The Nineteenth Century , No 182, Apr 1892 [‎31r] (66/244)

1892 PROSPECTS OF MARRIA 551
not think them worth paying for. The expectation that marriage
will in a few years after a girl leaves school solve all difficulties and
provide for her is at the root of all the confusion. Fathers who know
they can make no provision for their daughters make no attempt to
train them for really lucrative employment, because they think the
money will be thrown away if their daughters marry ; they let them
work full time for half or less than half the cost of living, out of a
mistaken kindness, of which employers get all the benefit. The
girls in many cases accept low salaries under the same impression,
in others because they are not strong enough to hold out where so
many are willing to undersell them. Those who only take up employ
ment as a stopgap until marriage never become really efficient, and
when later on they find that there is no prospect of release, they
become positively inefficient. Those who have faced facts from the
first can throw their whole heart into their work, but they are heavily
handicapped in their efforts towards progress by the bad pay which
is the result of the thoughtlessness and folly of those around them.
If only the relatives of these girls could realise that at least one-half
of them will never be married, and that of the others many will not
marry for several years after leaving school, that there is no means of
predicting which of them will be married, and that any of them may
have to support, not only themselves all their lives, but a nurse as
well in old age, the tangle would soon be unravelled. Two things
only I would venture to suggest. One, that instead of supplementing
salaries and so lowering them, parents should help their daughters to
hold out for salaries sufficient to support them, should assist them in
making themselves more efficient, and should help them to make
provision for themselves in later life, instead of making self-support
impossible. The other, that manufacturers and business men should
train their daughters as they train their sons. The better organisation
of labour should open a wide field for women, if they will only consent
to go through the routine drudgery and hardship that men have to
undergo. An educated girl who goes from the high school to the
technological college will find full scope for any talents she may
possess. As designer, chemist, or foreign correspondent in her
father's factory An East India Company trading post. she could be more helpful and trustworthy than any
one not so closely interested in his success. As forewoman in any
factory An East India Company trading post. , if she understood her work, she would be far superior to the
uneducated man or woman, and some of the worst abuses in our
factory An East India Company trading post. system would be swept away.
If anyone objects that women who are intensely interested in work
which also enables them to be self-supporting are less attractive than
they would otherwise be, I can make no reply except that to expect
a hundred women to devote their energies to attracting fifty men
seems slightly ridiculous. If the counter-argument be put forward