protection of children and youth in recreation and in labor, the succor of the needy, and the general expression of social control and social uplift, these are woman's special functions in the social order and have ever been her peculiar responsibility. The vital need in these fields to-day is not alone for a minority of trained workers, such as the schools for social workers are turning out each year, but also for a large majority of citizens devoted to the public weal and able and willing intelligently to carry out and perfect, modify and balance the schemes of the experts and "paid workers" who make "scientific philanthropy" a life work. Women will doubtless always take a larger share in this part-time service in the lines indicated than men can do; and older women, those in the third stage of life, are now entering this field with enthusiasm. As volunteers and as helpers, paid and unpaid, they are doing much of the constructive and ameliorative, the reformatory and the preventive work of social reform. When, however, women enter this field late in life, or after a merely amateur and impulsive response in earlier life to the call of social need, they enter by a vocational leap, as it were, from the inner to the outer circle of human interests. This gives, at the worst, an awkward meddling with established rules of procedure; and at best fails to give highest effectiveness. Women who have had four years of college and two years of special training in a teacher's college or school of philanthropy and then, after two to six years of professional work in their chosen field, marry to take charge of an individual home, are too valuable assets of educational opportunity to be left without social pressure and financial incentive to continue that work with the necessary modifications. The same is true of the minister, the lawyer, and above all the doctor and the nurse, as well as of all other women specialists in professional labor.

The difficulties of the woman worker who marries and has children increase as we go down the scale through commercial, clerical, and manual employments; but they are not insuperable; and the ingenuity of industrial mechanism needed for the higher utilization of the paid work of women in other than purely private domestic lines waits for development only for a more just perception in the common sense regarding women's work-power.

The present pressure upon the wages of men that makes so many house-mothers obliged to add to the family income at the worst time of their lives for economic strain, and at any work they can get, however exploited and health-destroying, is no solution of the problem; it is an aggravation of it dire in social results. Real solutions of social problems are not worked out by people wholly "under" their circumstances.

With, however, a true solution of the problems of womanhood, achieved not by flights of fancy but by patient infinitesimal efforts of daily living in which no inherited or present duty is neglected, and no opportunity for shaping toward future conditions is ignored, we shall gain at last for social culture in all lines, and for industry in many forms, a needed class of slowly trained, slowly apprenticed workers in every field where women naturally excel; to rise finally at the third period of their lives to positions of command where women are now most needed. This will mean new ways of conserving hitherto exploited capacities and gifts of the mass of mankind. For women of the right sort and the right training, shielded by men's protection and care from the heaviest economic pressure during early life and developed in personality by the special demands upon them in the home, will see to it when they arrive at their rightful place of control that neither professional demand nor the industrial order shall take such a heavy toll from life itself in the effort to make a living!

"Old men for counsel?" Yes, surely, now as of old; and it is well for humanity that it learned this bit of social wisdom so early. Old women for new work for the race? Yes, surely; and well will it be for human progress when mankind learns this new lesson of social wisdom and makes fitting social use of the postgraduate mother, eager and fresh in her second youth, for a new pathfinding for the feet of the coming generations before she draws down the curtain and says good night.

CHAPTER XIII

THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN

Plato's view, 550.- Differences in the mentality of the sexes, 552.- Woman's education a man's view, 562.-Woman's education a woman's view, 567.

[Much of the limitation of women's activity and of the suppression of her freedom of thought and impulse, which has come to be called, after Mill, "the subjection of women," has been due to preconceived and erroneous ideas as to the influence of the fact of sex upon the nonsexual functions of life. One of the most ill-used terms in the English language is the word "natural," especially when it is used in relation to sex. People speak glibly of this or that characteristic of women, or men, as the case may be, as "natural," meaning thereby that the trait is inborn in the individual through organic heredity, and that it is not a product of response to a given environment. It is difficult to realize how great are the differences of social training, of environmental stimuli in general, afforded the boy and the girl. Nowhere has this unscientific and superficial mode of thought, of attributing to nature what may be due to "nurture," played sadder havoc to the cause of justice and progress than in its easy assumption of innate and ineradicable mental differences between the sexes. There are perhaps certain a priori reasons, such as the physiological relation of the mother to the child, why we might look for a more widely diffused and active sense of sympathy, for instance, in women than in men, but no one can say scientifically, on the basis of ordered and carefully examined inductive evidence, that important natural mental differences do, or do not, exist. Modern scientific psychology has made but the veriest beginnings of a study of this problem, and the general tendency is to relegate it to the limbo of "academic" questions — possibly because of the almost hopeless nature of the task of distinguishing between

facts that are natural, the result of organic heredity, and those that are due to education, using that term in the broad sense of adaptation to, and by, a social environment. Nevertheless, no small portion of society is organized, and carries on its processes, upon the old assumptions of the inferior intellectuality and rationality of woman, and her "finer sensibilities."

Far more attention is still given to the policies which should govern the education of boys and men than is given to the education of girls and women. The new movement for vocational guidance, which fortunately has been taken up for girls as well as for boys, as well as the growth of the women's colleges and coeducational institutions, and the great number of girls in the high schools, is beginning to draw more attention to the question of the proper education for women. We are thus introduced to a most interesting and socially significant opposition of ideals for the future of the education of girls and women in this country.]

52. PLATO ON THE TALENTS AND EDUCATION OF WOMEN1

If the male and female sex appear to differ in reference to any art, or other occupation, we shall say that such occupation must be appropriated to the one or to the other: but if we find the differences between the sexes to consist simply in the parts they respectively bear in the propagation of the species, we shall assert that it has not yet been by any means demonstrated that the difference between men and women touches our purpose; on the contrary we shall still think it proper for our guardians and their wives to engage in the same pursuits.

Pray tell us whether, when you say that one man possesses talents for a particular study, and that another is without them, you mean that the former learns it easily, the latter with difficulty; and that the one with little instruction can find out much for himself in the subject he has studied, whereas the other after much teaching and practice cannot even retain what he has learned; and that the mind of the one is duly aided, that of the other thwarted, by the bodily powers. Are not these the only 1 Adapted from "The Republic," sections 454-456.

marks by which you define the possession and the want of natural talents for any pursuit ?

Well, then, do you know of any branch of human industry in which the female sex is not inferior in these respects to the male? or need we go to the length of specifying the art of weaving, and the manufacture of pastry and preserves, in which women are thought to excel, and in which their discomfiture is most laughed at? In almost every employment the one sex is vastly superior to the other. There are many women, no doubt, who are better in many things than many men. I conclude, then, that none of the occupations which comprehend the ordering of a state belong to women as women, nor yet to man as man; but natural gifts are to be found here and there, in both sexes alike; and, so far as her nature is concerned, the woman is admissible to all pursuits as well as the man; though in all of them the woman is weaker than the man.

Shall we then appropriate all duties to men and none to women? On the contrary we shall hold that one woman may have talents for medicine, and another be without them; and that one may be musical and another unmusical. And may there not be a love of knowledge in one and a distaste for it in another? and may not one be spirited and another spiritless? If that be so, there are some women who are fit and others who are unfit, for the office of guardians. For were not those the qualities that we selected, in the case of the men, as marking their fitness for that office? Then as far as the guardianship of the state is concerned, there is no difference between the natures of the man and of the woman, but only various degrees of weakness and of strength.

Then we shall have to select duly qualified women also, to share in the life and official labors of the duly qualified men; since we find that they are competent to the work, and of kindred nature with the men.

If the question is how to render a woman fit for the office of guardian, we shall not have one education for men, and another for women, especially as the nature to be wrought upon is the same in both cases.