These arguments are worthless. Besides, the question of the employment of women in such capacities can only be decided fairly with reference to the individual subdivisions of the work of child-protection. Unquestionably, women are suitably employed as children’s nurses, matrons of children’s homes, governesses and school-mistresses, wet-nurses, medical practitioners, factory inspectors, sick-nurses, confidential agents of the official guardians of children, visitors of foster-parents. Where the common people have no confidence in women employees, for example, in rough, uncultivated districts, where, in the interests of child-protection, police intervention is necessary, as, for example, in the case of morally depraved and uncontrollable children, and where trusteeship has to be undertaken as in the case of orphan children who are heirs to considerable property, women cannot be employed. The tendency of evolution is to employ women as executive instruments of child-protection, and, indeed, to employ them as salaried public officials.
Numerous and serious objections must, however, be raised against the idea that ladies belonging to the upper classes should find amusement and relief from the tedium of their ordinary life by engaging in some branch of the work of child-protection (such as supervising the work of midwives, or visiting the foster-parents of boarded-out children). The work of such women is of little value in itself, and it takes bread out of the mouths of women who could do the same work very much better professionally and as a means of livelihood.
SPECIAL PART
A.—DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL LAW AND INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS
[CHAPTER I]
MARRIAGE AND PARENTAL AUTHORITY
Introductory.—The two chief purposes of human life are, first, the maintenance of the individuals of the species, and, secondly, the reproduction of the species. The laws relating to property subserve the former aim; those relating to the family subserve the latter. Property itself is the central feature of the former, and the family is the central feature of the latter.