552 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



CORRESPONDENCE. 



GRANT ALLEN ON THE WOMAN QUES- 

 TION. 

 Editor Popular Science Monthly : 



IT is gratifying to know that so able an 

 advocate as Mr. Grant Allen has come 

 forward to champion the cause of the real 

 emancipation of woman, in claiming for her 

 the right to be exempt from the burden of 

 her own support. To meet with success as 

 a bread-winner in these days of severe com- 

 petition requires the best energies of the 

 best years of life just the time when a 

 mother should be giving the best energies of 

 life to the care of her children. The differ- 

 ence between a well-mothered child and an 

 ill-mothered one, in morals, conduct, intelli- 

 gence, and teachableness, is so great as to 

 warrant the assertion that, next to heredity, 

 a child's home training is the most important 

 factor in the evolution of its character. Na- 

 ture has ordained that for this training it 

 shall look to the mother, and hence it is a 

 self-evident fact that her own education 

 should be such as will best fit her for the 

 task. It is about what constitutes the 

 proper training to this end that opinions 

 differ. The average man thinks that to know 

 how to make pies and sew on buttons is 

 enough, while we " advanced" women believe 

 that a "wise" and " sane " mother should be 

 able to meet the moral and intellectual re- 

 quirements of her children as well as admin- 

 ister to their physical wants. We believe 

 that she should know enough of science to 

 give reasonable answers to her children when 

 they question her about the phenomena of 

 nature, and not to object to the study of bot- 

 any as improper for girls (which I heard a 

 model mother of the good old school do, the 

 other day) because it talks about the ova- 

 ries ! We believe that her literary taste 

 should be sufficiently cultivated for her to 

 take pleasure in reading something above 

 the inane fiction which constitutes the chief 

 intellectual pabulum of the average woman 

 of to-day; and even if she should have a 

 taste for anything so dreadful as the higher 

 mathematics, we see no great harm in her 

 indulging it, if it gives her pleasure to do so ; 

 the worst that can possibly result being to 

 give her children inherited aptitudes in the 

 same direction. Indeed, we see no danger 

 to the established order of the universe in 

 her cultivating intellectual tastes simply for 

 her own pleasure, if she chooses. It is only 

 when a woman has to add the drudgery of 

 bread-winning to the natural duties of her 

 sex that she need be condemned to intellect- 

 ual atrophy. 



In dealing with this part of the subject, 

 Mr. Grant Allen seems to have lost hisusual 



clear-headedness when he mistakes the aim 

 of " the woman's movement " for an " en- 

 deavor to put upon the shoulders of women, 

 as a glory and a privilege, the burden of 

 their own support." Now, I feel safe in 

 affirming that there is not one among us, 

 even of the most "advanced," who would 

 not gladly welcome Mr. Allen's ideal civiliza- 

 tion, in which all the labor should be done 

 by men and we won't even grudge them 

 the cooking and the washing, which I can 

 assure them is labor just as real as buying 

 cotton futures or watering railroad stocks. 

 The " woman's movement " does not aim to 

 force upon women the burden of their own 

 support, but merely to fit them, when that 

 burden is forced upon them, to bear it suc- 

 cessfully. Recognizing, as we do, the fact 

 that, with our advancing civilization, a large 

 and ever-increasing proportion of women 

 must be self-supporting, we believe it is un- 

 just and cruel that they should have to en- 

 gage in the struggle handicapped by igno- 

 rance, hampered by conventional prejudices, 

 and oppressed by political disabilities that 

 deny us a vote even on the whisky question 

 a subject of such vital importance to us. 

 In disposing of a large proportion of the 

 700,000 superfluous females of the United 

 Kingdom as "infants, lunatics, sisters of 

 charity, unfortunates, and ladies of eighty," 

 Mr. Allen " explains " his statistics on one 

 side only, and forgets to offset his incapa- 

 bles by at least an equal proportion of in- 

 fants, lunatics, priests, octogenarians, con- 

 victs, drunkards, and other ineligibles of the 

 opposite sex, to say nothing of that vast 

 mass of incompetents who must rank away 

 down below zero as husbands, and have to 

 be supported by their wives or sisters. The 

 existence of these negative quantities on the 

 other side is one of the " deplorable acci- 

 dents " that men are prone to overlook in 

 considering this question, but it is one which 

 enlarges so enormously the number of neces- 

 sarily self-supporting women as to make it 

 an open question whether they do not con- 

 stitute a majority of the sex instead of a 

 minority. Now, I am not arguing that this 

 is right, but it is a deplorable fact all the 

 sauie~; and since we can not force the wicked 

 men to support us, the bravest and strong- 

 est of us (instead of sitting down and crying 

 about it) are claiming the modest right to at 

 least support ourselves and too often the 

 men who ought to be supporting us into the 

 bargain, or the children whose bread they 

 are spending for whisky. And while we are 

 thus relieving society of its " potential " 

 paupers, can the witty philosopher think of 

 no better return than to consign us, with a 

 stroke of his graceful pen, to everlasting 



