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 circumstances 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 sustained 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. Wherefore, the higher education has been organized more as a practical equipment 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. Somervilles or Caroline Herschels, the Miss Burneys or Harriet Martineaus, of history. But such women are not many; voluntary devotion, irrespective 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 education of women. These are—1. The wisdom or unwisdom for a father of limited means and uncapitalized income to send to college,
