THE WORLD'S NEED OF BUSINESS WOMEN. 801 
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to provide for, protect, and fix the place and station of every woman on 
sarth, 1s only equaled by the placid unconcern with which he passes away 
from this planet without leaving wife cr danghter a dollar in the world, 
or a dollar’s worth of earning capacity. 
The truth is, there is no natural nor logical reason why all men should 
support, or claim or undertake to support, all women and children. It 
is too large a contract. It is not a true division of labor, nor wise politi- 
cal economy. Nor is there any just reason why the labor of the world 
should be divided into paid and unpaid labor, and all the paid labor should 
be man’s work, and all the unpaid woman’s work. Women, nowadays, 
generally know that they are working hard enough to earn, and far more 
than earn, their own living, and this under the greatest possible disad- 
vantages. The protection and support theory sounds noble, but it isn’t 
srue. Women have found out that it is largely ¢ pretty talk,” good for 
courting days. President Lincoln is reputed to have said, “You may 
fool some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the 
Jame, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” The patriarchal 
system is dead. Peace to its ashes! 
The world needs more brain-workers. No man should wait until he 
is obliged to earn his own living before he sets himself about it. All the 
forces within him should cry out for activity. This is equally true of 
woman. “‘Obliged to earn her own living !” say you ? Yes, obliged to 
win and preserve her own self-respect, her natural love of independence, 
;0 fulfill her share of the grand activities of the grandest age the world has 
known, to live out her surging, abundant life in congenial work. The 
world needs her rich young brain, her swift, skillful fingers, her keen, in- 
suitive perception, her tender conscience, her tireless devotion to duty ; 
and to withhold all these from their proper expression not only defrauds 
ner of her birthright, and harnesses the eagle to the plow, but it defrauds 
she world of the wealth locked up in her royal capabilities, and is a lavish 
waste of God’s bounty in human brains. 
The world needs more home-builders. And here the oft-quoted and 
ever just and timely criticism of Emily Faithfull, of England, should be 
reaffirmed : “It is a cruel mockery to tell women who have no home, that 
aome is woman’s proper sphere,” and it is far more cruel to taunt gentle, 
srue-hearted women, who some way have missed marriage, by telling them 
shat every woman should be a wife and mother. 
The world needs wiser marriages. The most indignant remonstrance 
against business training for women I ever heard was from a popular 
member of Congress, who said, ‘Do you wish to make young women so 
.ndependent that they will not need to marry ? Your ideas would wreck 
she world, if people believed in them, which, thank heaven, they do not !” 
One would think this gentleman, whose wife really loved him devotedly, 
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