Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/355

Rh leaders) contend that every woman is more unselfish than every man. On the contrary, it is only too easy to point out cases where feminine selfishness is shown again and again in petty ways to which men, as a rule, do not stoop. Yet it remains in general true that the practical life of women the world over calls for a more constant exercise of self-sacrifice than that of men, and that everywhere women have learned in the main to make their sacrifices cheerfully because lovingly, and even to court a life which brings them. That this acquiescence should be often considered an indication of tameness, if not inferiority, is but natural in a civilization which has even now only half realized the dignity of the altruistic ideal. In the affairs of life intellect has enjoyed a long prestige. Character, which, according to the highest conceptions of the race, depends at its best upon altruism, is but slowly growing into an equal recognition. In a rough, general way, men have been the apostles of the one and women of the other. It is true that the ideal of humanity is one. Women have gained in intellect and men in character, and this must go on; but it has not come about, and it will not come about, by a direct exchange of their activities.

These considerations lead to the good old dictum that "home is woman's sphere." It seems well-nigh superfluous to enumerate the obvious qualifications of this general statement. Surely no fin-de-siècle person would understand it to mean that woman should look upon marriage in itself as the sole desideratum of her existence, or that, failing to marry, she should devote herself to pets and fancy work, and live upon the charity of her male relatives. Surely at this stage of proceedings no one would attempt or desire to limit woman to purely domestic pursuits. It has been reiterated and most abundantly proved that she need not be circumscribed in freedom or opportunity for the sake of binding her to the home: it is not necessary, for Nature will take care of itself; and it is not expedient, for the more she is allowed to be in herself the greater the gift she can and will bring to the race. Moreover, no one will contend that every woman ought to be a mother, or that an indefinite number of offspring is a wife's chief duty. In a word, marriage, and the bearing and not bearing of children, are individual accidents dependent upon a thousand private considerations. To fulfill the law of womanhood one need not be a mother, but only to be motherly; one need not be a wife, but only to be loyal to the unselfish principle of wifehood; one need not eschew the paths of business or professional life, so only that she recognize hers as the exceptional feminine career, the more normal and significant one lying within the walls of the home.

Consciously sometimes, but perhaps more often with