is common to both, that I build my hopes of women’s success in the future. ”

“ I am also confining my remarks to working women educated for their work in life, and am not referring to the large numbers of women who take up work without any other training than the general education acquired at school. If the woman, who from seventeen to twenty-two has been trained for her profession, cannot obtain the salary which, as Mr. Pollard has shown, is necessary to keep her in good health and provide for her old age, there is no need to say that the untrained schoolgirl enters the labour market at a greater disadvantage. Now, on what principles is a girl’s career determined? ”

“ The hardened babies who have found the day attractive enough without anybody’s hugs and kisses may perhaps find their sentimental mother’s embraces an irritating nuisance.
I see no reason for believing that either wife, husband, or children will be anything but worse off if the wife goes outside the home to earn a living; nor do I know of any skilled work for educated women, requiring daily assiduous attention for the whole day, in which maternity, or the possibility of maternity, would not be a drawback in the eyes of an experienced employer. ”

“ And here lies the great difference between men and women in the labour market. All that the average man demands is that his work should be honest and remunerative. It need not be interesting, or elevating, or heroic. Most women, on the other hand, who look forward to a long working career must have an occupation to which they can give both heart and mind. The reason is simple. The woman is living an isolated life; unless her work involves the exercise of what may be termed her maternal faculties, she is living an unnatural life. ”

“ Nor does he, if he has any sense, deliberately choose to enter an overstocked market, merely because the men who succeed in it are admitted to be men of high intelligence. If he has a high opinion of his own talents, or if he prefers shining by reflected light to earning an income, he does perhaps become a barrister or a doctor, without much fitness for the profession. But at least those who take up business prefer to enter a labour market where there are comparatively few men of ability yet to be found, and where the supply of them is not so great as the demand. ”

“ Think of these motives, my dear girl, and resolve to exert yourself; and when you feel inclined to be angry and cross, recollect whether it will be worth while, because you have first got possession, to engage in a contest which will forfeit all these advantages. Think with yourself, Shall I lose my sister’s love or abate her regard for an orange, a plaything, or a seat? Do I not prefer making her contented, and keeping my own mind [Pg 102] serene and placid, before the pleasure of enjoying a toy or any other thing equally trifling? ”

“ Mental activity, provided there is no overstrain of the nerves, gives freshness and interest to life, and to be fresh and interested is to be young. It is because girls have been taught to use their brains, and women have been encouraged to keep them in repair, that this old stereotyped conception of the necessary failure of power after thirty-five years of age has become absurd. At what age the value of a woman’s increased experience is counterbalanced by diminished physical power I do not pretend to judge. Women differ, and their social opportunities differ. ”

“ We do not need to know whether men engaged in different occupations are married or single; but there is no fact of more importance with regard to female labour, and the value of such a return would more than balance the expense. The factories where the work cannot be given out (as is the case in match, jam, and cigar factories) contain the largest percentage of married women; and if called upon to choose the less of two evils, married labour in the factory and home work, I should unhesitatingly decide in favour of home work, which, if well organised, need not even be an evil. ”

“ The teaching and nursing professions, which include more educated women in their ranks than any other, have made great advances. In both every worker who wishes to be efficient can make herself so, and while youth and health last those occupations are absorbing enough in themselves to be worth living for.
At the same time, the women who succeed in either of these callings must be above the average in ability. The merely average girl must turn to some occupation in which more people are wanted, but for which less exceptional skill is required. ”

“ Instead of glorying in having once in a score of years a Senior Classic, I take pride in the fact that in the four years since the Mediæval and Modern Language Tripos was instituted, women have always been in the front rank, and I notice with fear and trembling that, although during the first three years there was always a woman in the first class, and no men, last year, although there was no deterioration in the women’s work, they did not have the first class all to themselves. ”

“ On the other hand, Hannah More, Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, Joanna Baillie, Caroline Herschell, Harriet Martineau, all women of brilliant intellect, have left their mark on history as good and happy women; and we can all of us give a long list of such bright and contented lives from the unmarried women of our own acquaintance who have found their vocation. If they have missed the best in life, they have always been true to themselves. ”

“ In some branches the extension of the working period of a woman’s life has been so great that it has even brought back to useful, hopeful enterprise women who had settled down to the colourless, dreary, monotonous round prescribed for the unattached elderly. The number of educated women who either earn a livelihood or engage in philanthropic work has not increased so much as is usually supposed, but the spirit in which the work is undertaken is wholly different. ”

“ That there were broad and vigorous-minded women at this period who probably owed much to their teachers there is no doubt. But, for the most part, these were women who by their social position came in contact with able men, and saw life from many points of view. The easy access to personal acquaintance with leaders of thought, statesmen, practical workers, and cultured and refined women, gives to the aristocracy and the upper middle classes an education and training which never cease, and which make a University training an amusing episode rather than a necessity. ”

“ As forewoman in any factory, if she understood her work, she would be far superior to the uneducated man or woman, and some of the worst abuses in our factory system would be swept away.
If anyone objects that women who are intensely interested in work which also enables them to be self-supporting are less attractive than they would otherwise be, I can make no reply except that to expect a hundred women to devote their energies to attracting fifty men seems slightly ridiculous. ”

“ Now that all girls, as a matter of course, are taught Latin and mathematics, they are no longer regarded as necessarily disagreeable in consequence; nor is inability to do their school work considered a merit. Large numbers of middle-class women must remain unmarried, but there seem to me to be many signs that it is no longer the Sixth Form girl, but her duller schoolfellow, who must be trained to make her way alone in the world. ”

“ The making and managing of the great engines of modern industry, the threading of earth and sea in our vast systems of transportation, the handling of our elaborate machinery of trade, commerce, and government—these things could not be done so well by women in their present degree of economic development. This is not owing to lack of the essential human faculties necessary to such achievements, nor to any inherent disability of sex, but to the present condition of woman forbidding the development of this degree of economic ability. ”

“ After marriage we should estimate not so much the effect of marriage on industrial position, but rather the effect of industry on domestic life.
In calculating the possibilities of marriage on a statistical basis, the method is frequently adopted of subtracting all the widows from the population and pointing out that in the remainder (the widowers not being subtracted) there is a slight surplus of men; the moral is drawn that every woman can get married if she will only make herself agreeable, and not be too particular. ”

“ Are girls worth educating? Apparently not, as their parents do not think them worth paying for. The expectation that marriage will in a few years after a girl leaves school solve all difficulties and provide for her is at the root of all the confusion. Fathers who know they can make no provision for their daughters make no attempt to train them for really lucrative employment, because they think the money will be thrown away if their daughters marry; they let them work full time for half or less than half the cost of living, out of a mistaken kindness, of which employers get all the benefit. ”

“ Stetson’s criticisms of women’s failures in every direction, but the remedy is better education and simpler tastes. It is only for the sake of her thesis that Mrs. Stetson finds fault with women or with men. She is generous in her estimate of the actual and possible capacities of both, and is full of high-minded delusions about them. “Woman holds her great position as the selector of the best among competing males; woman’s beautiful work is to improve the race by right marriage.” ”

“ In a world where so many odd jobs which ought to be done are left undone, because all the experienced workers are permanently employed, the married woman with experience and judgment comes in as the right person in the right place. She is perhaps the only skilled casual worker. If there is no need for money, she should prove the best philanthropic worker, her position as mistress of a house making it possible for her to give a personal service in her own home which the official philanthropist must often regret she is unable to offer. ”

“ The action of heredity has been to equalise what every tendency of environment and education made to differ. This has saved us from such a female as the gypsy moth. It has held up the woman and held down the man. It has set iron bounds to our absurd effort to make a race with one sex a million years behind the other.
Clearly, then, the decline and fall of woman dates back at least one million years. In practical retrospection there must be a Statute of Limitations. Neither Mrs. Stetson nor any one else knows what men or women were like a million years ago, or even ten thousand years ago. ”

“ Many a girl, accustomed to a country life, would much prefer the occupations and life of a farmer to that of a teacher, provided she is allowed to have the college life and the free intercourse with other girls which is the main attraction of Girton and Newnham. The work would be far more interesting to her if she came to it with the enthusiasm of a scientist with theories to be tested. What is drudgery to an uneducated person may often be pleasurable to an educated one.
No one can study the organisation of industry at the present time without noticing that there is great room for improvement. ”