P. 171.
I cannot refrain at this point from inserting the following quotations from “Shirley” (chapter xxii.). Charlotte Brontë’s genius illumined the situation of many girls even in her time, and of a larger number since. Caroline is speaking. “Old maids, like the houseless and unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in the world; the demand disturbs the happy and rich; it disturbs parents. Look at the numerous families of girls in this neighbourhood. The brothers of these girls are every one in business or in professions ... their sisters have no earthly employment but household work and sewing.... Men of England! look at your poor girls, many of them fading around you, dropping off in consumption or decline; or, what is worse, degenerating to sour old maids, envious, backbiting, wretched, because life is a desert to them; or, what is worst of all, reduced to strive, by scarce modest coquetry and debasing artifice, to gain that position and consideration by marriage which to celibacy is denied.”
I am not suggesting here that the pioneers of women’s higher education were wrong in the attitude they adopted. To win for women intellectual freedom was the most important duty for them, and that could only be achieved by women submitting to the same intellectual tests as men. But the problems which call for solution by their successors of a later generation have assumed a new form.
See Raymond Unwin, “Housing and Town-Planning.”
In June 1908, the value of the property of the various tenants’ companies was only a little short of a quarter of a million pounds, and their operations have since then been extended in various directions.