Teach the Meaning of a Contract 245 



lonely and aged widow may be cheered by the gift of 

 a wall picture, a crippled child may be accumulating 

 funds for hospital treatment, or another person may 

 have lost heavily from flood or fire. These and 

 many more like them may be made the occasion of 

 teaching the girl a beautiful lesson of sympathy and 

 sacrifice. And the sacrifice should come out of 

 what she has accumulated through her own small 

 business enterprise. 



7. Teach the meaning of a contract. It is 

 often declared that women fail to appreciate the 

 obligations of a contract, that they will enter into a 

 strict agreement to buy an article or to pay for 

 another and then refuse to carry out such agree- 

 ment. Merchants have been so often called on to 

 deal with this feminine change of mind that they 

 have seen fit to establish a custom of taking back at 

 cost any article not found satisfactory upon trial. 

 This failure of women to adhere strictly to the terms 

 of an agreement has given currency to the opinion 

 that they are naturally dishonest. Weininger in 

 his volume "Sex and Character" even offers a line 

 of questionable proof to confirm the correctness of 

 the opinion. 



But Dr. G. Stanley Hall in many of his researches 

 shows that falsehood and deception are common 

 and natural practices among ordinary children. All 

 forms of honest and fair moral and business practice 

 are less natural than acquired. They must have 



