Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/75

Rh to realize forms of waste that are not so material. When women, through motherhood, have that insight into the growing mind that no one else can possess, we prefer to have them withdraw from the profession of teaching. Is there no sense of a tremendous pedagogical loss? Because women alone can be mothers is that a reason that they should be nothing else? Shall their souls and their minds be refused their proper occupations even after motherhood is past, and shall they be condemned to atrophy because of a great though not exclusive function? Is there no insight into this spiritual waste? Does not society suffer from all these forms of waste? When we demand that a woman sacrifice her talents and ambitions, in other words, her natural powers, in order to become a wife and mother, we must not close our eyes to the fact that it is a sacrifice, and that sacrifice means waste. Our marriages rest upon a wasteful basis, and must become increasingly wasteful as civilization takes away more and more woman's former productivity in the home, unless she is granted a free field for her energies outside of the home. The young woman teacher must look forward, then, to contributing her share to the establishment of the home by her earning powers before she is married and afterwards when she can. The more she earns, the better. With this earnest view of the necessity of contributing to the family support, her profession will become something more than a means of occupying durance vile. It follows as the night the day that early marriage will be encouraged where two are contributing, and when marriage does not mean sacrifice and dependence on one side, and sacrifice and a heavy burden on the other side. Men, while necessarily bearing the financial burden alone for some of the time of married life will yet not be sacrificing more of their individual energy to the family than the mother who is giving of her life substance. For the woman a life of development and service will be added to motherhood, as a life of development and service are added to the fatherhood of the man. For we conceive of fatherhood as something more and nobler than the occupying of all one's time and energies with earning money for the children. Will there not be more time for fatherhood when the pressure of financial responsibility is lessened? And who knows what rich rewards of womanly forces future society will reap from allowing women to develop according to the divine promptings from within rather than by rule of man. For the full honors and rewards of effort, whether in the household or in scientific academies, have never yet been granted to women. They have never yet been permitted to drink freely of the cup of life. Let the men who openly or covertly regard women as their inferiors consider this, and for the sake of the future give her an equal chance. It was Schopenhauer who said, in quite a different connection, we may be sure, "First they bind our arms, and then they sneer at us because we are