But the contraction of the home as a field of adequate employment
for daughters exists everywhere, increasing the cost of living
for the family and driving daughters to supplementing the family
income.
What futility, as well as indignity, there is in the idea that
the query of support for women gets its full answer in a husband!
In the United States, in the year 1900, among women twenty years
of age and over, the married women numbered 13,400,000. The
unmarried women and the widows together numbered 6,900,000. For
every two women married there was one woman either single or
widowed.
If education does not (1) give women a comprehension of the
organization of the money-earning world, and (2) train them to
one of the techniques which lead to self-support in that world,
it is not education.
Just at this point, though, we encounter a curious conflict in
women's education. Just as we see their urgent need of a
money-earning technique, we simultaneously hear, coming from a
corner of the battlefield and swelling till it fills the air with
a nation-wide battle-cry, the sentiment: "The Home is also a
technique. All women must be trained to it.
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