By Josephine Pitcairn Knowles
(From “The Upholstered Cage.”)
The day has now arrived when nature and fairness are proclaiming that the same expenditure of time and money must be bestowed on the girl as on the boy, and she should be regarded as an investment in the same way as the boy now is. It has always been realized that unless he is given a good education and then started properly in life, that is, given a “shove off,” as it were, he won’t do much, and so all efforts in a family of small means are concentrated toward helping launch the boy in life. The idea, of course, being that he must support himself, and very likely keep a wife and children, therefore it is more important for him to get on well than for the girl, who has her parents to keep her until she marries. There would be nothing against this theory if it were sound; but where the theory breaks down is that girls and women now do have to earn their own living, and this necessity is on the increase, and the point is that the women have often to do it on inadequate material; the girl earns her living without the previous training, without the school or college training, without any capital having been spent on her as a premium, without all the advantages the boy started with.
The World of Scholarship a Man’s World
By M. Carey Thomas
Fifty years ago the world of scholarship was a man’s world in which women had no share. Now although only one woman in one thousand goes to college, even in the United States, where there are more college women than in any other country, the position of every individual woman in every part of the civilized world has been changed because this one-tenth of one percent. has proved beyond possibility of question that in intellect there is no sex. Unwillingly at first but inevitably and irresistably men have admitted women into intellectual comradeship. The opinions of educated women can no longer be ignored by educated men.
Social Education Important
By Helen Keller
(Helen Keller, having been born blind, deaf and dumb, is not only remarkable in that she has mastered many things, including articulate speech, but also that out of her reading and observations of life, she is able to construct a philosophy obviously superior to that of the average human being with normal faculties. The following is from “The Modern Woman” in “The Metropolitan Magazine,” October, 1912.)