WOMEN TEACHERS AND EQUAL PAY 71 



to realize forms of waste that are not so material. When women, 

 through motherhood, have that insight into the growing mind that no 

 one else can possess, we prefer to have them withdraw from the pro- 

 fession of teaching. Is there no sense of a tremendous pedagogical 

 loss? Because women alone can be mothers is that a reason that they 

 should be nothing else? Shall their souls and their minds be refused 

 their proper occupations even after motherhood is past, and shall they 

 be condemned to atrophy because of a great though not exclusive 

 function? Is there no insight into this spiritual waste? Does not 

 society suffer from all these forms of waste ? When we demand that a 

 woman sacrifice her talents and ambitions, in other words, her natural 

 powers, in order to become a wife and mother, we must not close our 

 eyes to the fact that it is a sacrifice, and that sacrifice means waste. 

 Our marriages rest upon a wasteful basis, and must become increasingly 

 wasteful as civilization takes away more and more woman's former 

 productivity in the home, unless she is granted a free field for her 

 energies outside of the home. The J^oung woman teacher must look 

 forward, then, to contributing her share to the establishment of the 

 home by her earning powers before she is married and afterwards when 

 she can. The more she earns, the better. With this earnest view of 

 the necessity of contributing to the family support, her profession will 

 become something more than a means of occupying durance vile. It 

 follows as the night the day that early marriage will be encouraged 

 where two are contributing, and when marriage does not mean sacrifice 

 and dependence on one side, and sacrifice and a heavy burden on the 

 other side. Men, while necessarily bearing the financial burden alone 

 for some of the time of married life will yet not be sacrificing more of 

 their individual energy to the family than the mother who is giving of 

 her life substance. For the woman a life of development and service 

 will be added to motherhood, as a life of development and service are 

 added to the fatherhood of the man. For we conceive of fatherhood as 

 something more and nobler than the occupying of all one's time and 

 energies with earning money for the children. Will there not be more 

 time for fatherhood when the pressure of financial responsibility is 

 lessened ? And who knows what rich rewards of womanly forces future 

 society will reap from allowing women to develop according to the 

 divine promptings from within rather than by rule of man. For the 

 full honors and rewards of effort, whether in the household or in scien- 

 tific academies, have never yet been granted to women. They have 

 never yet been permitted to drink freely of the cup of life. Let the 

 men who openly or covertly regard women as their inferiors consider 

 this, and for the sake of the future give her an equal chance. It was 

 Schopenhauer who said, in quite a different connection, we may be sure, 

 " First they bind our arms, and then they sneer at us because we are 



