neglecting their duty if they did not provide for placing them in a position to earn their own living. But the mere question of earning a living is not the only one, and it seems to me that all women, including those for whom earning is not a necessity, ought to have an independent career apart from marriage. I think so partly because nothing can be more depressing and demoralising than merely waiting for the marriage which may never come; it is bad for women physically, intellectually and morally; and moreover nothing can be more apt to lead to unhappy marriages than the temptation to marry merely for the sake of a career. But I also think that society has a right to expect that women, unmarried as well as married, should take a share in the work of the world—I am not of course speaking only of work for which the workers are paid, but of useful work of all kinds—and the women themselves have a right to the kind of happiness which can only come from work, and a sense of filling a useful place in the world, and which they cannot have if condemned to the position of mere idle drones.
I suppose that all sensible parents, whether able to leave their sons well off or not, look forward to their doing useful work in the world—either in a profession or in business, or in politics, or in some other way and endeavour to educate them accordingly. The same view would naturally be taken about girls were it not for the dual outlook of which we have spoken and the different relation of professional work to marriage in the two cases. A man's professional career is not cut short by marriage; indeed his marriage usually makes the earning of money more necessary; but a woman, if she marries, often, perhaps generally, finds it best to give up her profession at least for a time unless she can carry it on in a kind of partnership with her husband, partly because she must adapt her times and places of work to his, and partly because, when babies come, the demands on time and energy made by domestic life are often incompatible with professional work.
