Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/639

Rh help it on. This may be done by future inventions of machinery, or by the specialization of man's work to a point where much of it can be done by women. The dream of European economists, that through the conveyance of power by electricity the factory system is to give way to home-industry, may be realized, and woman's opportunities for sharing in a great variety of masculine tasks enormously increased. The public schools may some time be devoted more to sense and less to nonsense. Even though she must follow two or three hundred years behind man in her progress toward simplicity of dress, some of us may live to see her devoting a portion of the time now lost in that way to the cultivation, as an amateur if not otherwise, of some specialty hitherto monopolized by man. What she pursues as an amateur, her daughter, inheriting the aptitude, may find it convenient to follow for a livelihood.

Meantime, the calmness of our judgment will not be warped, though we indulge in sad contemplation of the fate yet in store for the millions of women who must be sacrificed to the good of the race, whose lives must be narrowed, whose natures dwarfed, whose care-worn minds cushed to insanity or suicide by the slowly-relaxing grip of an enslaving biological heritage. We may partially console ourselves by saying, as we did in the case of the negro, that she is born and bred to it, and can not realize how much better freedom is than enchainment. True as this may be in general, most of us do hear some complaint from the enchained. We like to hear it, because we despise the human being who has no aspiration to rise to higher things. The disagreeable feature of it is, that in the deplorable lack of economic training which woman shares with almost every man, she, like him, is disposed to attribute her troubles to the conscious intrigue or innate meanness of some class of human beings. It may be worth while to hint to her that, however irresponsible she may be, man is not responsible for her adoption of a style of dress which she would find very much in her way if she undertook to engage in some of the labors that he is free to follow. As to the willingness of her enchainment, that is a partial relief to her, but it is an obstacle to those who would break the chains. It is always harder to free a willing slave. But, when he has tasted liberty, he is very apt to like it. His callousness does not excuse the inactivity of those who have power to free him, whether or not they are responsible for his bondage. Woman's bondage is not to a person, nor to a class, so much as it is to a race to an apparently necessary, but let us hope transitory, condition of the highest development of that race.

Turning with a sigh of relief to the economics of the sex which has hitherto monopolized the attention of the science, we find specialization hindered here, too, by circumstances over which nobody has control, or even very much influence. A large class of men, a full half of them in many countries, are in a case approaching that of woman.