THE PRESENT POSITION OF WOMEN 91 



a continuity of tradition on all household problems. 

 Whether the elder members of such a family imbibe 

 the necessary knowledge from watching and early 

 taking a share in the general management, and the 

 supervision of the younger members, or whether the 

 younger members, as they grow up, are found 

 useful occupation in the new homes of their elder 

 brothers and sisters, which are beginning to take shape 

 around them, we have a type of family life in which 

 domestic interests and all questions involving the wel- 

 fare of the future generations are never lost to sight. 

 We have, in fact, not the artificial conditions of the 

 laboratory of domestic science with which we are 

 laboriously trying to replace lost opportunities, but the 

 natural living, growing workshop in which every woman 

 learns by precept, experience and practice a knowledge 

 of the duties which in all natural societies would fall 

 to her share in after-life. 



Thirty years ago, the large majority of women could 

 enter upon their married life with the confidence of 

 experience, gained as part of the usual equipment of 

 their normal home surroundings. To-day, it is lament- 

 ably, almost ludicrously, frequent to find girls of twenty- 

 one who have never washed an infant, cut out a night- 

 gown or passed disturbed nights with a teething 

 youngster. There is a natural reluctance to perform 

 duties with which we are unfamiliar ; and the feeling 

 of dislike, the sense of almost impotent despair with 

 which many of them regard the possibility of having 

 to undertake such offices, is a speaking comment on 

 our present system of higher education for women. 

 Experientia docet. There is more of applied science and 



