Page:The Higher Education of Women.djvu/121

 are synonymous with affectation and feebleness. You may make a boy unlike a girl by teaching him to care for nothing but out-of-door sports, and by making him believe that he is showing spirit when he is rude and selfish. But this is not the kind of variety that any one seriously wishes to cultivate.

It may here perhaps be argued on the other hand, that to give wives professions would tend to separate them from their husbands by throwing them into a society of their own, and leading them to set up a distinct set of independent interests,—that whereas a wife now throws herself into her husband's concerns, losing sight of herself in her sympathy with him, she would, if she had a pursuit of her own, be