THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMAN. 169 



Of late years this question of woman's work has passed into another 

 phase, and the crux now is, not so much how they can be provided 

 with work adequately remunerated, but how they can fit themselves 

 for doing it without damage to their health and those interests of the 

 race and society which are bound up with their well-being. This is 

 the real difficulty, both of the higher education and of the general cir- 

 cumstances surrounding the self-support of women. For the strain is 

 severe, and must be, if they are to successfully compete with men — 

 undeniably the stronger, both in mind and body, in intellectual grasp 

 and staying power, in the faculty of origination, the capacity for sus- 

 tained effort, and in patient perseverance under arduous and it may be 

 distasteful labor. But the dream and the chief endeavor of women 

 now is to do the same work as men alone have hitherto done — which 

 means that the weaker shall come into direct competition with the 

 stronger — the result being surely a foregone conclusion. This is the 

 natural consequence of the degradation by women themselves of their 

 own more fitting work ; so that a female doctor, for the present, 

 holds a higher social position than does the resident governess, while 

 a telegraph-girl may be a lady, but a shop-girl can not. 



For well-paid intellectual work a good education is naturally of the 

 first necessity, and the base on which all the rest is founded. Where- 

 fore, the higher education has been organized more as a practical equip- 

 ment than as an outcome of the purely intellectual desire of women to 

 learn where they have nothing to gain by it. For all this, many girls 

 go to Girton and Newnham who do not mean to practically profit by 

 their education — girls who want to escape from the narrow limits of 

 the home, and who yearn after the quasi-independence of college-life 

 — girls to whom the unknown is emphatically the magnificent, and 

 who desire novelty before all things ; with the remnant of the purely 

 studious — those who love learning for its own sake only, independent 

 of gain, kudos, freedom, or novelty. But these are the women who 

 would have studied as ardently, and with less strain, in their own 

 homes ; who would have taken a longer time over their education, 

 and would not have hurt their health and drained their vital energies 

 by doing in two or three years what should have taken five or six ; 

 who would have gathered with more deliberation, not spurred by 

 emulation nor driven by competition ; and who, with energy super- 

 added to their love of knowledge, would have made the Mrs. Somer- 

 villes or Caroline Herschels, the Miss Burneys or Harriet Martineaus, 

 of history. But such women are not many ; voluntary devotion, irre- 

 spective of self-interest, to art, literature, science, philosophy, being 

 one of the rarest accidents in the history of women — as, indeed, must 

 needs be if they are to fulfill the natural functions of their sex. 



Three important points come into this question of the higher edu- 

 cation of women. These are — 1. The wisdom or unwisdom for a 

 father of limited means and uncapitalized income to send to college, 



