Page:University Education for Women.djvu/13

 Under these circumstances it is not unnatural that the advantage of serious preparation for professional work, preparation involving expense and effort, should sometimes seem doubtful both to parents and daughters. The expectation of marriage is apt similarly I fear to affect the quality of many women's work in all classes and make it less thorough than men's, for as the future career of women depends on the whole less on the excellence of their work than the future career of men does on them, an important stimulus and incentive is absent for women, or at least weakened.

If hesitation to undertake systematic preparation for a career of usefulness were due to reluctance to spend money or to idle love of pleasure alone, it would have little claim on our sympathy. But since for women marriage is itself a kind of profession in a sense which it is not for men, we have to ask whether systematic preparation for a career independent of marriage is a good preparation for marriage. I believe that it is, I do not merely mean that the special preparation for other careers is as likely as anything else to prove a good preparation for married life; though this seems to me eminently true of the preparation for such professions as teaching, medicine, or nursing. I mean also that the qualities, apart from affection, which make a good wife and mother, are mainly moral qualities, or such intellectual qualities as may be cultivated in almost any relation in life—good sense and general intelligence—and which serious and steady preparation for any useful work will certainly aid in developing. It seems to me clear therefore that until she knows she will marry, every woman should consider how her life apart from marriage can be most profitably spent and should prepare herself accordingly, and that in doing so she will be preparing herself to meet the future however it may develop. I am not disposed to draw a distinction in this respect between those women who in order to maintain themselves independently must earn their livelihood, and those who are not under a similar necessity. All should