Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/638

620, help it on; if avoidable and undesirable, do what we can to prevent it.

It seems to me both desirable and possible that woman should diversify her aptitudes. The process will be slow, if possible at all, but it will soon begin to bear good fruit. In those cases where she must depend on salaried work for a living, it will enlarge her life by enlarging her pay. Her independence will make her more choice in the selection of a husband, which will be a blessing not only to herself, but to her offspring. I insist on the importance of the blessing to herself, and on her right to it. If one were disposed to find fault with the order of Nature, the worst thing to be said is that there seems altogether too much vicarious sacrifice' in it. A majority of the lives brought into this world are offered up on the altar of that sacrifice. The sacrificial destruction of vegetable life need give us no pain. But the animal offerings, especially the human offerings, suffer torture in the ordeal, and enlist our sympathy. The economic development of the human race has cost untold sacrificial agony, mitigated by little or no reward to those who suffer it. We can not wholly prevent this. Our best efforts to reduce it often increase it. But latterly success has come often enough to stimulate more determined trial.

First of all, then, we desire that woman, for her own sake, should secure a more commanding position in the economic world. We can have no sympathy with the wide-spread, unmanly fear that she may become a wage-reducing competitor in the masculine specialties. Neither can we sympathize with the fear that her devotion to them will make her less enjoyable as a woman. Let it make her less a woman if it makes her happier. Let it, if necessary, make her less enjoyable to man. Is it of no concern that she should be enjoyable to herself? "I am a Jew," said Shylock. "Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, senses, affections, passions?" And if a Jew, why not a woman?

But even if we had a right to ask it, what right do the facts give us to believe that, in order to be attractive to man, woman must spend all her time and energies consciously trying to be so? Let those who coolly assume this to be the case, tell us how they know that man, who has little or no time for such cares, is less attractive to woman than she to him. The grimy coal-miner, without even so much as a change of clothes, manages in some way to hold with a reasonably firm grip the affections of at least one woman. As for the "oak-and-vine" idea that one half the race can be attracted only by strength, and the other half only by weakness, that will do very well for poetry and flattery, but, if it is to do for science, it must be mercilessly tested.

So far as the test has been made, the idea may fairly be said to be disproved. In fact, the result is so encouraging to the parties concerned, that the consequently growing tendency toward the enlargement of woman's sphere may well give us hope, and stimulate us to