profession of teaching, for women, is overcrowded and becoming more
overcrowded. The work done is, on the whole, mediocre or worse, and, as a
result of these two conditions, the pay is pitifully small considering the
importance of the results.

Because women can become teachers without losing one notch of their social
standing in even the most hide-bound communities, thousands of women
become teachers who ought to be housewives. Thousands of others struggle
in the schoolroom, doing work they hate and despise, for a miserable
pittance, when they might be happy and successful in a store or an
office. We have met women teachers who ought to have been physicians;
others who ought to have been lawyers; others, many of them, who ought to
have been in business; and still others, thousands of them, who ought to
have been in their own homes. And, naturally enough, we have also met
women in the professions and in business and in their homes who ought to
have been teachers--but not nearly so many.

The true teacher has three fundamental qualifications. First, a love of
knowledge; second, a desire to impart knowledge, and third, a love of
young people. Added to these should be patience, firmness, tactfulness,
knowledge of human nature, facility in expression, reasoning power,
enthusiasm, and a personality which inspires confidence. Can any county
superintendent discover these qualities by means of the examination upon
which first, second and third-grade certificates are based? Have the
members of any average school board the discrimination necessary to
determine the presence or absence of these qualities in any candidate who
brings her certificate?

WOMEN IN BUSINESS

The business world suffers from the presence in the ranks of its workers
of thousands of hopelessly inefficient girls who have no aptitudes for
business, or even for the minor detailed processes of commercial activity.
They take no real interest in their work. They have no particular ambition
for advancement. Their one motive for condescending to grace the office
with their presence at all is to earn pin-money or, perhaps, to support
themselves in some fashion until they marry. It is true that some of these
girls might be taught to be reliable and efficient in their work if they
could be persuaded to take an interest in it, to look upon it as something
more potent and more important than a mere stop-gap. Many of them, no
doubt, could be trained to earn salaries wh