aspect of the subject was said by a woman in a small Maine town.
Her father had been a day laborer, her husband was a mechanic. She had
five children, and, of course, did all the house-work. She also belonged
to a club which studied French history. To a foolish expression of
surprise that with all her little children she could find time to write a
paper on Louis XVI she retorted angrily: "With all my children! It is for
my children that I do it. I do not mean that they shall have to go out of
their home, as I have had to, for everything interesting." But the larger
truth is that the value of a woman as a mother depends precisely upon her
value as a human being. And it is for that reason that in her youth we
must lead one who is truly thirsty only to fountains pouring from the
heaven's brink. It might seem cruel if it did not merely illustrate the
law of risk involved in any creative process, that the more generously
women fulfil the "function of their sex" the more they are in danger of
losing their souls to furnish a mess of pottage. The risk of life for life
at a child's birth is more dramatic but no truer than the risk of soul for
body as the child grows. In the midst of petty household cares the nervous
system may become a master instead of a servant, a breeder of distempers
rather than a feeder of the imagination. The unhappiness of homes, the
failure of marriage, are due as often to the poverty-stricken minds, the
narrowed vision of women as to the vice of men.
Their sense is with their senses all mix'd in,
Destroyed by subtleties these women are.
George Meredith's prayer for us, "more brain, O Lord, more brain!" we
shall still need when "votes for women" has become an outworn slogan.
No one claims that character is produced only by college training or any
other form of education. There are illiterate women whose wills are so
steady, whose hearts are so generous, and whose spirits seem to be so
continuously refreshed that we look up to them with reverence. They have
their own fountains. It would be a mistake to suppose that because they
are "open at the outlet" they are "closed at the reservoir." But there is
a class of women who are impelled toward knowledge (as still others are
impelled toward music or art) and whose success in anything they do will
depend upon their state of mind. We ought to assume that the girls who go
to college belong to this class, however far from the springs of Helicon
they mean
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