Social Science and Woman Suffrage. 87 



in competition for employment, preference will be given to 

 married men, and that there will be discrimination in the rate 

 of wages in their favor. Thus shall we render aid to the 

 greatest number of women, and to the class most sorely need- 

 ing it. Here let it be said that the great social question 

 before us is not how units of either sex can take care of them- 

 selves. The subject of prime importance pressing upon us is 

 not the matter of opening new avenues of employment to 

 women who are out of the ordinary family relations. So far as 

 the "struggle for existence " is concerned, there is no one now 

 in our society more favorably situated than an unmarried 

 female willing to work, no one who has less difficulty in main- 

 taining an honored social position The great social qmsiion is 

 hoiv to lighten the burdens of women in an average home^ how 

 the wives of farmers, of mechanics, of laborers, of men on 

 small salaries and men with moderate incomes may assume 

 motherhood, without the grave or an insane asylum in the 

 near prospect. In other words, the great question is how a 

 married man can properly provide for his family. 



We want to enter a protest against the philosophy of John 

 Stuart Mill respecting the social position of woman. He asserts 

 that because woman has never been on practical, political 

 equality with man, that therefore we know nothing about her 

 or about her appropriate social position and function. That 

 we have nothing for it but to try her in every new position as 

 it is proposed. But if all human experience has gone for 

 nothing, all human experience will go for nothing. If the 

 human race has not hit the high road of nature in this matter 

 hitherto, there is little likelihood of its ever striking it, or of 

 ever knowing it if it did. If something like the great law 

 which has prevailed in all time, across the whole social scale, 

 from the wigwam to the palace, by which the exoteric duties 

 of a home have been assigned to man and the esoteric to wo- 

 man, we may despair of being able to find any regulative prin- 

 ciples whatever. It has not yet become folly in other depart- 



